Proper Sheepdog Work

A hat tip to Donald McCaig for this one!
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David Lee Roth, Border Collie Man

DLR Dog World from David Lee Roth on Vimeo
 
He's pretty good with the dogs, and has a nice sense of humor.  These are self-actualized dogs with as good a life as a dog can get -- real work with an owner that can laugh.  "You ought to hear them howl when they hear my truck pull up."  I bet! 
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Maybe They Need to Train the Sheep?

In 2008 the UK Border Collie Club decided to embrace work and passed a rule that Border Collies can be made full champions only if they first pass a "limited field trial".

And what is a limited field trial?  Well it appears to have the essential elements of work.  As the Border Collie Club of Great Britain notes:

The Herding Test consists of five principal elements - Outrun, Lift, Bring/Fetch, Inspection and Drive - working a group of five to ten sheep.

So far so good.

But wait, there's a joker in the deck. The Border Collie Club of Great Britain's web site goes on to note that:

Following a review of the initial test in October 2008, details of the requirements have been clarified. Dogs need to pass overall but do not need to pass each section; the stated objective of the Herding Test is 'to assess a dog's instinct to herd sheep in a controlled manner and under instruction of the handler'. As it is the dog's herding ability which is being tested, dogs may be handled by anyone, not necessarily the owner.

Right. 

If the test is too tough, don't ask why we do not have dogs and owners that can complete it, but instead soften up the tests and allow professional handlers and trainers, some of whom are so good at training a dog they could get a Jack Russell to qualify for this herding test.

Nontheless, how many dogs have actually qualified since 2008? Just nine.

Welcome to the world of Barbie Collies -- dogs for frustrated hairdressers and pretenders.

Meanwhile, in Carbondale, Colorado the 2011 National Sheepdog finals are now over. No shortage of honest working dogs there, and not too many pretenders in evidence, I imagine!

Wales.  At rest in the field of the Lord.

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Robots on the Range with Musical Goodness

Robots tractors will soon plow and fertilize our largest fields using little more than GPS coordinates carefully laid into a hazard map.

Robots already automatically water fields based on ground sensors.

And can robotic sheep and cattle herders be far away?

Imagine a small solar- or motion-powered GPS locator on the animals, and perhaps a capacitor to deliver a small shock to any recalcitrant sheep or cattle. 

The herding, of course, would all be done by a couple of little zippy radio-controlled cars like this, linked to an artificial intelligence chip housed in a nearly indestructible unit carrying a few laser, magnetic, and heat-seeking sensors.  I will bet this actually exists within 10 years!
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When Men Were Men, and Sheep Were Afraid

Source

William Elliot, Shepherd, 1817-1897.

They don't make facial hair like that anymore!

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Dogs Made by the Hand of Man

A repost from August 2005.

The morphological variation within dogs is pretty extreme.

The picture, above, is of an English Bulldog, a breed with such an overlarge head that almost 100% of all dogs are born caesarian.

This is a breed that would be extinct in 10 years were it not for the regular intervention of veterinarians.

Most people do not realize that almost all dog species, as we know them today, are very recent creations.

In the last 1790s, a farmer by the name of Robert Bakewell realized that by separating males from females -- made easy by the rising number of enclosed fields -- a farmer could choose which stock was allowed to breed. By deliberately inbreeding livestock, and selecting for desirable traits, Bakewell rapidly created new and "improved" breeds of sheep and transformed modern agriculture forever. Bakewell's experiments with sheep quickly spilled over into other farm stock, such as cattle, pigs, and chickens, and eventually into pet stock such as dogs and pigeons.

In 1800, there were only 15 designated breeds of dogs, but by 1865 that number had grown to more than 50 and it exploded fantastically over the course of the next 60 years as Victorian-era dog breeders produced a dizzying array of dogs, most with invented histories and elaborate (and entirely fictional) rationales for their taxonomic differences. To see how rapidly the shape of the Bull Terrier was changed by the Kennel Club show ring >> click here.

Border Collie Skull (above)


Dachshund Skull (above)


Pug Skull (above)



Poodle Skull (above)



Saint Bernard Skull (above)



Schnauzer Skull

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I Love These Baa-studs

I saw this video over at Pet Connection and at The Conservation Report this morning, and with only a little shame I rip them both off, because this video is that fun! Hat tip to Gina and Buck, of course. .

Dogs Shows As Human Failing

Why Televised Dog Shows Are a Sham
The New Republic, 12.14.06, by Sacha Zimmerman.


As Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "The world was conquered through the understanding of dogs; the world exists through the understanding of dogs." And so it is that there is perhaps nothing more philosophical on television than the "American Kennel Club/Eukanuba National Championship" dog show on Animal Planet. For, despite its sports-competition-sounding title, the national championship is, at its heart, a theater of existentialism.

To truly understand a dog show means to shed all common notions about how an animal's greatness is measured, like speed or jumping ability. At Eukanuba, as at all purebred dog shows, the dogs are judged, not for their cuteness or prowess in catching a Frisbee, but against a transcendent idea of the perfect dog. In other words, the Belgian Tervuren is not competing against the Pembroke Welsh Corgi; the Belgian Tervuren is competing against the metaphysical ideal of a Belgian Tervuren. Whichever dog comes closest to personifying its breed's quintessence wins best in show--and becomes something like the philosopher king of the canine world. There is, underlying all of the pomp and ceremony of the competition, a kind of Platonic striving to find that dog which will epitomize the archetype so resoundingly that we humans will perhaps leave the cave for a moment and, as Nietzsche suggests, understand the world a bit better for understanding a dog. "Dog is my co-pilot," indeed!

Unfortunately, instead of conveying its philosophical nature, the dog-show world seems wedded to useless sports-world analogies. Let's start with the conundrum of the handler. Edd Bivin, who provides the color commentary for Eukanuba's TV audience beside the play-by-play of former "Entertainment Tonight" host Bob Goen, explains to us that the human handler should be invisible. The best handlers apparently allow the dog to be the main focus. There are even contests for the handlers--Goen was thrilled to announce the winner of the Junior Handler Competition. Meaning there was actually a contest to see which handler was least noticeable, a through-the-looking-glass moment where a handler was remembered, essentially, for her absence.

And yet, along with the ubiquitous sensible shoes, I saw a startling number of sequins, large-pattern prints, and gold-lamé sheaths adorning the figures of the handlers. Were it not for the tight camera shots of the dogs, I might have missed them completely, as I was staring agog at the garish trends in dog-show-handler couture. Shouldn't invisible handlers be wearing basic black to stop distracting viewers from the dogs?

Moreover, while praising the handlers who show dogs so skillfully, so invisibly, Bivin nevertheless informs us that a handler's performance is, in fact, irrelevant. This came up when a particularly inelegantly dressed woman nearly tripped over a leash (so much for not being noticed). Bivin reminds us that this is a dog show; the handler's gaffe will not affect the scoring of the dog. So, if any clod with two left feet covered head-to-toe in Swarovski crystals can march a dog around the arena without affecting the judging of the dog itself, then why all the talk of invisibility and skill, not to mention high-priced professional handlers? It's like the handlers are some kind of preternatural red herrings meant to keep us looking at the shadows instead of at the dog-gods among us, who are blithely padding to and fro with none of the angst or consternation of the humans by their sides.

Even worse, the dogs, too, are regarded as athletes in this competition, even though they are nothing of the sort. Bivin explains to the home viewers that winning is all about the dog's performance on a given day. But a dog is the same on any given day. Unless a dog's hip has shifted an inch or its color has changed from one competition to the next, the dog is either close to perfect or it isn't. The contest is about appearance, after all, not temperament. The standards are supposedly set. And what "performance" is the dog really giving? After one spirited dog, a Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen (PBGV), gave a yelp and a growl to the judge, Bivin was quick to remind the audience that the judge would not hold it against the dog; indeed, the PBGV did well in its grouping. (Though, truthfully, understanding any of the standards for judging was near impossible with Bivin at the helm. He is prone to incredible fits of tautology. For example, when asked by Goen what the judge was looking for in a dog's gait, Bivin explained that the judge was watching how the dog moved. Illuminating.)

