Jessica Elgot is a Racialist, Not a Reporter

Hitler and Eva Braun with their purebred dogs. Six dogs were in the bunker -- all purebred.

This post is not about dogs. It is about racialism and reporting.

Jessica Elgot is a young "reporter" for "The Jewish Chronicle," but we will get to to that in a moment.

Let's start with the fact that she is a racialist.

A racialist is someone who sees the world through one lens, the lens of race, culture or religion.

The folks you find on the Stormfont web site, or at British National Party or English Defence League rallies are all racialists if not outright racists.  These folks are obsessed with the race and religion of people they see on the street corner, in the media, and in politics.

This obsession is shared by Jessica Elgot.

Though she is not hurling invective at others, her obsession is not how we are connected together, but how we stand apart.

If The New York Times said the end of the world was at hand, Jessica Elgot would write an article entitled: "End of Word at Hand, Jews to Be Most Affected."

So how do I come to write about Jessic Elgot? After all, she has not written a word about me, we live in different countries, and she herself says she does not care a whit about dogs.

It seems that someone Ms. Elgot did not know sent her a smear packet about the BBC documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed. 

Ms. Elgot herself says she does not care a whit about dogs, but as a confirmed racialist it seems she reflexively reached for her keyboard when she was told the documentary was opposed by "Jewish dog breeders." The result: an article for The Jewish Chronicle entitled "Jewish dog breeders call upon BBC to cancel Nazi-linked film".

Whiskey-tango-foxtrot.   Nazi-linked film? There's taking some liberties with the English language!

The morning the piece came out, I looked up Ms. Elgot. It turns out she is all of 24 years old and she wants to be a freelance journalist. Good luck with that!

I shot off an email. Had she actually talked to anyone about dogs or the history of dogs? Who was it that represented ALL Jewish dog breeders? Under what claim?

Her answers were evasive.

It turns out that she had not talked to anyone. She had not talked to Jemima Harrison nor, apparently, had she talked to anyone who knew anything about dogs or the history of dogs. Instead, she said she had received a letter "signed" by four putatively Jewish dog breeders from a Facebook group.

A Facebook group??! A letter from FOUR people??!

Yes, that seems to have been the extent of her "research".

How absurd does this story get? You cannot imagine.

For starters, let me point out that Pedigree Dogs Exposed was commissioned by Richard Klein of the BBC, a Jew according to the typing Nazis over at the Stormfront web site who happily go through the roster of all the Jews in power at the BBC.

The Executive Producer of the Pedigree Dogs Exposed update that is now in video production under commission from the BBC, is also Jewish.

But so what? What's religion got do with it? Not a thing!

We would all recognize the naked racism and anti-Semitism if the typing Nazis over at the Stormfront web site put out a headline entitled "Jews Bash Kennel Club Dog Breeders" and it turned out to be just four random people who happened to be Jewish, wouldn't we?

And guess what? That headline may yet float!

You see Nick Griffin, the hate-spewing head of the British National Party has already tweeted in support of the Kennel Club after critics noted it's obsession with racial breed purity.

Very amusing.

I actually know more people who hunt with their dogs who are opposed to breeding dogs for defect, disease and deformity than I know "Animal liberation cranks" with that view point, but never mind that.

What I'm hoping for is that someone will tell Nick Griffin that a Jewish fellow commissioned the BBC piece about the Kennel Club. I am sure Mr. Griffin will oblige with a headline or a tweet about that. After all, Nick's already got his Kennel Club rosette!

But wait, it gets better.

Caroline Kisko, the press secretary for the Kennel Club, is married to Chris Kisko who is (or was) a member of the British National Party, and who is all over the web site of the hooligan-soaked English Defence League. On one post, for example, he echoes sentiments once voiced by the likes of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering:

Since what date did accepting an invasion of an incompatable cuture into ours become desirable. (sic)

Right. Nice words those, and I cannot help but note that they nearly echo those of Steve Dean at the Kennel Club who, when asked if the Club would welcome all who are actively involved with pedigree dogs, replied: ”It is not open to everybody as this carries risks: if you do not filter the applicants then any group of people can join and thus effectively change the entire organisation.”

