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| This is what the Shar Pei used to look like. Image source. |
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| This is what a heavily inbred dog can look like today. |
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| The same dog after a face lift to save its eyesight. |
The Daily Mail details a recent facelift given to a Shar Pei whose over-wrinkled face and resulting eye entropion was leading to blindness.
The vet blasted the over-breeding which led to Molly suffering from one of the worst cases of the entropion he had ever seen.
Mr Marks said: 'Molly is a result of very bad breeding between dogs that are essentially diseased.
'Molly was bred to satisfy a certain criteria on what they think a dog should look like rather than its health.'
Ms Walsh bought Molly for £500 just last month, but has already shelled out £720 in vet bills.
She now plans to sue the owners, from Wales, who sold her the pet, claiming they were not honest about her state of health.
She said: 'I'm very angry. It's not about the money, it's the fact they were dishonest.
'How could they let Molly go through a year of pain without doing anything?'
A row erupted two years ago about the over-breeding of pedigree dogs following a BBC documentary that exposed health problems among some of the most extreme cases.
The Shar Pei was among 12 breeds documentary makers demanded be dropped from Crufts as a condition for continuing to air the celebrated dog show. The demands were not met by the Kennel Club.
The "modern" Sharpei is a Kennel Club-created mutant created by extreme exaggeration and rapid inbreeding.
A commentator to the article, however has it exactly right when she writes where the real problem lies:
Did Molly's owner research this breed before she blindly went and bought her pup? I doubt it.
Did Molly's owner buy her for her looks? I'm pretty sure of it.
I am by no means excusing the breeder, as they obviously have not been breeding responsibly, but as long as there are people like Molly's owner willing to pay to get dogs like these, there will be a breeder meeting the demand.
Bingo.
Exactly right.
Do not buy a wrecked car because you liked the color of the paint, and then sue because the alignment is wrong and the engine does not run.
Anyone buying a Shar Pei today should know they are likely to be buying a bucket load of problems ranging from serious health issues to serious temperament issues. These problems are talked about routinely in breed literature, and are not deeply hidden secrets.
Yes, the breeder is criminally irresponsible.
Yes, the Kennel Club is an organization that embraces systemic cruelty through the breeding of diseased, deformed, and defective dogs.
But dog buyers too are culpable. This dog was a mess the day it was bought!
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7 comments:
As per the article you posted some time ago on the vet who quit the profession and wrote a news article about the unethical practices...would that make the vet also responsible for doing the eye surgery to prolong the animal's life, albeit with less discomfort?
As an aside, I watched a medial canthus resection on a Peke with corneal ulcers due to the lack of muzzle and the rolls of skin that were shoved under its eyes. The dog most likely has no eye problem now...but it STILL CAN'T BREATHE PROPERLY. It's a bloody shame for those dogs.
As a general rule, I tend to avoid Asian breeds of dogs. Akitas, Chow Chows, Shar Peis, Pekingese and especially Lhasa Apsos tend to be standoffish and snappy.
As a kid, our family had a Lhasa Apso that bit my brother constantly, not that he didn't deserve it about 50% of the time.
Freinds of mine adopted a rescue Lhasa Apso. It constantly bit them until the day it died. Friends of mine have a Shar Pei, I'm not too thrilled with that dog, either.
WOW. The pictures really bring it into perspective, don't they??!
I have a mini-shar pei which I inherited from a friend who got divorced. She is atypical in the sense that she doesn't bite and is very friendly to everyone she meets. She is exceedingly adorable but recently her eye skin needed to be surgically removed (entropion) and after a $1051 surgery she developed glaucoma and went blind 30 days after surgery.
She is coping well with her blindness but it's painful to watch her in the role of shrinking violet because in her sighted life she was such an energetic and animated dog.
I have a Presa Canario that watches after her and picks up the slack in the watchdog department. I would never get another Shar Pei because there will never be another Shar Pei like Liza.
Here's a picture of them playing in better days. The Presa Canario is only 2 years old. The Shar Pei is 7.
http://flickr.com/gp/warwolf/47B33k
http://flickr.com/gp/warwolf/291724
I don't get the freaky over bred sharpei look. Why would anyone want that. The first photo isn't so attractive to me either, but at least it shows an able working dog not some saggy freak that looks like it smells bad.
That poor dog with the facelift looks like Eeyore now, but not so cute.
I can't remember where I read this (might have been Houlie or Janeen who said it), but this little blurb has been in my head the moment I read it:
"But the wrinkles are so kyoot!"
"That would be the problem, no?"
I saw a cute little shar-pei puppy in Home Depot Friday, and I actually thought "Awww, how cute. But its owners deliberately bought a breed for the cute factor and it's going to have so many problems... Poor thing." And I was briefly annoyed with you, Terrierman, for sucking the cute out of my life. But really, deformed isn't cute, and it's hard to see the extreme purebreds as anything but deformed anymore. :-/
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