Actually, there is some rationale for all the sports talk. After all, the dogs are divided into groups based on what they were bred to do, like hunt, guard, or herd. But, for all we know, the Siberian Husky has never set a paw in the snow or even heard of the Iditarod; perhaps the Newfoundland is terrified of water rescues; and has the Border Collie ever rounded up sheep? By ignoring the teleological nature of the dogs, how can we possibly be sure that each one is anywhere close to the breed ideal? Then there is the constant banter between Goen and Bivin about the sweetness of one breed, the appropriateness of a breed for children, or the most loyal breed, which leaves the viewer pining for a demonstration of these traits. But no dogs are released into a gaggle of children to shower them with licks, and no dog is asked to bound to the door to exhibit its joy at its master's return home. The show is as devoid of personality as any Miss America pageant; perhaps more so, as talent is not even a consideration.

"All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog," wrote Franz Kafka, and yet we foolishly examine teeth and coats whilst ignoring the soul. Which makes this entire dog-show extravaganza an exercise in eugenics, something we generally frown upon in the human world. Besides, inbreeding for dogs with pure bloodlines designed for outdated purposes, like guarding castles, is bad for dogs (many of which suffer from genetic diseases due to inbreeding) and bad for pet owners, who want a nice, playful dog, not a ratter or a racer. The competitive canine universe is festooned with all the trappings of a love of dogs. But that is a fallacy. Breeding to "perfection" has nothing to do with the true spirit of dogs, who care not that their beloved owners wear frumpy clothes, have less than perfect posture, lack good muscle tone, or don't have a smooth gait. I don't blame the genetically superior dogs; Eukanuba is a totally human failing.

Border Collie Owners Battle What Doesn't Work

In 1848, Queen Victoria was introduced to working Collies at Balmoral Castle. She became captivated by these intelligent dogs and brought a few back with her to London, where they became the rage -- hitting center stage just as the first dog shows were starting to take off in the U.K.

With the rise of organized dog shows between 1860 and 1890, a show standard was written up for the Collie by John Henry Walsh (aka "Stonehenge"), a man who himself did not own or work Collies, but who felt himself expert enough in nearly every breed of dog to write a standard by which they could be judged by appearance alone.

Needless to say, dogs were soon being bred to this "standard," which assigned large numbers of points to head shape and size, coat length, and coat color.

A Collies ability to actually work sheep or take commands was not allotted a single point.


A Border Collie rides herd on sheep in a chute.


In 1893, the fate of the Collie took another bad turn when the very young Czar Nicholas II sent 15 Borzois to the aged Queen Victoria. Intended as a diplomatic gift to curry favor with an aged dog collector who also happened to be his wife's grandmother, the Borzois more than left their mark, as they were soon crossed with Queen Victoria's Collies, thereby helping to create the strange-looking, impossibly narrow-headed dog we now know as "the Lassie" Rough-coated Collie.

By the 1920s, these non-working and narrow-headed Collies appeared to be a different breed from the working Collies found in rural parts of Scotland, Wales and the rest of the British Isles.

While the show dogs were increasingly homogeneous, the working dogs were of varied sizes and colors. Some had short coats and prick ears, others had longer coats and folded ears. The dogs themselves ranged from 25 to 75 pounds, and they came in a wide variety of colors from brown or red, to black and white, from dappled Merle to various hues of gun metal gray. In fact, almost the only thing all these dogs had in common was an obsessive devotion to work created by breeding worker-to-worker for generations.

"Big one, little one, handsome one, ugly ones, long-coated, short-coated: nobody gave a damn. How's his outrun? Can he read sheep? Can he move a rank old cow?"
. . . . - Don McCaig, Dog Wars

Needless to say, these were not the kind of questions being asked by the folks at The Kennel Club shows!

As a result of divergent selection criteria -- working ability versus conformation -- the smart, working, heterogeneous collies that had been so admired by Queen Victoria in 1848, were systematically selected out of The Kennel Club gene pool in favor of more homogeneous conformation stock.

Could these pretty show dogs herd a cat across a living room? Perhaps, but no one had much illusion that they would be of any real use on a mountain side with 500 head of semi-wild sheep to pen before an approaching storm. Shepherds looked elsewhere for their working dogs.

But what did that matter? How many people really had sheep to pen? Never mind that the sheep and the hill created the Collie. How could a dog be harmed if it still looked good? A non-working Collie could be bred to a non-working Collie, and it would still chase a stick. What else was needed?

In fact, by The Kennel Club's light, what mattered was not the dog, but the name. And so, in 1924, when the International Sheep Dog Society (ISDS) brought working Collies to Hyde Park for a sheepdog trial, The Kennel Club objected. How could these feral-looking dogs be called Collies, they demanded!? They had no resemblance at all to the dogs in The Kennel Club ring!

"Fine," the ISDS replied, and promptly began calling their working dogs by a new name: "Border Collies," to differentiate them from their non-working Kennel Club cousins.


A Border Collie at Crufts: a bored animal at a dog show started by a man that never owned a dog.


Much the same story played out with working Fox Terriers at about this same period of time (complete with Queen Victoria in a supporting role).

Here too a breed of working dog, was quickly wrecked by Kennel Club breeders focused on pure conformation standards within a closed-registry system.

And here too, the true working dog continued to live on in the countryside under a different name -- the Jack Russell Terrier.

Move forward 100 years, and the tale plays out anew, as the Kennel Club bureaucracy circles back to try to round up two popular working dog breeds that somehow (how?) slipped out of sight and off their roles.

"The Border Collie? The Jack Russell Terrier? Oh, we must have them."

Never mind that these dogs had already been pulled onto the Kennel Club roles. By now the Kennel Clun dogs were ruined beyond recognition and operating under a different name. Time to try again!

It is here, at the start of the Second Battle for the Border Collie that Virginia sheep man and writer Don McCaig begins his tale in The Dog Wars: How the Border Collie Battled the American Kennel Club.

In its simplest form, McCaig's book is a battle between what works and what doesn't.

On one side you have the American Kennel Club -- a 19th Century organization driven by 19th Century genetic theories and an almost Kremlin-like bureaucracy in New York City. These people have the strange notion that all canine breeds can best be judged at a glance while trotting a dog around a ring on a thin string leash.

On the other side, you have a small collection of not-too-sophisticated farmers and sheep dog trialers; the very people who made the working collie what it is. These folks may not own a tuxedo or ball dress, but by God they know two true things; 1) that the show ring has never made a working dog, and; 2) that the mettle of a Border Collie can only be determined on the hill while working cattle, sheep or goats.

The fact that McCaig is a partisan in this war does not mean he has not written a fair book.

In fact, he is more than fair.

While he mentions some of the breeds ruined by the Kennel Club's love affair with closed registries and show ring standards, he does not catalogue them (or their ills) to the extent he could.

Nor does McCaig open up both barrels in order to blast the AKC' for their sordid history as puppy mill profiteers.

Instead, McCaig's book focuses on the straight-forward history of the "Border Collie War" of the 1990s, leavening historical chronology with short divergent tales of his own working dogs, Silk, Moose and Harry.

McCaig does a pretty fair job of puncturing the American Kennel Club lie that they "only register dogs," and that it is individual breeders -- not AKC policies -- that are responsible for the general decline in pure-breed quality and performance.

In fact, McCaig notes, the Kennel Club does far more than register dogs. It also mandates that all AKC breed be maintained in a closed registry which almost guarantees mounting levels of inbreeding.

The AKC also prohibits performance tests as a requirement of winning a championship, and they will not allow a club to ban puppy mill or pet store registrations which are a large part of the AKC's bread-and-butter business plan.

The staff of the AKC have forced the rewriting of show standards (as they did with the Labrador Retriever), and they will not allow a breed club to mandate a health check as a condition of registration, even if the breed has a serious, pervasive, debilitating, gene-based health care issue such as deafness, cataracts or dysplasia.

In fact, as McCaig makes clear, the AKC is really not interested in power-sharing with a strong breed club. If a strong breed club already exists outside the AKC, they are not willing to do much to woo its support in order to have them join the AKC.

It's much easier -- and safer -- to simply create a new club from whole cloth; a simple matter of finding a few dozen people who are anxious to "get in on the ground floor" with a new AKC breed.

These new AKC converts are likely to already believe that dog shows are the beginning-and-end-all in the world of dogs.

