Canis lupus hominis

Jock Richardson sought virtual immortality by breeding from Wiston Cap so many times.

In an insightful post at the Border Wars blog, Christopher Landauer discusses an important aspect of the dog culture. It does not matter what the aspect of the dog culture it is, but this aspect seems to be the main force that drives people into doing things that are a bit risky for the long-term viability of whatever strain is being produced:

Each hobbyist seeks immortality through the dogs he or she produces, and each hobbyist would like a little notoriety within the designated community.

These two forces are quite destructive. Take the culture of trial border collies, which celebrates Wiston Cap, even if over-using him as a stud had definite health and genetic diversity consequences:

Jock Richardson didn’t have a crisis of conscience after he cashed the 10th check for studding out Wiston Cap and he didn’t quit after the 100th check. He cashed over 388 such checks and Wiston Cap sired over 1,900 registered puppies. I assume that the only thing that stopped Wiston Cap from impregnating as many bitches as possible year round until his death was probably a venereal disease that made him sterile. At some point nature says ENOUGH long before human-kind figures this out. His progeny stopped abruptly several years before his death.

Wiston Cap wasn’t in the dark ages, he lived in the 1970s and his owner died only 10 years ago. Would we praise a repeat performance today or would we condemn it?

No one owns “the breed” and altruism doesn’t exist, so individual ego, self aggrandizement, and desire for immortality through fame trumps the greater good. People whose greatest accomplishment in life is in their dogs do exist and asking them to take their last bow before they have to be dragged kicking and screaming, or in most cases whimpering, from the spotlight, is unseemly. We don’t criticize these people, we put their dogs on our logos and name awards after them. We give them glowing obituaries and make sure that any mention of the breed includes at least one or two homages to their dog. Everyone seems to know that Wiston Cap carried the gene for a red coat color, but no one seems to know that he also carried CEA.

The culture at large rewards this sort of thinking. In the AKC, top producing studs are lauded, as if  a few studs producing as many offspring as possible is somehow good for the population genetics of these breeds.

The problem with dogs is deep within the systems in which these culture exist. They reward competitive values over good sense, and people live in a fantasy world in which the best way to win is to breed from the dogs who do win.  It is almost Lysenkoist to believe that one can breed show dogs or working dogs by breeding from an elite set of studs. Different genes interact with those of different dams, and those things that make those studs so special may not be expressed when bred with a particular dam.

And never mind the parts of the dog that are not inherited but have to be learned through careful training or developed through good nutrition and conditioning.

But even having a good Darwinian understanding of dogs doesn’t stop this very destructive part of the culture.

Dog culture simply is not collaborative enough to encourage the preservation of genetic diversity, and within every culture, there are always people who have nothing to do but pull out daggers against someone who does something they don’t like.

I’m sure they are in every part of society, but in dogs, it seems that it’s those people who wind up having the power, the ones who use bromides and harassment to keep things going their way, and the ones who stand in the way of reform.

Not all people in dogs are like this, and even within the leadership of various clubs, there are people who understand these problems and want to correct them.

To correct them, however, would cause a great shift in what people do in dogs. Landauer explains what this change in breeding ethics would have to look like:

It requires a breeding ethic in which you don’t only select just one offspring from a parent to carry on the legacy. This isn’t hard for males, but few females have more than one significant offspring. Popular sires have no problem creating multiple distributed copies of themselves in the gene pool, but it’s a rare female who has 10 registered children who all have sustained lines.

We don’t have to breed 10 puppies from each litter though, as long as we have breed a diversity of puppies in the past. If a sire and dam both came from litters where just a few of their brothers and sisters were bred, the genetic diversity from the grandparent dogs will be preserved in those cousin lines and the need to preserve those genes in this litter is greatly diminished.

This is why preserving genetic diversity is a community endeavor. No single breeder can accomplish this. No line of dogs can be a universal outcross. No one litter can by itself can capture enough of the genome.

But in most so many strains, breeders select only a handful of puppies as breeders. A few even sell the majority of their stock already spayed and neutered.

This, of course, allows the individual breeder to have a lot more power over his or her strain. It is good for virtual immortality.

It is terrible for genetic diversity, and if we actually wanted to work toward more genetically diverse dogs, breeders would do much more to encourage their puppy buyers to get into this.

And to allow those buyers a bit of freedom to be experimental with their breeding choice.

But that means that the breeder of the original dogs have to let go a bit, and that means less of a chance at virtual immortality within the designated dog culture.

Of course, one could get virtual immortality by encouraging people to increase genetic diversity within a chosen breed and help the long-term viability of the breed and of the species at large.

However, those virtues simply aren’t rewarded within the dog cultures.

But it’s high time they were.

If people actually understood the  looming crisis with MHC/DLA genes in domestic dogs, I don’t see how anyone could think that the current way of doing things is fine.

But then again, I’m an outsider.

Within the fancy and the trial cultures, denialism is the most important thing. Various biologists and geneticists who become part of these clubs seem to forget much of what they learned in school or what they say must be done to save various endangered species.

No one seems to understand that contrived genetic bottlenecks are no better than natural ones.

The former are superior because they are the ticket to fame and immortality within a cultural construct, and the latter are bad because they will kill endangered species.

But they are both bad.

It’s just that the former get reinforced within the human culture that we think they are good.

To solve these problems, we are either going to have to change the culture or start our own competing culture. The public seems to be receptive to changing things. People are skeptical about the various cultures already. We just have to provide something else– something more collaborative and science-based.