Right. They want to "filter" out the riff-raff. You know who you are. They're not actually against the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Pakistanis, you understand. They're just for their own kind. "Separate and equal," and all that.

Now to be clear, it may be that Ms. Elgot is not a dyed-in-the-wool racialist like Nick Griffin or Chris Kisko.

It could be that she is simply a very young and very lazy reporter who has not been too well trained.

Perhaps no one has told her that Facebook and Twitter are not news sources!

Perhaps no one advised her that a real reporter would have noted that Jemima Harrison's award-winning documentary resulted in three independent studies affirming its conclusions (one of which was commissioned by the Kennel Club itself).

Perhaps no one suggested to her that she might Google "eugenics and dog breeding". If she had done that she might have read "The Eugenics Man and the Kennel Club" right at the top, or "The Westminster Eugenics Show" just below, or "From Bassetts to Auschwitz in 50 Years."

A few more clicks and she might have read about how the Nazis were obsessed with breeding "pure Aryan cattle" and how Hermann Göring helped fund the creation of a "German hunt terrier," and how dog breeders associated with the "Verein Fur Deutsche Schaferhunde" gave Hitler "Blondi," the German Shepherd that was by his side when he ordered millions to their death.

At the very least, she might have thought of calling up Jemima Harrison.

So yes, Jessica Elgot is not much of a reporter, and she certainly seems to fit the criteria we might normally associate with a racialist.

But perhaps she is simply young, not very well-trained and lazy? That, is, in fact, almost certainly true.

What then of her editors? Where are they in all this? Any guidance from them?

Nope, not a bit. They are cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.

I copied my correspondence with Jessica Elgot to Stephen Pollard, Richard Burton, and Alan Montague, her putative editors at The Jewish Chronicle, but they do not seem to care how poorly this story was hammered together. And why would they? Their readership is not subscribing to this publication to actually read the news of the day, is it? No, they are mostly subscribing as an act of ethnic solidarity. The Jewish Chronicle is not likely to lose too many subscribers because of a mangled and poorly-researched piece on dog breeding!

And yet, I am troubled.

How could an editor of a Jewish publication miss the fact that any story about pedigree dogs is also a story about breed purity... and that standing in the shadows of that discussion is also the dark shadow of forced sterilization and gas chambers?

Have the parallels never occurred to them? Have they never wondered why those parallels exist?

Are the editors at The Jewish Chronicle really that asleep at the wheel?

Surely the editors of The Jewish Chronicle know that the gas chambers of World War II were first suggested in 1935 by Alexis Carrel, the French scientist who won the 1912 Nobel Prize for medicine and who wrote that, "Perhaps it would be effective to kill off the worst and keep the best, as we do in the breeding of dogs."

Surely the editors of The Jewish Chronicle know that Hitler was not operating in a vacuum, and that he got a lot of his ideas from Leon Whitney, the dog breeder, veterinarian, and American Kennel Club-darling who was president of the American Eugenics Society, and who had penned a book calling for the forced sterilization of 10 million Americans?

Surely the editors of The Jewish Chronicle know that Whitney got a lot of his ideas from Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who was President of the British Eugenics Society and who was the first person to coin the term "eugenics?" Surely they know that Galton was an advocate of closed breeding pools, and that it was this idea that was so warmly and emphatically embraced by the Kennel Club around 1900?

Surely the editors of The Jewish Chronicle know the intellectual roots of the Holocaust?

No?

Then, how sad is that?

• Related Links:
  ** The Eugenics Man and the Kennel Club
  ** Fearing Foreign Blood at the Kennel Club?
  ** From Bassetts to Auschwitz in 50 Years
  ** The Canine Neo-Nazis Have Their Panties in a Twist
  .

On Eugenics and Dogs, Circa 1942

As I have noted in previous posts, Charles Darwin's work in The Origin of Species drove Francis Galton, his half-cousin, to create the field he called "Eugenics" -- the notion that natural selection done by the unguided hand of God could be put into hyper drive by unnatural selection at the hand of man.