What does it matter that geneticists have said that the AKC's breeding scheme is unsound and bad for working dogs? They will be careful and breed smart.

So what if the AKC is a major engine driving the puppy mill and pet shop trade of dogs? If the AKC was not pocketing the cash, someone else would.

And who really needs working dogs any more anyway? Sheep herding with dogs is an anachronism, and fox hunting has been banned in the U.K. The modern world is all about fly-ball, agility, and Frisbee. If the dogs have a little less obsession and drive, they will still be fine for that.

And, so the AKC charges ahead and does what it wants.

When the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club (founded in 1954) turned down AKC overtures because the AKC would not allow their Club to deny membership and registration to puppy millers and breeders that sold their dogs to pet shops, the AKC simply created its own Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club to compete.

When the Border Collie folks said they would greenlight AKC admission only if there was a performance standard, the AKC would have none of it.

When the Jack Russell Terrier folks opposed a too-limited conformation standard and maintenance of the breed in a closed registry system with no limits on coefficients of inbreeding, the AKC simply rounded up a collection of breeders who cared more about blue ribbons and green cash than the future of this working dog.

McCaig gives a nod to these other dog battles, of course, but his concern is the Border Collie.

McCaig details an AKC in which both officials and staff are secretive, arrogant and clannish. They think nothing of omitting facts, telling lies, and stretching the truth. When asked to explain their intentions, they become a collection of Know Nothings, and when asked to sit down to see if common ground can be found, they express outrage that -- after 100 years of wrecking dogs -- the entire world is not willing to roll over and give them the benefit of the doubt on their say-so alone.

After all, they will tell you, they are the experts on dogs. What, you don't believe it? Well, just ask any of their all-breed judges who claim they can judge the value of a sheep-working dog at 40 feet, never mind that they themselves have never seen a sheep.

Ask any one of the terrier judges who have never dug four feet to a fox, or carried a shovel out of their own backyard.

You want to to know about whippets and greyhounds? Well the AKC has experts on chasing plastic bags on a string. Who would know more about running dogs than people with experience like that?

Though McCaig's book is brutal in its accounting, his tone is generally dispassionate and he sticks to the facts.

In fact, I would argue that McCaig's book is actually generous to the American Kennel Club.

Recognizing that the organization is behaving irrationally -- spending money to lose money, winking at puppy mills, capriciously changing breed standards, and ignoring the wishes of both breed clubs and dog owners alike, he wonders what is going on. How could people, whom he generously supposes are neither evil nor stupid, be so terribly misguided?

He dismisses the notion that it's all about money. He says it is not -- in discussions with the AKC they never mention money, and they seem offended that anyone would suggest theirs is a business (never mind the Madison Avenue offices, high salaries, black-tie galas, and plethora of cross-promotional activities with dog food companies, veterinarians, and dog toy manufacturers).

McCaig generously suggests that the AKC is guided by something else -- a vision that can best be described as religious in nature, since it seems to operate both independent of fact and based on faith alone.

And what is that faith? McCaig writes:

"Throughout the fight, I kept stumbling over a simple truth without quite seeing it: dog fanciers and their creature, the AKC, really do believe that what is most valuable about any dog can be judged in the show ring, that the show ring is the sole legitimate purpose and reward for all dog breeding. They even believe, against all evidence, that the show ring 'improves' breeds."

And, to give credit, McCaig cuts them a little slack about their belief system. He even tries to identify in -- at least a little bit.

"The AKC's faith in the show ring is no more implausible than the fourth-century creed I recite every Sunday in the Williamsville Presbyterian Church."

McCaig goes on to note that while AKC dog show folks really do believe a dog is all about looks, the AKC staff is motivated by something else in their eternal quest to pull ever-more breeds into the AKC show ring.

"When AKC staffers argued with traditionalists that they should abandon their venerable snobberies and recognize every breed they could, the staffers were just doing what staffers have done since the time of the pharaohs; increase their importance by swelling their organization."

And so, in the end, McCaig tries to humanize the AKC. He does not forgive them their lies, their pettifoggery, or for what they have done to the Border Collie and other working breeds, but he does try to see the world through their eyes.

Unfortunately, it's still not a pretty picture.

One big issue seems to be that the staff of the AKC feels that their power in the world of dogs is slipping from their fingers.

The United Kennel Club already registers more breeds, and other for-profit dog registries are popping up left and right.

The American Press Corps (from Time magazine to ABC's 20/20) have informed everyone that AKC dogs are more likely to have specific genetic defects than run-of-the-mill pound puppies.

And with their recent disastrous attempt to form an alliance with Petland, everyone now knows that a huge portion of AKC's bottom line comes from the registration fees pocketed from the sale of "misery puppies" cranked out by commercial puppy mill breeders.

Slowly, the glow is coming off the rose. So what to do?

Well of course, your double down your efforts and continue doing the same thing! Isn't that so often the way?

So how does it all end?

When the smoke and fog of war lifted, it turned out that both sides had lost the Border Collie War.

The Border Collie had lost because they were now just one more dog within the American Kennel Club where they were to be judged on looks alone rather on the brains, obsessive drive, and bidability that make them truly unique in the world of dogs.

The American Kennel Club lost because they not only activated a permanent (and growing) base of opposition outside of the AKC, but also because the public was apparently not deceived by their shennaningans. Ten years after the Border Collie were first drawn into the AKC, that organization registers only 2,000 border collies annually; only a tenth of the dogs the American Border Collie Association registers.

And while McCaig notes that the AKC has twice the number of herding trial events as the American Border Collie Association, the AKC events are poorly attended because "ordinary citizens seem to understand what's real and what's not."

At least for now, it seems, common sense has won out.

The same can be said in the battle for the Jack Russell. Not only is the AKC version of the dog not as popular as the AKC had hoped it would be, but it is no longer even called a Jack Russell Terrier. Meanwhile, the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America continues to prosper and thrive as the largest Jack Russell Terrier registry in the world. It's focus: to preserve and protect the Jack Russell as "first and foremost" a hunting dog.

And so, as George Santayana might have predicted, the world of working dogs has come full circle.

The AKC once again has drawn into its folds a type of working collie (and a type of working terrier too), and put them on the fast track to ruin in a closed registry system with a pure-conformation standard.

Within 50 years, these new AKC dogs will be as as close to their working cousins as chalk is to cheese, and 100 years from now, if the AKC is still around, the whole process will probably start all over again. Nonetheless, I suspect the working Border Collie and the working Jack Russell Terrier will continue to endure.

Bottom Line: Buy and read Don McCaig's new book about the battle for the Border Collie. It's a good book, and an important book. And, truth be told, there are damn few of those.



A Proposed New AKC Class: "Working Dogs Ruined by the Show Ring"


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Border Terriers vs Border Collies

An older, but still great, commercial which illuminates the difference between a border collie and a border terrier.

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The Kennel Club Wrecks More Than Terriers

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The Cocker Spaniel was once a fine pocket-sized bird dog, but the show ring emphasis on exaggerated coats has created a dog that cannot get through a hedgerow even if its life depended on it.


Mark Derr, the author of Dog's Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship wrote the following paragraphs in a March 1990 Atlantic Monthly article entitled "The Politics of Dogs":

The cocker spaniel, along with the poodle, the perennial favorite of American pet buyers, has not competed in field trials since 1965, having lots its ability to hunt. Elizabeth Spalding, a leading breeder of Cavalier King Charles spaniels, says, "Most people don't know it, but up until the 1970s a sentence in the cocker-spaniel standard stated that a dog could be penalized for excessive coat. But for twenty years cockers had been bred for long coats, which brought them championships." The long-haired little hunter has developed a reputation as a foul-tempered, possessive, and nervous creature.

In the 1950s show people turned the German shepherd into a weak-hipped animal with a foul temper and bizarre downward-sloping hindquarters. A few breeders are trying to restore the dog to its former dignity. The Monks of New Skete, a religious order in the Orthodox Catholic Church, near Cambridge, New York, have for twenty-two years worked to produce dogs without those problems. "We stopped using American dogs and turned to German ones, because breeding there is better controlled," says Brother John, a member of the order, which has a waiting list of more than a year for its dogs.

