The End of Inbreeding?

You want to know why it's hard to get the dog show crowd to stop inbreeding within a closed registry pool?

Simple: dog shows started in Europe where they have been led to believe, for more than 500 years, that incest is best. As Jessa Gamble at The Last Word on Nothing blog notes:

All ten current European monarchs — that’s Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg, UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Netherlands, for those who haven’t kept track of republican trends — are direct descendants of John William Friso, Prince of Orange, who died in 1711, ten generations ago. This fact understates their actual degree of kinship, however, because the interconnected bloodlines cross much more recently. Most of the European monarchs are also descended from the grandmother of Europe, Queen Victoria of England and from Christian IX of Denmark, both of whose many respective grandchildren – who occupied their thrones during the First World War – married each other so conscientiously their family tree sports the systematic order of a round-robin badminton tournament. Of course, Queen Victoria and her consort Albert were first cousins to begin with, and Victoria passed her hemophilia down to her far-flung grandchildren....

So is there a glimmer of hope?

There is.

Kate is an outcross to a .... gasp ... commoner, and Meghan is an outcross to ... gasp ... an American.