It was Galton who framed out the core intellectual construct that became the Kennel Club, though it was John Henry Walsh who created the points system which was based on the eugenics theories of Plato several thousand years earlier.

It was not until almost the turn of the 20th Century that the Kennel Club fully embraced a closed registry system, and by then the field of eugenics was taking off like gangbusters.

By the 1920s American veterinarian and consummate dog man Leon F. Whitney was not only writing about dog breeding, but he was also head of the American Eugenics Society where his work involved holding dog-show-like "Fitter Family" contests across the Midwest and writing and publishing a book advocating the sterilization of some 10 million Americans -- a book praised by none other than Adolph Hitler.

Into this arena, the Rockefeller Foundation stepped in 1926 with a grant to Dr. Charles Stockard for the establishment of the Cornell Dog Farm at Shrub Oak, near Peekskill, New York. 

The purpose of this dog farm was simple:  to study the endocrine systems of dogs and determine the role of breeding and the impact of genetics on this system.

Kennels at Peekskill, NY

The research progressed for 13 years until Dr. Stockard's death, but a summation of what was learned can be found in a July 1942 paper by German-born Jewish geneticist Hans Grüneberg, M.D., published in The Eugenics Review (the house publication of the Eugenics Education Society) in 1942.  At the time Grüneberg was with the Department of Biometry at University College London.

In Dogs and Eugenics he writes:

The breeds of dogs studied included the following:

1. St. Bernard
2. German shepherd (Alsatian)
3. Saluki (a large North African greyhound-like animal)
4. Great Dane
5. Bassethound
6. Foxhound
7. Dachshund
8. English bulldog
9. French bulldog
10. Boston terrier
11. Brussels griffon
12. Pekinese

Of these widely differing breeds the Alsatian [German Shepherd] is rightly regarded as the most normal type, lacking obviously pathological stigmata and being closest to the wolf-like ancestors of our dog breeds. Comparatively harmonic in general shape are also the Great Dane, the Saluki, and the foxhound. The giant St. Bernards have signs of acromegaly; Bassethound and dachshund show marked achondroplasia of the legs, but not of skull or tail; the two bulldogs, the Boston terrier and the Brussels griffon have extremely shortened muzzles, but normally shaped legs, while the Pekinese is highly achondroplasic both as regards skull and appendicular skeleton.

Pekingese X Salutki cross

Grüneberg goes on to note that Stockard created some fantastically odd crosses, and that many were quite unsatistactory -- a result that Dr. Charles Stockard pointed to as a caution as to what might happen if there was too much race-mixing in humans.

Is it surprising that the startled author of this nightmare dog show should utter warning after warning against "mongrelization" of human races? And yet, most of these monstrosities would have been predictable from the ingredients contributed by the parent breeds. These divergences are vastly greater than anything that could possibly occur in human race crosses. And if you cross breeds of dogs which are not predictably incompatible, like a bulldog and a dachshund, or a Saluki and a Pekingese, quite alluring animals may be produced. For instance, the hybrid between Great Dane and Alsatian is a strong and distinctly handsome dog, and a similar type could no doubt be made homozygous in a later generation. But a good deal of the highly pathological, and unpredictable, monstrosities probably owe their origin not to the race cross per se....

Grüneberg then goes on to discuss inbreeding, and how a doubling down on the genetic load to be found in Stockard's small pool of dogs likely led to to some of the disease, deformity and defect that was found:

... there is every reason to believe that all breeds of dogs are soaked with harmful recessives; in an outbred population these remain largely under the surface, but inbreeding makes them homozygous. Now Dr. Stockard's experiments involved not only race crosses, but also much closer inbreeding than is customary within breeds; for technical reasons most experiments started with a few specimens of the " pure " breed, and the production of an F2 or backcross generation involved close inbreeding. Hence the pathological types recovered owe their appearance to a double reason; one is the reshuffling of genes, the other is the segregation of pathological recessives which were hidden in heterozygous form in the " pure " breeds; The latter source of monstrosities has not been recognized by Dr. Stockard, and for this reason his argument about the undesirability of human race crosses is considerably weakened.