Many of the toy breeds are so small and fragile that they cannot live outside artificial environments. The bulldog and the Boston terrier have difficulty whelping naturally, because of the breeds' exaggeraged heads, and bitches are regularly subjected to cesarean sections. Hetherington says, "The bulldog is a man-made dog, and man has to be responsible for it. The dog hasn't come out perfectly, but that's reason to keep trying to improve the breed , not to abandon it."

The problem exists throughout the world. In Australia the kelpie, which is considered a rival to the border collie in the management of sheep, became the darling of the show ring in the 1930s and within three decades had nearly lost its herding instinct. In the 1960s the Working Kelpie Council of Australia began to rescue the breed, by establishing a registry for working stock. In the United States the Australian kelpie has been in the AKC's miscellaneous class since 1941, and Susan Thorp, the secretary of Working Kelpies, the American breed club, wants to keep it there. "In the AKC," she says, "the dog becomes an object. People get dogs, don't use them, and then selectively breed them for characteristics other than work."

Peter Borchelt, an animal behaviorist in Forest Hills, New York, says that springer spaniels, mostly the males, born of a particular show line frequently develop dominance-related behavioral problems that lead them to become aggressive toward their owners, while those from field stock don't manifest that tendency. Among labrador retrievers there are as many as three distinct varieties with different characteristics--show dogs, somewhat large and slow afoot; dogs adept at AKC field trials, smaller and more high-strung; and working dogs, varying in appearance but bred for their ability to swim and retrieve.

Among other AKC-recognized hunting breeds--including the German shorthaired pointer, the Chesapeake Bay retriever, the pointer, the Brittany, the Gordon setter, and the English setter--are dogs that can point, retrieve, or flush birds as well as any every have. People work hard to preserve those traits, and they don't intend to stop. (Many register their dogs not with the AKC but with American Field, an organization in Chicago devoted to field dogs.) But the trend among people who want breeds unspoiled by an overemphasis on appearance is toward animals the AKC doesn't deign to register, such as the Catahoula leopard dog, Australian and English shepherds, the beauceron, and European pointers (including the English).

The trend has not escaped the notice of the AKC. Kenneth Marden, the AKC's president, says, "We have gotten away from what dogs were originally bred for. In some cases we have paid so much attention to form that we have lost the use of the dog." Marden has supervised the establishment of herding tests, which are scheduled to begin this winter and are subject to a great deal of controversy among people with working stock dogs, who argue that AKC animals like the collie and the Old English sheep dog will prove unable to complete them. Marden has also expressed interest in terrier tests to measure the dogs' ability to flush game from underground dens, and in lure coursing for sight hounds and whippets.

He has publicly recognized the need to emphasize function as well as form, despite strong opposition from the AKC's powerful traditionalists, who argue that he is denigrating shows. They have nothing to fear. In some European countries dogs must excel both in the field and in the ring, and be judged physically sound, before they can become Champions. But an AKC dog can become a Champion in the show ring alone.

The above post is a repeat of a post from this blog from June 4, 2005.

Give That Clone a Bone

Back in 1998 John Sperling decided to clone his dog. Sperling was, at the time, the 79-year old founder of something call the "University of Phoenix," which can best be described as a very-for-profit continuing education system married to a huge internet-based correspondence school.

The University of Phoenix is now the largest private university in the United States, with more than 140,000 students attending classes at 41 campuses, and it is supported by over $1.6 billion in U.S. Government sanctioned-student loans. Sterling became a billionaire in less than 15 years by simply marrying the old correspondence-school idea to the internet.

All of this is by way of introduction to John Sperling's dog cloning project, which is one of the ways Mr. Sperling is spending his considerable fortune.

It seems Mr. Sperling used to have a cross-bred border collie by the name of Missy. Sperling got the idea it might be possible to clone Missy whom, he decided, was a very special genetic combination.

And why not clone a dog? Sperling's brain storm occurred just two years after Scottish scientists had cloned Dolly the Sheep. How hard could a dog be?

And so John Sperling put up millions of dollars to create the "Genetic Savings and Clone" company with the "Missyplicity Project" at its heart.

Missy died at age 15, in 2002, before efforts to clone her had succeeded, but her tissue has been well-preserved and she will, no doubt, be cloned within a few years.

Meanwhile, the "Genetic Savings and Clone" company is moving along apace. The company was the first in the world to clone a cat, creating a kitten called CC (Copy Cat), and in February of 2004, the company launched the world's first commercial cat cloning service.

On the canine front, the company is offering genetic banking of dog tissue in anticipation of the commercial viability of a stable and reliable canine cloning procedure. For $900 to $1,400 per pooch, the Genetic Savings and Clone company will collect and store biopsy samples of your beloved dog in anticipation of that Great Day when dead dogs will rise out of the ground and stand at the right hand of Jesus ... or at least until you are willing to have it cloned.

In 2005, the first dog was supposedly cloned in Korea (an Afghan of all things). Though genetic testing supposedly confirms the validity of this clone, the scientist doing the research has faked other research data and some doubts remain.

What is not in doubt is that cloning a dog is harder than cloning a cat and a reliable and stable procedure and protocol have yet to be worked out.

But it is clearly only a matter of time.

In 1998 the Ishikawa Prefectural Livestock Research Center produced Noto and Kaga, the first cows cloned from adult cells, and the next year the University of Hawaii produced the first male clone -- a mouse. In 2000, Chinese researchers produced the first cloned goat, and the next year Advanced Cell Technologies cloned "Noah," a rare gaur (a type of wild cow). In 2002, researchers at Trans Ova Genetics and Advanced Cell Technologies produced the first banteng (another ungulate), born to a surrogate domestic cow, with the genetic material taken from a donor that had died 23 years earlier and whose cells has been preserved in the "Frozen Zoo" at the San Diego Zoo's Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species.

In 2003, Italy produced the first cloned horse, and that same year the University of Idaho produced a pair of cloned mules, while the University of Texas cloned a whitetail deer. Everyone was getting into the act!

In 2005, researchers at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans (not related to the National Audubon Society) naturally breed unrelated African wildcat clones, resulting in the birth of African wildcat kittens -- the first time unrelated clones of a wild species had produced offspring.

What's next?

Well, another dog or two, for sure. A human being or two is a pretty safe bet, as are gorillas and chimpanzees for medical research. Millions of genetic mice and other small test animals are an eventual certainty. A cloned mammoth (from frozen cells gleaned from long-frozen Siberian carcasses) is not beyond imagination.

But what of cloned dogs? Let's assume that the health issues associated with cloning are worked out (about a quarter of all animals born through cloning have some kind of cloning-related health problem). Who is going to buy these cloned pups?

It may not be the market you think. The racing horse industry has already banned clones, and I think it's safe to say the Kennel Club will follow suit.

Hunting dogs may be a very real canine cloning market. Who wants the risk of a working terrier that is too big, or a pointer with no interest in birds? For the lurcher man, a baying dog is a nightmare, while for the houndsman a dead-mute dog is a serious nuisance. Everyone wants a dog with gameness, tractability, brains and a nose. If you've hunted with a "one-in-a-million" dog, you may want to pass that dog on to your kids 50 years from now.

On the pet side of the equation, there will always be a demand for "guaranteed-healthy" dogs that are going to be"just so" in terms of size, coloring and temperament.

Look for "clone shops" to advertise terriers and beagles that do not bark and border collies that are entirely apathetic. After all, it is the prey-drive of these animals that make them "problem pets" for so many urban and suburban owners. A defective border collie is just what some people want.

That said, I suspect that most people just want a dog, and are not going to spring for a test tube pup-ciscle hatched out in a lab. In fact, a cultural aversion to such fetish perfectionism may develop.

It is a fac, however, that technology and biology tend to creep -- and sometimes gallop -- on to the human stage. It is entirely possible that, in just 50-years time, cloned dogs will be passed down from father to son (or daughter) and on to human clone.

Yes, yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Your cloned self (it's never too early to bank a little tissue) may one day hunt with your cloned dog (cryonic technicians are standing by) in genetically modified fields and forests.

The game may be a natural animal or perhaps a clone (what species would you like to hunt today, Sir?) or perhaps even a chimera with just enough exotic genes spliced into its double-helix that it provides an entirely different kind of hunting sport -- a faster flying duck, a larger whitetail with elk-like antlers, or a 10-pound European rabbit entirely immune to North American rabbit diseases.

