The Kennel Club is not same faceless entity; it is run by people with names, and it time those people were brought up on charges for systematic abuse of man's best friend.
In yesterday's post, Cancer at the Kennel Club, I noted that the authors of a new paper on the levels of inbreeding in Kennel Club dogs affirmatively lied in their conclusion by trying to minimizing the damage that closed registries have done to Kennel Club dogs.
I got it right, but there is a price to pay for being first to comment on a new paper. You see, while I got it right, the data is actually worse than I thought.
Carol Beuchat, at the Institute of Canine Biology has looked at individual breed data, and she notes that while some breeds have plateaued at very high levels of inbreeding, others continue to rise to the moon. Read the whole thing.
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| Bull Terrier |
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| English Cocker |
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| English Springer |
When individual breeds are sorted and laid out, in order, by effective population size, we find that ONLY TWO of the 152 Kennel Club breeds have an effective population size of 500, which biologists now say is the minimum necessary to maintain a sustainable breeding population.
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| Click to enlarge. |
Bottom line: Kennel Club dogs are deeply inbred genetic messes, diseased, deformed, and too often dysfunctional.
Closed gene pools cause the disease, selection for defect cause the deformity, and preening pretenders in the world of working dogs cause the dysfunction.
Have no illusion that ALL of this is due to individual people that run the Kennel Club, and no one else.
It is the Kennel Club that mandates that dogs be bred in a closed registry system in which increasing levels of inbreeding are the inevitable byproduct.
It is the Kennel Club that green lights the standards which select for defect and which means that most members of some breeds suffer their whole lives.
It is the Kennel Club that credentials judges who have no idea of what they are doing because they know nothing about working dogs or even the basics of anatomy.
It is the Kennel Club that gives show dogs zero points for health, zero points for work, and zero points for temperament.
It is the Kennel Club that allows puppy mill dogs to be registered
It is the Kennel Club that refuses to allow any breed club to mandate health tests as a requirement for registration.
It is the Kennel Club that refuses to allow any breed club to mandate working tests as a requirement for registration.
It is the Kennel Club that refuses to allow any breed club to delay registration until a dog is an adult and is actually proven to look like the breed it is supposed to be.
The Kennel Club is not same faceless entity; it is run by people with names, and it time those people were brought up on charges for systematic abuse of man's best friend.
To be clear, what has occurred to dogs is real abuse, and it has not been an "accident" but part of a systematic and regimented plan that has predictably led to millions of dogs in long-term pain, early death, and endless misery.
It's time to shut it down.
1 comment:
One could argue that focusing upon genetic diversity is much more important that focusing upon a handful of DNA tests for known genetic diseases. Decreased genetic diversity will reveal more unrecognized genetically linked diseases while increased genetic diversity will minimize this AND minimize the likelihood of crossing two that are carriers of known genetic diseases.
I am not against testing for known diseases but these tests become crutches for the lazy breeders and buyers who are unwilling to see the bigger, more important picture of breed wide genetic diversity.
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