And so there you have it: even as men, women and children were locked in World War, and millions of bodies were being tossed into ovens and graves, the Faustian eugenics dance between Germany, America and Britain played out in the world of dogs as scientists, geneticists, and social theorists looked to canines and Kennel Club breeds as a predictive models for human differences and human breeding.

• Related Links:
  ** Inbred Thinking
  ** The Eugenics Man and the Kennel Club
  ** From Bassetts to Auschwitz in 50 Years
  ** The Francis Galton Dog Show
  ** A Fear of Foreign Blood
  ** Stonehenge:  The Roots of the Inbreeding Problem
  .

Caroline Kisko Continues to Damage the Brand

Kennel Club spokesperson Caroline Kisko really has to go. She is a proven liar; a small fact I have demonstrated in previous posts. It's hard to do press when you lie about core issues, and it's so easy to prove that you lie. A small problem!

Perhaps as serious as Ms. Kisko's casual relationship with the truth is the fact that she appears to be incompetent at her press job.

Only she could take a silly PeTA bus poster (put up at only two locations) and turn it into newspaper fodder on two continents (see here and here and here).

Now veterinarian and columnist Peter Wedderburn is shaking his head in amazement, noting that PeTA actually has a point, and going so far as to highlight it; Pedigree dogs really are not as healthy as cross-bred dogs!

Thanks Caroline Kisko! No one has done more to show the degree of entrenched inbred thinking going on at the Kennel Club than you have. How could anyone mishandle the press to this extent and still hold a press job? Amazing!

Of course the thing that makes this doubly comic is that it reminds us that the Kennel Club is not only built around eugenics theories, but that Caroline Kisko herself has a BNP member snuggling up next to her in the bedroom.

Perhaps the Kennel Club needs to "do a Costanza" and go in the opposite direction from whatever direction Caroline Kisko is headed, and see if they might achieve some messaging success that way?

Just a thought...

Of course, the real problem may be above Kisko. The buck has to stop with Ronnie Iriving, doesn't it? I have always thought the real litmus test for Kennel Club change is the departure of Caroline Kisko but, perhaps the change needs to start right at the top....


..

From Bassets to Auschwitz in 50 Years

There is nothing quite as amusing as the Kennel Club saying it has had nothing to do with Eugenics.

Really?

Let us look at their own history.

The year is 1897, some 14 years after Sir Francis Galton first coined the term "Eugenics," and just 11 years before Galton founded the British Eugenics Society in 1907.

What's going on at the Kennel Club?

Well, for starters they are firmly closing the registry for all dogs except new breeds just being enrolled for the first time.

In the 1905 publication The Kennel Club: Its History and Record of Its Work, Edward William Jaquet, secretary of the Kennel Club writes about the 1897 debate over what to do about the declining health of Scottish Deerhounds.

And so there it is: The question of health versus purity is raised, and put front and center.

And what is the Kennel Club's answer? Simple: Quash all questions of health in favor of maintaining breed "purity."

And what about health? The Kennel Club had a solution for that: euthanasia of the unfit, and sterilization of all but the most exemplary as decided by appearance alone.

It is important to understand that the Kennel Club's decision to close its registry did not occur in isolation. The core ideas underpinning the eugenics movement were already more than 30 years old, and these values, in turn, had been shaped and reinforced by those who pointed to the "progress" being made by the "scientific" breeding of dogs, pigeons, and livestock for the show ring. One idea fed off another, and rationalized and excused the other.

A time line shows the progress:

• Plato was the first to propose state-sponsored eugencis, suggesting that in his ideal Republic "The best men must have intercourse with the best women as frequently as possible, and the opposite is true of the very inferior." In Plato's scheme, the fittest and best would be determined by a points systems.
• In the late 1770s, Robert Bakewell began to rapidly improve farm stock through sire selection and control, a feat made possible by the rise of the Enclosure System. Bakewell's fame and fortune spread rapidly and soon countless farmers had embraced his animal husbandry techniques
• Stock shows grew up out of a desire of farmers to show off and sell their new and improved "scientifically bred" animals. At some of these early stock shows, dogs were also featured, but more as an afterthought than anything else.
• It was at the new farm stock shows that Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's father, first began to get an inkling of the power of the selection process -- an idea he expounded on in a book entitled Zoonomia.
• Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, noting that while un-natural selection worked very quickly to improve farm stock, natural selection did much the same thing in the wild, albeit more slowly.
• The same year that The Origin of Species was published, the first formal dog show was held. John Henry Walsh (aka "Stonehenge") was a judge.
• In 1865, the first modern work on eugenics was written by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin. In a long essay entitled "Hereditary Talent and Character," Galton said human intelligence was a product of breeding, and suggested that through selective breeding humans could be bred to be be more (or less) intelligent. Galton specifically noted that dogs seemed to have been bred for stupidity and obsequiousness, as man wanted a "slave."
• In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, Galton expanded on his earlier essay, noting:  "I propose to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations."
• In 1867, John Henry Walsh (aka Stonehenge) and his friends adopted Plato's "point sytem" for grading breeding stock, and used it for grading dogs at shows. When the The Kennel Club was created in 1873, it adopted this points system as its own.
• In 1880, the Kennel Club put into place the first formal rules governing the naming of dogs so as to avoid double registrations and confusion. This was the start of the Kennel Club's registry system.
• In 1897, the Kennel Club formally closed its registry, disallowing cross breeds and outcrosses to other breeds.
• That same year Francis Galton began using Kennel Club breed records to support his genetic theories, noting in his Memoir (chapter XX): "I had thought of experimenting with mice, as cheap to rear and very prolific,and had taken some steps to that end, when I became aware of the large collections of Basset Hounds belonging to the late Sir Everard Millais. He offered me every facility. The Basset Hound records referring to his own and other breeds had been carefully kept, and the Stud Book he lent me contained accounts of nearly 1,000 animals, of which I was able to utilise 817. All were descended from parents of known colours; in 567 of them the colours of all four grandparents were also known. Wherever the printed Stud Book was deficient, Sir Everard Millals supplied the want in MS from the original records. My inquiry was into the heredity of two alternative colours, one containing no black, the other containing it; their technical names were lemon-white and tri-colour (black, lemon, white) respectively. I was assured that no difficulty was felt in determining the category to which each individual belonged. These data were fully discussed in a memoir, published (1897) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, on what is now termed the "Ancestral Law," namely, that the average contribution of each parent is ¼, of each grandparent, and so on. Or, in other words, that of the two parents taken together is ½, of the four grandparents together ¼, and so on. My data were not as numerous as is desirable, still the results were closely congruous, and seem to be a near approximation to the truth. The conclusions have been much discussed and criticised, and they have been modified by Professor Karl Pearson; but they have not been seriously shaken, so far as I know."

Of course, as new dog breeds came into the fold, individual dog registries were not always closed on Day One. That said, as a general rule they do not seem to have stayed open for very long, with the Kennel Club door generally being slammed shut within a year or two, and often with just two or three dozen dogs listed on the roles.

In 1907, Galton created the Eugenics Education Society and that same year Indiana passed a State Sterilization Law.

That same year the Germans created their own Eugenics Society, the "Internationale Gessellschaft fuer Rassenhygiene."

To give a little flavor to the intellectual debate taking place at this time, it's worth reading this little piece from the September 1914 issue of Atlantic magazine entitled "Eugenics and Common Sense":

There seems no objection to Eugenicists classing themselves with cabbages and dogs and cats, but does the rest of the world accept this for itself? Are you content to be described and treated as a beast, and a beast only? Each reader will answer that for himself no doubt, and I need not elaborate the point. It is the cheerful and veracious foundation of Eugenics.

Let us continue. The Eugenist takes man purely as a plant or as an animal; he wants to breed him just as animals are bred, so let us consider how plants and animals are bred and what the result has been. He says: 'Surely the human product is superior to poultry,'—the very foundation of his whole argument is that it is not; however, let us go on,—'and as we may now predict with precision the characters of the offspring of a particular pair of pedigreed poultry so it may be some time with man.'