I know I am supposed to be terribly concernd about all this, but I find it increasingly hard to get terrified. Having grown up in the shadow of The Bomb ("duck and cover little children") and news stories about chemicals in the air and water, mass extinctions, global warming, AIDS and avian flu pandemics, I no longer scare easily.

Besides, what are you going to do? If people want cloned dogs, they will get them, never mind that they reduce genetic variability.

You will have more success holding back the ocean with sand castles than you will trying to stop those seeking a quick profit or instant gratification.

In the end, you have to bet that Mother Nature and Father Time will work it all out. It's always a good bet they will bat last in this game. They always do.

No, this is not a real ad. But it might be
part of the real market for cloned pets.

Canine Genetics Made Easy?

First we had artificial insemination, then we had artificial insemination with frozen sperm ("pupcicles"), and then we had dogs being cloned ("Clone, clone on the range, where the dogs and the puppies all play ..."

Now scientists have mapped almost the entire canine genome. The article below, from The Boston Globe, gives the details:

Team of Scientists Maps Out 99% of Dog Genome

Scientists have finished a sophisticated map of a dog's genes, providing new insights into the deep links between humans and one of their most treasured animals, as well as creating a unique tool for studying a range of diseases, from cancer to blindness, that affect people and their dogs.

The team of scientists, led by the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, determined virtually the entire genetic code, or genome, of the dog, making the achievement the canine equivalent of the completion two years ago of the Human Genome Project, the scientists said yesterday. Rough drafts of the dog genome have been released over the past several years, but the new work represents the first highly accurate version and also includes, for the first time, a detailed library of common genetic variations seen in dogs -- making possible a new generation of fast, accurate genetic studies of diseases and other traits.

Biologists have taken up the genetics of many animals, but the dog is uniquely interesting and useful, the scientists said, because of its history. The modern dog, including several hundred breeds, is the product of thousands of years of careful breeding, aimed at drawing out specific behaviors, such as the obsessive herding of the Border collie, or appearances, such as the hairless Chinese crested. By applying the modern tools of genetics to these breeds, it is now easy to find the small genetic variations responsible for the differences, with applications from dog breeding to human psychiatry. The genetic map of the dog announced yesterday should also accelerate the search for the genetic causes of diseases that plague certain breeds, perhaps leading to cures for dog and man alike.

''It is a historic day in the relationship between man and dog," said Eric S. Lander at a press conference yesterday, as a pug and an Akita tussled in the back of the room at the Bayside Exposition Center, where a dog show was being set up. Lander is the director of the Broad Institute and the owner of two golden retrievers.

Scientists said that the dog also stands as a testament to the power of evolution -- and its importance -- at a time when some are challenging its teaching in public schools. Looking for the genetic causes of human diseases in dogs makes sense only if humans and dogs are close evolutionary relatives that share a common ancestor -- a fact that is strongly supported by the genetic map Lander and his colleagues found.

''Biomedical research today depends on evolution," said Lander. ''It is hard to say that it is 'just a theory.' "

The research, which is reported today in the journal Nature, was led by Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, co-director of genome sequencing and analysis at the Broad Institute. Using a blood sample from a boxer named Tasha, the team determined about 99 percent of the sequence of DNA that makes up the dog genome.

The team, which included researchers across the United States as well as in France and the United Kingdom, also compiled a list of 2.5 million places in this sequence where there are common differences among dogs. This was done, according to the Nature paper, by comparing Tasha's DNA with DNA from a poodle and a number of other breeds -- enough, the scientists said, to record many of the most common variations in dogs.

Having this list of common differences will make it far easier for researchers to do genetic studies involving large numbers of dogs, because they can focus on the places in the genome where dogs are likely to have differences that might explain why one dog gets bone cancer and another does not. For example, scientists who are interested in why some greyhounds get bone cancer, and others do not, can look at these places to see if there is a pattern, without having to determine the entire genetic code of each dog -- about 2.4 billion molecules long. ''This is really the big thing," said Gregory M. Acland, a senior research associate at the Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University.

Many ailments -- including cancer, epilepsy, and heart disease -- are thought to be similar in dogs and humans, but it will be easier to identify the genes involved using dogs, said Acland, who studies genetic diseases that affect vision. In contrast to humans, dog breeds are highly in-bred, making two dogs in the same breed more similar genetically than two humans. Thus, for example, scientists could compare Dalmatians that are deaf with those that are not deaf, and there would be fewer random genetic differences between the dogs clouding the picture than if the same study were done in humans.

The work described yesterday, and follow-up work planned to study specific diseases, were made possible by the efforts of the American Kennel Club and dog owners who agreed to send in blood samples from their pets. (Owners of pure-breed dogs who are interested in participating can find more information at www.dogdna.org.) The research was funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Dogs themselves are a human creation, thought to have begun when people domesticated the wolf in East Asia. The new analysis suggests that this happened about 30,000 years ago, said Lindblad-Toh.

The researchers also compared the DNA of dogs with completed genomes for humans and mice, and what they found challenges one idea about what makes humans special. When the human genome was first compared with that of the mouse, several years ago, scientists found evidence that the genes that are active in the cells of the brain seem to have evolved more quickly in humans than in mice, hinting that this might explain the intellect of humans. The new analysis casts doubt on this theory, because it shows that the brain-related genes in dogs have been evolving just as fast as those of humans, according to Tarjei S. Mikkelsen, a scientist at the Broad. The dog has about 19,300 genes, slightly fewer than humans, who have about 20,000 genes, according to Lindblad-Toh.

The researchers also identified a portion of the genome, about 5 percent, that is shared by dogs, humans, and mice -- meaning this portion is apparently essential to mammals. Yet less than half of that is devoted to genes. What the rest of the genetic material does is a mystery, but it is thought that some of this material may regulate when the genes turn off and on in particular cells. Still, the fact that the function of this crucial part of the genome is unknown underlines how much there is to learn.

For those who have been involved in dog genetics for years, there is hope that the new work will put the dog on the same footing as other favorite research organisms, such as the fruit fly and the mouse. In a way, it is a logical next step for the dog, which has done so much for humans -- guardian, hunter, companion. Yet there is also irony in discovering the scientific potential of dogs, noted Mark W. Neff, a scientist at the Center for Veterinary Genetics at the University of California, Davis. ''We are so close to our pet dogs, that we stop thinking of them as this incredible, unique species," Neff said.

The AKC Embraces the Jack Russell

Conformation for people as well as dogs!

Sometime in the late 1990s, following the appearance of Jack Russell Terriers in a host of TV and Hollywood productions ranging from “Wishbone” and “Frasier” to “My Dog Skip” and “The Mask,” the American Kennel Club decided to add the Jack Russell Terrier to its roles.

As they previously had done with the Border Collie, the AKC ignored the strong and vocal opposition of the large existing breed club, and quietly assembled a covey of show-ring breeders to serve as the nucleus of a new AKC-friendly breed club.

The “Jack Russell Terrier Breeders Association” (later called the Jack Russell Terrier Association of America, and now called the “Parson Russell Terrier Association of America”) petitioned for the admission of the Jack Russell Terrier into the Kennel Club and, despite the objections of the JRTCA, the breed was admitted in January of 2001.

The admission of the Jack Russell Terrier into the American Kennel Club was a contentious affair, with the JRTCA standing firm on its long-held rule that no dog could be dual-registered.

What this meant is that breeders had to chose whether to remain in the JRTCA or to “get in early” with the AKC in order to get their dogs registered before the breed registry closed.

Some of the breeders that chose the AKC did so because they thought they could then sell their puppies for more money, others were eager to be “big fish in a small pond” at the beginning of a new AKC-registered breed. Still others were anxious to attend more dog shows and performance events, arguing that individual dogs were the same no matter under whose auspices they were registered.

On this last point, those pushing for dual registration were correct as narrowly defined, but wrong in every way that mattered.

While it is true that individual dogs were not changed by admission to the Kennel Club, the AKC goal -- right from the beginning -- was to get rid of the wide sweep of variation that existed in the working world of Jack Russell Terriers.

Towards that end, the American Kennel Club breed standard stipulated that an AKC Jack Russell terrier could not be under 12 inches in height or over 15 inches in height, and that the “ideal” dog was 14 inches tall and the ideal bitch was 13 inches tall. Ironically, this breed description effectively eliminated about 40 percent of all the American Jack Russell terriers that had worked red fox up to that time!

