Inbred Thinking Without End

Pictured is the 2021 Westminster Dog Show winner, a Pekingese named Wasabi.  

Wasabi's grandfather was Malachy, who won the Westminster Dog Show in 2012.

Wasabi's great-grandfather was Malachy, who won the Westminster Dog Show in 2012.

And Wasabi's great-great-grandfather was also Malachy, who won the Westminster Dog Show in 2012.

There’s a family tree that looks like a cable-knit sweater!

Some 20 years back, I wrote a piece called “Inbred Thinking,” about the closed-loop, self-reinforcing back-patting and back-scratching that goes on within the Kennel Clubs.

I was reminded of that with this picture, which shows Wasabi owner David Fitzpatrick with his dog.

Guess who was the “best in show” judge at Westminster who selected Penny the Doberman as top dog just last week?

None other than David Fitzpatrick!

Twenty years ago I wrote:

“The Kennel Club is a huge money-making bureaucracy dependent upon selling people on the ‘exclusivity’ of a closed registry and a scrap of paper that says a dog is a ‘pure breed’.  So long as people are willing to buy Kennel Club registered dogs that have predictably higher chances of serious physical impairments than cross-bred dogs, the Kennel Club (and Kennel Club breeders) have little motivation to change the way they do business.

“Let me hasten to say that the Kennel Club is not filled with evil people intent on doing harm to dogs. It is, in fact, filled with regular people who are different from the rest of the world only in the degree (and the way) they seek ego-gratification and are status-seeking.

“This last point is import: the Kennel Club is not primarily about dogs. Dogs do not care about ribbons, pedigrees, titles, and points. These are human obsessions. The reason a human will drive several hundred miles and stand around all day waiting for 10 minutes in the ring is not because of the dog, but because the human needs that ribbon, that title, and that little bit of extra status that comes from a win.

“Each to his own, but let us be honest about what dog shows are about -- they are about ribbons for people. The dogs themselves could not give a damn.

“It is unfair to fault individual breeders and breed clubs for the failures of the Kennel Club, as these smaller units are powerless to change the larger whole.

“Breed clubs are small and largely impotent by design. Because the Kennel Club does not require breeders, pet owners, or even show ring ribbon-chasers to join a breed club as a condition of registration, these entities remain small, underfunded, and unrepresentative.

“Breed clubs, like dog shows themselves, are also steeped in internecine politics and dominated by big breeders and people who over-value ‘conformation.’

“It is only by conforming to the AKC system for decades that anyone can hope to move up in the AKC hierarchy -- a situation that guarantees intellectual and bureaucratic inbreeding.

“In the end, the AKC is a closed registry in every sense of that word. It continues to embrace the failed genetic theories of Victorian England because it is incapable of serious reform within the Club itself.”

What was true then, is true now.

So am I surprised that the breeder of the very inbred Pekingese Wasabi was also the Westminster judge who tapped a Doberman as top dog last week?

Not a bit.

And, to be clear, this post is not about David Fitzpatrick, who is, by all accounts, a wonderful person. 

This post is about something larger; inbred thinking.  

Which is to say **of course** a top AKC show judge would inbreed the hell out of hist own dogs, and **of course** the Westminster Kennel Club would assume that someone who engages in that level of inbreeding would be just the sort of expert they’d want to select their top dog at Westminster.

Inbred thinking?   Yes indeed.