Still, let us go on. Let us assume with the Eugenists that we really are no different from cabbages and roses, or horses and dogs,—that every rule which applies to them applies to us, and let us see what the scientific breeding of plants and animals has effected. What has been the result?

Well, the result has been astonishing. The simple little wild Persian rose, for instance, has been improved into the gorgeous blooms of our gardens: the small, rather sour apple has become the Albemarle Pippin; the wild dog has become the great Dane, the mastiff, the bull-dog, the pug; and the barb mixed with the Frisian horse has become the thoroughbred. In size, in beauty, in variety, in qualities useful to mankind, plants and animals have been improved out of recognition.

That is quite true. But what of the other qualities? What, for instance, of health and intelligence? Have these also increased pari passu with the increase in size? Go to a nursery gardener, to a racing stable, to a dog-fancier, and inquire. You will learn this: the extraordinary improvement In size and shape has been gained at the cost of all other qualities. Thoroughbred plants and animals are very tender, they require most assiduous attention, they have to be nursed like babies. They have no stamina, and they have no brains. They are so delicate that unless they are continually protected and doctored they are devoured by disease. A rose-grower's outfit now includes innumerable medicines without which his blooms would be destroyed. If you abandon a garden of any cultivated flowers for a few years, the vigorous and hardy wild plants will choke all your improved stock; nothing will be left save perhaps a few lucky plants which have managed to evolve as it were backwards and regain some of their virility by abandoning their acquired splendor. In free competition the improved plant does not stand the ghost of a chance with its unimproved brothers. The struggle ends inevitably and tragically.

It is exactly the same with improved birds and animals. In open competition for a livelihood thoroughbred stock would be doomed. It has no constitution, it cannot get a living for itself, cannot bear exposure, must be cared for like an invalid. Read for instance the history of the cavalry and mounted infantry horses in the Boer War. The fine-bred stock from England was useless. It died in heaps. It was only horses from places where they are brought up semi-wild, as in the Argentine and Australian runs, that were of any use. Even they did not compare with the Boer ponies.

A further fact, and one still more important to remark, is that all tame is incomparably inferior in intellect to wild stock. There is so little opportunity for people of civilized nations nowadays to observe wild animals that this fact is often overlooked. But the difference is startling. Look at a pack of wild dogs, as I often have. They hunt with a science and precision that tame fox-hounds have no idea of, even when directed by huntsmen and whips. A pack of wild dogs will mark down a stag—they always select stags with big heads if possible—in a piece of forest surrounded by grass. They will post sentries at the exits and the rest of the pack will go to the end and beat the jungle through. When the stag breaks, the sentries at the exit give tongue and warn the rest who immediately run to their call.

There is no one who like myself has kept both wild and domesticated animals as pets who has not noticed that the latter are fools to the former. It is a commonplace of knowledge. Here is a story in illustration, from the life of the elder Dumas.

He had a dog and a fox both chained up near the house. One day he gave a bone to each, putting it just out of reach, to see what would happen. Well, at first, both acted in the same way, they strained at the chain. The fox, however, soon found out the uselessness of this and sat down to consider. Then he got up, turned round so as to add the length of his body to that of the chain, reached the bone with his hind leg, and having scraped it within reach, sat down to eat it. But the dog not only could not think of this himself, but even when he saw the fox do it, he could not imitate it.

The more scientifically bred animals are, the less brain they have. If you want a dog who will be an intelligent and sympathetic companion, which do you choose, the dog bred by 'science' or the dog bred by the natural selection of mutual love, the thoroughbred or the mongrel? All experience says the latter. Therefore, suppose the Eugenists had their way and established a state, what would the inhabitants of that state be like in a few generations? They would be tall, broad, muscular, beautiful, delicate to a degree, useless save for athletic contests or beauty shows, always in the doctor's hands—Eugenic doctor of course,—brainless, incapable of affection, almost wanting in courage, to a great extent sterile; and in the end, if the state did not die of inanition first, some more virile and intelligent race, say the Hottentots or Andamese, would come and eat its inhabitants. The Eugenic Utopia would end in the digestive apparatus of a savage. Sic transit gloria Eugeniae. Nothing could be more certain than that.