More importantly, this narrow standard eliminated the small dogs necessary to “size down” a breed — something absolutely necessary in order to keep working terriers small enough to work.

Of course the American Kennel Club has never been interested in working terriers, and the breed club they created has shown no interest in work either.

Under pressure from the working Jack Russell Terrier community in England and the U.S., the British and American Kennel Clubs eventually decided to jettison the “Jack Russell Terrier” name to more easily identify the non-working show dog they favored.

Now called the “Parson Russell Terrier,” the AKC dog is quickly getting too big in the chest to work — not that many of the dogs are actually taken out into the field to try.

After just three years in the Kennel Club, the “Parson Russell Terrier Club” tried to modify the show ring standard so that the AKC dog no longer had to be spanned at all. Though this move was defeated, it was an early and ominous sign that the Parson Russell Terrier is more likely to end up as a show ring dog than the honest hunting dog from which it is derived.

AKC: Wrecking More Dogs Than Terriers

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The Cocker Spaniel was once a fine pocket-sized bird dog, but the show ring emphasis on exagerated coats has created a dog that cannot get through a hedgerow even if its life depended on it.


Mark Derr, the author of Dog's Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship wrote the following paragraphs in a March 1990 Atlantic Monthly article entitled "The Politics of Dogs":

The cocker spaniel, along with the poodle, the perennial favorite of American pet buyers, has not competed in field trials since 1965, having lots its ability to hunt. Elizabeth Spalding, a leading breeder of Cavalier King Charles spaniels, says, "Most people don't know it, but up until the 1970s a sentence in the cocker-spaniel standard stated that a dog could be penalized for excessive coat. But for twenty years cockers had been bred for long coats, which brought them championships." The long-haired little hunter has developed a reputation as a foul-tempered, possessive, and nervous creature.

In the 1950s show people turned the German shepherd into a weak-hipped animal with a foul temper and bizarre downward-sloping hindquarters. A few breeders are trying to restore the dog to its former dignity. The Monks of New Skete, a religious order in the Orthodox Catholic Church, near Cambridge, New York, have for twenty-two years worked to produce dogs without those problems. "We stopped using American dogs and turned to German ones, because breeding there is better controlled," says Brother John, a member of the order, which has a waiting list of more than a year for its dogs.

Many of the toy breeds are so small and fragile that they cannot live outside artificial environments. The bulldog and the Boston terrier have difficulty whelping naturally, because of the breeds' exaggeraged heads, and bitches are regularly subjected to cesarean sections. Hetherington says, "The bulldog is a man-made dog, and man has to be responsible for it. The dog hasn't come out perfectly, but that's reason to keep trying to improve the breed , not to abandon it."

The problem exists throughout the world. In Australia the kelpie, which is considered a rival to the border collie in the management of sheep, became the darling of the show ring in the 1930s and within three decades had nearly lost its herding instinct. In the 1960s the Working Kelpie Council of Australia began to rescue the breed, by establishing a registry for working stock. In the United States the Australian kelpie has been in the AKC's miscellaneous class since 1941, and Susan Thorp, the secretary of Working Kelpies, the American breed club, wants to keep it there. "In the AKC," she says, "the dog becomes an object. People get dogs, don't use them, and then selectively breed them for characteristics other than work."

Peter Borchelt, an animal behaviorist in Forest Hills, New York, says that springer spaniels, mostly the males, born of a particular show line frequently develop dominance-related behavioral problems that lead them to become aggressive toward their owners, while those from field stock don't manifest that tendency. Among labrador retrievers there are as many as three distinct varieties with different characteristics--show dogs, somewhat large and slow afoot; dogs adept at AKC field trials, smaller and more high-strung; and working dogs, varying in appearance but bred for their ability to swim and retrieve.

Among other AKC-recognized hunting breeds--including the German shorthaired pointer, the Chesapeake Bay retriever, the pointer, the Brittany, the Gordon setter, and the English setter--are dogs that can point, retrieve, or flush birds as well as any every have. People work hard to preserve those traits, and they don't intend to stop. (Many register their dogs not with the AKC but with American Field, an organization in Chicago devoted to field dogs.) But the trend among people who want breeds unspoiled by an overemphasis on appearance is toward animals the AKC doesn't deign to register, such as the Catahoula leopard dog, Australian and English shepherds, the beauceron, and European pointers (including the English).

The trend has not escaped the notice of the AKC. Kenneth Marden, the AKC's president, says, "We have gotten away from what dogs were originally bred for. In some cases we have paid so much attention to form that we have lost the use of the dog." Marden has supervised the establishment of herding tests, which are scheduled to begin this winter and are subject to a great deal of controversy among people with working stock dogs, who argue that AKC animals like the collie and the Old English sheep dog will prove unable to complete them. Marden has also expressed interest in terrier tests to measure the dogs' ability to flush game from underground dens, and in lure coursing for sight hounds and whippets.

He has publicly recognized the need to emphasize function as well as form, despite strong opposition from the AKC's powerful traditionalists, who argue that he is denigrating shows. They have nothing to fear. In some European countries dogs must excel both in the field and in the ring, and be judged physically sound, before they can become Champions. But an AKC dog can become a Champion in the show ring alone.

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A Terrible Beauty: The Ugly Side of Show Dogs

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It would be nice if I could report to you that everything is different at the AKC, and that the Time magazine article, below, is some sort of historical anachronism, but it's not.

The AKC is still in their big building in downtown New York City (260 Madsion Avenue), working tests for working dogs are still not allowed as a requirement for a championship, the AKC is still registering pet store puppies, and genetic tests for soundness -- even in deeply messed up breeds -- is still not required. The AKC still registers entire litters of dogs, and there are still no limits on in-breeding.

The only major change, as far as terriers are concerned, is that Jack Russells have been pulled into the AKC fold under the name of "Parson Russell Terrier." Go to the AKC "Parson" Russell web site and not a single mention is made of working the dogs.

The first thing the Pasron Russell breed club did was set a size standard that excluded nearly half the working dogs in America. They then dictated an ideal size for a dog that guaranteed that within a decade most "Parson" Jack Russell Terriers will be too big to work (exactly what they did with the Fox Terrier 100 years earlier). And, of course, they closed the registry, guaranteeing that in time, and with popular sire selection, the genetic pool would get narrower and inbreeding coefficients would soar.

Once again, we find an AKC breed Club dominated by people who are more interested in chasing rosettes and breeding (and selling) puppies than in preserving the characteristics of the breed they profess to admire.

Whatever the AKC is about, it is certainly not about dogs!

_________________

Time Magazine, December 12, 1994,

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY
An obsessive focus on show-ring looks is crippling, sometimes fatally, America's purebred dogs

Cover Story by Michael D. Lemonick with Ann Blackman/Washington, Dan Cray/Los Angeles and Wendy Cole/Chicago

_______________________

Four years ago, Amanda and Bob Metzger of Exton, Pennsylvania, saw an ad for golden retriever puppies in the local newspaper and went to have a look. "Once we saw them," says Amanda, "we fell in love. We couldn't have left the place without one." They decided on a dog they named Jake -- but being careful consumers, the Metzgers made sure the breeders had a solid reputation, insisted on an American Kennel Club certification of Jake's pedigree and got assurances that his parents were free of health problems before they handed over $ 325 for their dog.

Their troubles started three months later. Jake began to limp on his left front leg; the vet diagnosed osteochondritis, an inherited bone condition, and had to operate. The bill came to $ 650. Six months later, Jake went lame again, and X rays showed severe dysplasia, a hereditary weakness of the joints, in both hips. A $ 750 operation relieved his pain, but even with a dose of aspirin almost daily, Jake still walks stiffly. On top of that, he has severe allergies, dry skin and a poor coat. He has recently started having seizures as well. "He's a medical mess," says Amanda Metzger. "It just breaks my heart because he wants to play like a puppy, but he can't."

It would be tempting to put Jake's problems down to plain bad luck -- but in fact the odds were against him from the start. While most golden retrievers are healthier than Jake, a shocking 60% of them end up with the dysplasia that may yet cripple him, according to the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine. Many are born with an undescended testicle, another hereditary condition vets say can cause the gland to become cancerous.

