Crufts Dog Show Is International Laughing Stock

The Crufts dog show makes itself an international laughing stock (again!) by putting up an American Cocker Spaniel with an deformed head, sloped back, and a coat only a hair dresser could love.

This is a gun dog? It's an insult to dogs, to work, and to Americans.

Only the AKC could create this kind of canine wreckage.

And, of course the babbling pretender Caroline Kisko, the Kennel Club's flak, is trying to defend it by saying many of the gun dogs at Crufts don't actually work! No, of course they don't, and Pinocchio is not a real boy.

The Telegraph headline says it all: Crufts Best in Show 2017 branded a 'joke' as fans say American cocker spaniel looks nothing like a working dog.

Not said: the American Cocker Spaniel is a perfect recapitulation of the everything wrong with the American Kennel Club and the British Kennel Club, as it was largely created by OB Gilman and Hitler-correspondent Leon F. Whitney.

In 1934, Leon F. Whitney was a frequent writer for the American Kennel Club who also happened to be calling for the sterilization of ten million defective Americans at a time when the U.S. population was just 126 million.

It was about this same time that American Cocker Spaniel creator OB Gilman, who was getting old, decided to dump all of his dogs on Leon Whitney, a man he greatly admired.

What happened next?

I told the tale back in 2008: Of the 100 dogs delivered to Leon F. Whitney by OB Gilman, 50 were dead within a few days, put down by a veterinarian who saw dogs as little more than a cash machine and a chance to experiment with coat color and race politics.

Was it gas or gun?  Were ovens involved or a backhoe?  The details are lost, but here we see how Kennel Club thinking helped the world quickly transition from Bassets to Auschwitz in 50 years. As I noted back in 2009:

[T]he Kennel Club still warmly embraces eugenics theories based on a closed registry system that elevates to prime importance such useless attributes as coat and nose color, while kicking to the curb such vital issues as health and working ability.

Of course, even as the Kennel Club holds tight to "racial purity" breeding, the farm world has moved forward, discovering the benefits of hybridization and outcrosses.

Today, most beef cattle, dairy cattle, chickens, corn, and soy are hybrid animals and plants.

Only in the show ring, where there is no true axis of production, is racial purity still valued.

That last line is not quite true, though, is it? Racists are on the rise again in both Europe and in the U.S., and Kennel Club spokesperson Caroline Kisko is herself married to someone who appears on the roles of the British National Party. The fear of foreign blood has not yet gone away.

And yet it becomes quite laughable doesn't it?

Steve Bannon and Donald Trump are models of genetic superiority?

This non-working American Cocker Spaniel with a deformed head that is being paraded around the ring at Crufts is the finest gun dog in the world?

Absurd.  No wonder the world is laughing.