The AKC’s Problems Are All Internal

It’s NOT the "animal rights" folks who are killing dog shows.

Almost everyone in this country is eating chicken and hamburgers, wearing leather-made shoes, and doing so while eating eggs and drinking milk.

Next time you’re at a hardware store, check out the aisle for pest control.

Where I shop they sell leghold traps as well as mouse and rat traps, rat poison, and insecticides.

We have hunting shows on TV, hunting magazines on the rack, and we have over 500 million acres of public hunting lands paid for by taxpayers and open to all who plunk down a few dollars for a license.

The Congressional Sportsman’s Caucus is the largest on Capitol Hill.

My state asks me, every year, whether I’d be interested in shooting a bear.

You want to shoot deer? Turkey? Ducks? Geese?

Lots of all that. Knock yourself out.

I’ve spent north of 40 years in the woods and fields and I’ve never met an “animal rights person” out there, not even once.

There’s a gun store next to where I get my morning coffee off Main Street, and where I buy my bleach they also sell crossbows, duck calls, boxes of ammunition, and dove decoys.

I live a few blocks from a dairy, and a quarter mile from a place that sells castrating bands for sheep.

The animal rights folks are “killing dog shows”?

Gimme a fucking break.

I spent the week at a local County fair where the chickens, cows, sheep, goats, rabbits, and pigs on display are destined to be sold for slaughter, sheared for wool, and milked. Across the walkway aisle at the fair from the pig barn was a place selling pulled pork sandwiches. I may have been the only person who noticed. No one gives a shit about PETA, least of all the people who actually make their living off cows, chickens, and sheep.

Animal rights? Gimme a break!

This is fantasy stuff spun up by thick-ankled matrons and blue-blazer rosette chasers who live in suburbia with their pet dogs, and who have never killed a chicken, cleaned a stall, or walked two miles of electric fence in the rain.

Here’s the truth: deciding not to buy an over-priced puppy-mill dog from a pet store does not mean anyone is saluting an "animal rights" agenda (whatever that is); it means they are making a simple, smart, and obvious consumer choice.

Most folks are looking for a healthy pet.

Some folks are looking for a special-performance working dog.

On both counts, the AKC does not have much to offer.

AKC dogs are less healthy, on average, than cross-bred dogs picked up at the pound, while the difference between “show line” and “working line” dogs speaks to the failure of the AKC.

It's time we started to think of dogs as breed products. And when every breed product you are offering is sliding towards failure due to inbreeding, selection for defect, and failure to perform in the field, don't be surprised if no one is rushing to your store to buy your product.

That’s the AKC’s core problem, and it’s not going to be fixed by a breed-blind leadership that has no vision and no courage.

So what do AKC apologists do instead? They say the failure of their business model is due to some mysterious force called the “animal rights” agenda.

But it’s not.

America has more dogs, both in total and pet-capita, than it ever has.

At the same time that the AKC’s registration numbers have collapsed by 70 percent, we own more dogs than ever.

America loves dogs, same as it loves hamburgers, fried chicken, and leather footballs.

Nothing has changed.

But does America love AKC dogs that are now known to be deformed, diseased, and dysfunctional?

Not so much.

America is voting with its wallet and it’s feet.

That’s not a bad thing; that’s a very good thing; it means the basic tenets of free-market capitalism still work.

Hurrah!