Yet even if they had chosen another breed, the Metzgers would have been taking a chance. The appalling truth is that as many as 25% of the 20 million purebred dogs in America -- 1 in 4 animals -- are afflicted with a serious genetic problem. German shepherds, for example, run an even higher risk of hip dysplasia than do golden retrievers. Labrador retrievers are prone to dwarfing. At least 70% of collies suffer from genetic eye trouble, and 10% eventually go blind. Dalmatians are often deaf. Cocker spaniels tend to have bad tempers. Great Danes have weak hearts. English bulldogs have such enormous heads that pups often have to be delivered by cesarean section. Newfoundlands can drop dead from cardiac arrests. Chinese Shar-Peis, the wrinkly dogs that don't seem to fit into their skin, have congenital skin disorders. And Irish setters, laments veterinarian Michael Fox, a vice president of the Humane Society of the U.S., "are so dumb they can't find their way to the end of the leash."

The list goes on and on, running to more than 300 separate genetic disorders that subject dogs to enormous pain, roil the emotional life of their owners and, estimates Dr. William Schall, a genetic specialist at Michigan State University, cost almost $ 1 billion in vet bills and lost revenues from stillborn pups, which cannot be sold.

Bad genes are a universal hazard of life, of course; practically every species suffers from inherited diseases. But golden retrievers and other purebreds are not like most other animals. They are in a very real sense artificial, molded over thousands of years through selective breeding to satisfy human needs. For most of that time, those needs have largely been companionship and labor, and dogs have prospered.

Within the past century, though, and especially over the past 50 years, the most popular types have been bred almost exclusively to look good -- with "good" defined by breed-specific dog clubs and the American Kennel Club (AKC).

"Form has been separated from function," says Brian Kilcommons, a dog trainer in Middletown, New York. "Styles come in vogue. The competition at dog shows is geared almost exclusively to looks." This focus on beauty above all means that attractive but unhealthy animals have been encouraged to reproduce -- a sort of survival of the unfittest. The result is a national canine-health crisis, from which few breeds have escaped.

The astonishing thing is that despite the scope of these diseases, veterinary researchers know next to nothing about what causes them or how to cure them. Only 23 of the hundreds of known disorders can currently be picked up by genetic lab tests. Biologists know far more about the heredity of the fruit fly, in fact, than they do about canine genetics. That is because there are fewer than 100 canine geneticists in the world, working at just a handful of major universities -- and they are constantly scraping for funding.

The lack of research money is especially disconcerting when one considers that dogs are the nation's most popular pets. Almost 36 million households have them, compared with the 29.2 million that keep cats, according to the Humane Society of the U.S. More Americans spend more than $ 8 billion a year on their dogs, not counting the initial purchase.

The AKC alone raked in $29 million last year, about three-fourths of it from the $ 25 or more it charges to register each pedigreed pup and provide a copy of its family tree. But the AKC annual report shows that the club cut its grants for education and research into the health of dogs from $ 1.675 million in 1992 to $ 575,000 in 1993.

Who is to blame for the shabby treatment of humanity's best friend? The AKC, with its focus on pedigrees and beauty pageants rather than canine well-being? Legitimate breeders, who supply customers with beautiful but sometimes damaged puppies? Puppy mills, which do the same but at much higher volume and in search of greater profits? Or the public, more insistent with each passing year that a mutt -- a "randomly bred dog," to be politically correct -- simply won't do?

They are all partly at fault. But it is hard to avoid putting the AKC high on the list. While the club is not the only dog registry in the country, it is certainly the biggest, best known and most powerful. It is because of this power that the AKC has been largely unchallenged over the years. "Criticize the AKC, and there will be retribution," says one New York dog trainer. "Judges may find they are no longer getting assignments. Breeders might discover their dogs are no longer winning prizes." The AKC acknowledges that it is perceived as overbearing. "I think it's a fact of life that people have that fear, and it's unfortunate," responds John Mandeville, the club's vice president for planning.

The AKC does not need to resort to intimidation, however, to have an overwhelming influence. It sponsors most of the nation's dog shows, events that reinforce the insidious notion that beauty is a dog's paramount virtue. It also keeps track of purebred pedigrees, yet it requires no proof of good health to certify an animal. All it takes to get AKC certification is proof of pedigreed parentage.

Says Fox: "The best use of pedigree papers is for housebreaking your dog. They don't mean a damn thing. You can have an immune-deficient puppy that is about to go blind and has epilepsy, hip dysplasia, hemophilia and one testicle, and the AKC will register it."

No one at the kennel club denies this. AKC certification "is absolutely not a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, unfortunately," says Mandenville. "It's acquired a lot of these trappings because the idea of 'AKC-registered' is so widely known."

Or, to be blunt, because it has such snob appeal. The American Kennel Club was founded 110 years ago by a group of American bluebloods who pledged "to do everything to advance the study, breeding, exhibiting, running and maintenance of purity of thoroughbred dogs." At the time purebreds were status symbols, owned exclusively by the wealthy and prized for their strength, skill and intelligence as much as for their looks.

But during the 1940s, as the middle class sucked in vast numbers of new members with aspirations of gentility, these Americans began to insist on purebreds too, and their popularity took off. In 1944 the AKC registered 77,400 dogs; that jumped to 235,978 in 1949, and by 1970, the club was issuing papers on a million dogs a year. (The total last year: 1.4 million.)

The number of AKC-sponsored dog shows has increased just as dramatically. In 1894 there were a mere 11 all-breed shows. By 1954 there were 384, and last year a total of 1.3 million dogs competed in 1,177 different exhibitions. Then as now, the idea was to show off the owners' prize breeding stock.

But the concept of what makes a dog valuable for breeding has changed. While obedience and field trials were once considered at least as important as beauty contests, the canine equivalent of the swimsuit competition has all but taken over. Historians have yet to explain this ideological shift, but the AKC has one idea: "You could almost say this venerable institution with its great credibility and history has been infiltrated slowly by the type of people it was not intended to deal with," says Wayne Cavenaugh, the group's spokesman.

Whatever the reason, animals with names such as Rainbow's Maggie Rose O'Koehl and Jrees Buddy Holly are brushed, hairsprayed, beribboned and otherwise tarted up before going in front of the judges. Says Buddy Holly's owner, Jan Smith of Wichita, Kansas, a longtime exhibitor of Great Danes (and herself the runner-up for Miss Congeniality in the 1965 Miss Arkansas pageant): "When the ears are too flat, we use cement to make them perky. We use chalk to color the legs, which is fine as long as you don't use copious amounts."

That's just the final polish, though: no dog can hope to be a champion without conforming to a very narrow standard of physical perfection set by individual dog clubs and ratified by the AKC. And customer-conscious breeders have obliged by creating prizewinning dogs with specific traits, such as long ears in cocker spaniels or sloping hips in German shepherds.

Biologically, this is just asking for trouble. For one thing, the characteristics judges and clubs have decreed to be gorgeous can themselves be bad for the animals' health -- huge heads on bulldogs that make it difficult for them to be born naturally, for example, or the wrinkled skin on Shar-Peis that sets them up for rashes. For another, the best way to produce a puppy with a specific look is to mate two dogs who have that same look. As with any species, though, the closest resemblances are found among the closest relatives.

So breeders often resort to inbreeding, the mating of brothers and sisters or fathers and daughters. Or they "line-breed," having grandparents mate with grandchildren or cousins with each other. "If we did that in humans," says Mark Derr, who wrote a scathing indictment of America's dog culture for the March 1990 Atlantic Monthly, "we'd call it incest."

Both practices increase the likelihood of genetic disease. It is not that purebreds have more defective genes than other dogs, or that inbreeding somehow causes healthy genes to go bad. Most hereditary disorders in dogs are caused by recessive genes; as long as an animal has a good copy of the gene from one parent, it will override a bad copy from the other parent. But if both parents pass on the same bad gene -- which is more likely if mother and father come from the same family -- the puppy has a problem.

The problem intensifies with what experts call "the popular sire effect," the result of a single desirable male's being used to sire a large number of litters. Says Michigan State's Schall: "If it is later determined that the male that looked perfect has a genetic disease, he will have dispersed it widely before it gets discovered."