And where did it go from here? Well, not to common sense!

Galton died in 1911, but his ideas did not die with him.

The American Eugenics Society was formally started in 1923, and veterinarian and celebrated dog man Leon F. Whitney was put in as its secretary.

As I have noted in a previous post entitled "The Eugenics Man and the Kennel Club", Whitney was a very prolific author of popular dog books, many of which are still available and in print to this day.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Leon Whitney was also a famous popularizer of eugenics thought.

In Whitney's mind -- and in the minds of many of this contemporaries -- eugenics thought and dog breeding were very compatible ideas and comparable pastimes.

In fact, they were self-reinforcing to the point that Whitney and others in the American eugenics movement decided to create a "dog show for people" which they called "Fitter Family" contests.

In these contests, which were held at State Fairs all across the U.S., four generations of families would be paraded out and put into competition with each other to win a prize.

 
"Fitter Family" contest winners in Topeka, Kansas.


In 1931, Leon F. Whitney began writing The Case for Sterilization a book designed to encourage the passage of more state-based sterilization laws in the U.S. and around the world.

The Case for Sterilization was finally published in 1934 and noted, with some approval, that Adloph Hitler had already sterilized one percent of the population of Germany. Whitney saw this as a good start.

In his own book, Whitney advocated the sterlization of 10 million Americans!

One of Hitler's staff wrote Whitney, asking him for an autographed copy of his new book so that the Fuhrer himself might read it.

Whitney, of course, complied immediately, and shortly thereafter he received back a personal letter of thanks from Hitler who, records show, was fascinated by the American and British eugenics movements to the point that in 1935 he modeled some of his own Lebensborn program after their ideas.

In 1935 Alexis Carrell, the French scientist who had won the 1912 Nobel Prize for medicine, published a best-selling book entitled L'Homme, Cet Inconnu (Man, The Unknown) which took Whitney's ideas one step further, advocating a forced eugenics system to be controlled by the state, and facilitated by gas chambers.

"A euthanasia establishment, equipped with a suitable gas, would allow the humanitarian and economic disposal of those who have killed, committed armed robbery, kidnapped children, robbed the poor or seriously betrayed public confidence.... Would the same system not be appropriate for lunatics who have committed criminal acts?"

In the 1936 edition of the same book, Carrel praised the Third Reich's eugenics policies, and noted that more could be achieved if they used gas chambers. Later, when questioned by a magazine interviewer about his theories, Carrel explained in a rather matter-of-fact way:

"Perhaps it would be effective to kill off the worst and keep the best, as we do in the breeding of dogs."

And so there it is -- from Bassets to Auschwitz in 50 years.

Did the Kennel Club invade the Sudetenland? No, of course not.

But did the Kennel Club walk arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder with the eugenics movement right from the beginning? Absolutely. One could not have happened without the other. They are as intertwined as the grape vine and the trellis.

And, of course, the 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.

• Note: The title for this piece is stolen from a line by Andrew Marr in his BBC program entitled "The Making of Modern Britain," in which he notes that the eugenics movement went "from the Basset Hound stud book to Auschwitz in not many bounds."

• Related Links:
  ** Inbred Thinking
  ** Stonehenge: The Root of the Inbreeding Problem
  ** The Eugenics Man and the Kennel Club
  ** No Tolerance for Diversity
  ** Howard Galton's Bloodhounds
  ** Charles Galton Darwin
  ** The Francis Galton Dog Show
  ** Standards and Stonehenge
  ** The Kennel Club Stud Book - 1884
  ** Non-Extinct Terriers & Other Mysteries
  ** Counterfeit Collies and Transvestite Terriers
  ** Rawdon Lee :: The Fox Terrier, 1902
  ** A Pictorial History of Terriers; Their Politics & Their Place
  ** Before the Era of Dog Shows....
  ** Does the Breed Standard Require a Rape Rack?
  ** Handsome Is as Handsome Does
  ** Dogs Made by the Hand of Man
  ** Robert Bakewell's Apartment
  ** The AKC's Long Love Affair With Puppy Mills
  ** Science Remakes the Dog
  .