The facts are clear: Kennel Club papers prove nothing but inbreeding.
Kennel Club dogs, as a group, are provably LESS healthy than dogs at the pound.
NO breed's health has been improved by being pulled into the Kennel Club.
So why do people buy pedigree dogs?
More often than not, people are buying dogs that they hope will convey wealth, position, expertise, knowledge or a special quality that they hope will make them look interesting.
Some call it snobbism, but really it's the same sad vanity that exists in all of us.
Who wants to look into a mirror and see reality?
The very reason we have dogs is that they mirror back to us a lie: that we are smarter, nicer, and more wonderful than we really are.
Dogs make us feel better.
That's great, but why do we so often made the dogs feel worse?
As Michael Brandow notes in an article in Salon:
Why do we go on hurting the ones we love? Why must German shepherds limp through life and French bulldogs barely breathe? ... Rigid tastes, latent class consciousness, a belief in blood “purity,” naive notions on authenticity — and a tendency to sometimes love dogs for the wrong reasons — override a wealth of information available on the dangers of inbreeding, the downsides to extreme anatomies, and the evils of the pet industry today. Well-intentioned animal lovers with minds open to this broader historical perspective might wake up one morning to a revelation: dogs don’t need to be neatly standardized, packaged, and sealed to be our friends.
No, they don't -- and America, at least, has noticed.
Today, more than half of all dogs (about 54%) are cross-breeds or mongrels and the number of dogs registered by the American Kennel Club has never been lower, falling from over over 1.52 million in 1992, to about 400,000 today.
There are approximately 75 million dogs in the U.S.
Every year about 7 million new dogs are acquired in the U.S. to replace those that die from disease, old age, or accident.
To put it another way, AKC registrations account for only 6 percent of all dogs in the U.S.
What about the other 40 percent of dogs that are purebred but not registered? The vast majority of these are casually-bred Labrador or Golden retrievers, Boxers, Yorkies, Beagles, Toy Poodles, or German Shepherds that had one-off litters, with the unregistered offspring going to family, friends or local acquaintances.
Other dogs are registered in breed specific registries unaffiliated with the AKC, such as the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America, the American Border Collie Association, or the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club.
One registry, American Field, registers a type of dog (bird dogs) rather than one breed or all breeds, and it is the oldest registry in the U.S.
There are two or three more-or-less respectable all breed organizations: the United Kennel Club, the Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI), and the Canadian Kennel Club. None of these clubs are paragons of virtue. In reality, they are little more than AKC-lite with all of the same problems.
Finally, we come to an entire file drawer of all- or multi-breed registries such as the American Rare Breed Association, the Continental Kennel Club, the World Wide Kennel Club, the International Progressive Dog Breeders Alliance, the National Kennel Club, and the Animal Research Foundation.
These registries are just cranking out paper.
The AKC will tell you these bottom-feeder registries are awful, but in fact they are only awful because they are competing head-to-head with the AKC and will sell you worthless paper for less.
If the "papers" are actually meaningless (and they are), why would anyone pay anything, much less more?
The puppy mill folks figured it out pretty quickly, and so now the American Kennel Club (which has always be dependent on puppy mill registrations) is now in a "race to the bottom" in registration fees, and is actually given discounts to puppy millers that they are not extending to more reputable breeders. How's that for getting treated special and telling the world your values?
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| Misto wants to do more than just read the review. |
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3 comments:
They are also be looking for predictability (not saying they will get it) re behaviour - a dog that is good with children/cats, doesn't require too much exercise, is friendly etc. They may also want a particular size.
Some of the descriptions of a breed's "personality" seem overly detailed/optimistic to me.
Nice article. Thanks for the mention. I can never get enough of Misto ...
Another organization that registers a "type" or dog, based on working ability is the American Working Farmcollie Association: http://www.farmcollie.com/
Some of the dogs are specific breeds, some are crossbred, but all have working abilities.
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