Hereditary weakness can be introduced even when there is no underlying genetic defect at all. The biological interplay between individual genes can be extremely complicated, and breeding to enhance one characteristic can have unintended consequences. Vets believe the retinal disease that afflicts most collies may fall into this category. The gene responsible may lie very close to the one that gives collies their long noses and closely set eyes -- traits that have been deliberately emphasized by breeders. Says Dr. Donald Patterson, chief of the medical genetics section at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine: "Many people have bred dogs for desired traits, but in the process of doing this they have also got undesirable ones. The objective should be to combine breeding for good traits with more careful planning to get rid of genetic defects. Unfortunately, not much attention has been paid to that."

The AKC insists that it is not at fault: the breeders are. Asked why club-sponsored shows put much more emphasis on appearance than health, Mandeville responds that "this is America. If this size is good, this size is better. We reflect, unfortunately, the breeding of dogs [that] people register with us. Are there genetic problems? Absolutely. Are there temperament problems? Absolutely. Are there people making poorly informed breeding decisions? Far too many."

The club is just a registry, he says, so "don't rely on a registry to make an informed decision for you."

Why don't AKC registrations carry health and temperament requirements -- as comparable certification does in Germany and Sweden? Says Mandeville: "It's the Big Brother argument. At what point does regulation of the individual for the greater good step on the individual's toes?"

Mandeville also claims that any attempt by the AKC to limit registration would trigger government sanctions. "We would like to be able to say, 'I'm sorry, we're not registering your dog,' but we would be in court faster than your head would spin. The Federal Trade Commission has rules and regulations in this country about restriction of trade."

Plenty of dog owners reject this sort of reasoning -- and shun the blessings of American Kennel Club membership as well. The U.S. Border Collie Club is vigorously resisting AKC efforts to add border collies to the 137 breeds it formally recognizes (there are more than 300 breeds worldwide). The border-collie owners and breeders are convinced that AKC recognition would create pressure to breed the dogs for their looks at the inevitable expense of their intelligence and herding instincts. "We are concerned that the working ability of our dogs would be completely lost," says Donald McCaig, a breeder in Williamsville, Virginia, and a spokesman for the club.

The Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club voted overwhelmingly last May to reject AKC recognition for another reason: their conviction that the AKC values its own revenues over a dog's welfare.

Cavalier breeders do not allow the dogs to be sold in pet stores, which are infamous for buying animals from shady sources, including puppy mills. In fact, most dog experts routinely warn buyers not to deal with pet stores at all.

The AKC insists, though, that the Cavalier club drop its prohibition as a condition of affiliation. Why would it take such a position? Perhaps because some 7% of the group's $21 million in dog-registration earnings comes from pet-store sales. "They simply want to gain as many registrations as possible because money is power," says the Humane Society's Fox.

Greed cuts both ways, of course. Six Labrador retriever breeders say they have filed a class action against the AKC and the Labrador Retriever Club Inc. for changing the breed standard to favor slimmer, longer-legged animals over the traditional stockier, shorter ones -- thereby devaluing the out-of-date model. And some owners of a relatively rare dog called the Havanese, which arrived in this country from Cuba in the mid-1970s, are actively seeking AKC recognition, despite worries by other owners that they are inviting overbreeding and genetic problems.

"It's a competitive world, and money talks," says one Havanese breeder. "For many people, winning dog shows is a thrill and makes them proud, and the AKC has a lot of shows." Perhaps more to the point, once the Havanese join the high-profile AKC fold, the going rate for puppies, according to some breeders, could go as high as $ 2,000, up from about $ 750 now. On average, registered puppies go for 10 to 20 times the price of paperless dogs, and champion purebreds can sell for as much as $ 50,000.

Most of these genetic problems would disappear if Americans could somehow be persuaded to abandon purebreds in favor of mutts. While individual mixed-breed dogs have problems, the animals on average are a lot healthier than their high-class cousins. "Mutts are the Hondas of the dog world," says syndicated animal columnist Mike Capuzzo of the Philadelphia Inquirer. "They're cheap, reliable and what nature intended in the first place. They are what you would get at a canine Club Med if you left them alone for six years." There are "breeds" in the mutt world, just as there are among purebreds. The most popular: a cross between a Labrador retriever and a German shepherd.

But even if the U.S. cannot be cured of its addiction to purebreds -- probably a safe assumption -- there is plenty that can be done to improve overall canine health. One factor that is forcing breeders to pay closer attention to genetic problems is the emergence of puppy lemon laws in a dozen states, including New York, Massachusetts, California and Florida. If a dog is found to have a debilitating defect, owners can get a refund or a healthy dog in exchange, or they can force the breeder to pay the vet bills to repair a problem.

The laws are not entirely fair to breeders, though, says George Padgett, a veterinary pathologist at Michigan State University. "Some may be penalized unfairly because no one has taught them about genetic defects." Agrees Penn's Dr. Donald Patterson, founder of the genetic section of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine and widely acknowledged as the dean of canine genetic research, "The common misconception is that breeders are cavalier." The real problem, he says, is that they have not had the scientific information to detect hidden defects and thus avoid bad breeding decisions.

That is starting to change. One new tool that should prove helpful is a computerized genetic-disease data base developed at Patterson's lab that lists more than 300 genetic problems plaguing dogs. Another is the university's PennHIP program, a hip-disease-detection system that took 11 years and $1 million to develop. It involves taking detailed measurements of hip X rays to grade the severity of dysplasia. The program is being marketed by International Canine Genetics Inc., a research company based in Malverne, Pa., which is already training vets to use it. "A tighter-fitting hip joint is better, and we now have the technology to determine which hips are tighter," says Dr. Gail Smith, an engineer and veterinarian who developed the test. "This will help people select the best breeding dogs."

Lists and detection systems are not the same as cures, but Patterson points out that veterinary researchers are finally beginning to have some insight into the causes of these disorders. "Canine genetic diseases," he says, "are now being defined at the molecular level, and the mapping of the canine genome is at last under way." Scientists have located the genes that cause muscular dystrophy in golden retrievers, and "shaking pup" syndrome in Welsh springer spaniels. They're working on identifying the genes responsible for failure-to-thrive metabolic problems in giant Schnauzers, bleeding disorders in Scottish terriers and Doberman pinschers, and the hereditary deafness that affects about 30% of Dalmatians. And they believe hip dysplasia, the crippling condition that afflicts Jake the golden retriever and his kin, may be the result of several defective genes working in concert -- not an unusual situation with hereditary disorders.

On the supply side, critics of the AKC argue that the kennel club should follow the lead of its European counterparts by imposing health standards as part of its registration process. Rather than wait for that step, individual-breed clubs are taking their own action. At least three Rottweiler clubs have ruled that dogs missing more than one tooth, which can be a sign of a genetic defect, may not be bred. English springer spaniel owners are encouraging one another not to breed dogs with temperament problems; they want to eliminate what they call the "rage syndrome," a type of brain seizure that makes some dogs lose control. And the Portuguese Water Dog Club requires breeders who advertise in its magazine to submit copies of hip, eye and heart clearances to prove that their dogs are not suffering from genetic defects.

The Portuguese Water Dog Club is perhaps the most active organization in policing genetic defects. Water dogs tend to suffer from progressive retinal atrophy, which causes blindness, and from an enzyme deficiency that can kill dogs by storing toxins in the nervous system. The club offered in 1987 to finance several researchers at major veterinary schools to develop screening tests for the diseases. The result is a blood test that found 16% of the dogs to be carriers in 1990. Club members stopped breeding the afflicted animals, and by 1993 the incidence had dropped to 7%.

With such grass-roots pressure, and perhaps a bit battered by bad publicity and lawsuits, the AKC has lately shown some interest in promoting this kind of research itself. In October it sponsored its first-ever canine-genetics conference, where 25 leading researchers gave talks to an audience of some 150 veterinary scientists from around the world. And during the past month there have been discussions within the club about setting up a scientific advisory panel that would recommend research projects the club might support. If the ancient American Kennel Club is finally thinking of altering its culture, there may yet be hope for the family dog.
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Note: The last line was hope over experience. In fact, the Board of Directors of the AKC moved to sign a contact with Petland to codify and regularize the registration of puppy mill puppies sold at pet stores. See >> Here for what happened -- and what did not happen.