In Amman, Jordan, there is a conformation show for Damascene goats.
It is called “The Most Beautiful Goat Contest,” and although I’m having a difficult time finding the “breed standard” by which these goats are judged, the goal is to breed a snub-nosed goat with an undershot jaw.
A Google Images search of similar Damascene goats shows that many of these goats have really strange profiles.
My guess is this type of conformation is a hindrance for the goats when they forage. Goats are browsers that need to be able to put their heads in narrow places to pull leaves off branches.
And I’m sure that a large number of Western goat owners don’t approve of the practice.
However, you won’t find as much complaints when the same conformation type when it’s applied to dogs.
What breed is snub-nosed with an undershot jaw?
Well, there is the bulldog.
Damascene goats are primarily kept for dairy purposes, so they actually do have a function.
The Kennel Club bastardized bulldog has no purpose. It’s just an artifact that people can distort and twist with no regard to actual health or welfare.
These goat shows are becoming more and more popular in the Middle East, especially among wealthy Arabs.
Just as the bulldog is derived from the hardy catch and baiting dogs of Medieval England, these show goats are derived from hardy Nubian-type stock that have been the staple of goatherds throughout the region for thousands of years.
When England became industrialized and the British Empire rose, there was a class of people who could afford to breed animals with distorted and quite dysfunctional conformation.
It is that society that produced the bulldog as we know it today.
In the Middle East, great fortunes have been made in recent decades with the rise of petroleum prices.
There are lots of young Arab gentlemen who want to have objects of what Thorstein Veblen would call objects of conspicuous consumption. These are objects that have no utility other than what they symbolize about the status of the person who owns them.
Bulldogs were perhaps the first dog ever destroyed by the concept. They were already in quite poor shape within two decades of the rise of the modern dog fancy, and they have been messed up for so long that people don’t even recognize the very real problems they have.
This Middle Eastern goat fancy is fairly new, and it has not yet had time to reach the pathology of the dog fancy in the West.
But it very well might.
One feature I noticed on the prize winner at the Damascus show is that her ears were cropped:
The cropped ears add even more to the grotesque appearance.
I find these photos quite disconcerting.
Goats aren’t supposed to look this way.
But then I realize something even more disconcerting: Bulldogs aren’t supposed to either.
But they’ve looked that way for so long and their appearance is so enshrined in our cultural understanding of what a bulldog is that we don’t see it as equally grotesque.
In fact, it is even more so, for I have not heard of any serious health problems that have resulted from breeding Damascene goats.
But bulldog health problems are legion. They are almost impossible to reproduce without AI or “hand matings,” and virtually all of the ones born in North America have been delivered via a planned C-section.
So we can judge the “brown people” over there for their deformed goats, but the truth is we ought to be looking at the dogs we are producing over here.
We have no room to make such pronouncements.
We are even more guilty than they are.
Why do people feel the need to take a beautiful, beautifully functional animal and then select for deformity until it’s a grotesque caricature of its species?
Geez. It’s not a lump of clay people. It’s an animal! Have a little respect and empathy for crying out loud!
I happen to really like goats! Some of them are so friendly they remind me of dogs, only stinkier!
Of course, my dog EATS goat, so I don’t think the goats would elect me as their #1 defender if they knew. ;)
Goats can indeed be friendly and very dog-like. If they like you, they really like you. I learned long ago not to wear new trousers in my neighbor’s pasture. Her goats think I’m the cats pajamas (possibly because whenever I weed I feed them all the poison ivy.) They love to rub their faces on my legs and get their horns scritched.
(And no their affectionate nature hasn’t prevented me from eating goat when offered the opportunity.)
To breed goats such as these may be animal abuse. It is hard to believe that these animals don’t have trouble eating and breathing. Of course the same is true of English bulldogs, but why single out them? Virtually every dog breed has horrible health problems that have resulted from over-zealous breeding. The high cancer rate in Goldens and boxers, for example, or the cranial problems of the Cavalier King Charles, as well as the breathing problems of the pug and Pekingese. Then there’s the short lifespan of the giant breeds, and the blindness problem in rough collies. The prized “ridge” of the Rhodesian Ridgeback is apparently a manifestation of spina bifida. And look at the confirmation problems of the GSD. Some of these problems are not as obvious as the grotesque shape of the bulldog, but they are often deadly. Perhaps I’m going out on a limb to say this but, at least where dogs, and perhaps goats, are concerned, deformity and suffering is what happens when mankind interferes with nature.
I am a Golden owner, and I love the breed, but my God! What are we doing to it? I am in favor of more responsible breeding practices that would be focused on producing healthier, more functional dogs of all breeds, but I really don’t see this happening in the near future.
From your mouth! These goats represent the exact same sort of ridiculous, thoughtless, extremist nonsense that is so prevalent in Western dog breeding.
The poor, deformed animals man perpetuates.
These goats actually often can’t eat on their own. They have to be fed via a tube. They’re generally kept alive on a diet of milk & porridge, poured down their throats via the tube.
My beautiful little Nubian is so much more attractive. And he can feed himself.
That’s just…*shakes head*
As for bulldogs, I’m ashamed they’re anything to do with my country.
This is just wrong. No matter the species.
Have people ever done any thing like that to cattle?
Not that I know of.
Those have proven to be a failure. They can’t calve naturally.
There was a big move about 20 years ago around here to get Belgian blue stock into beef herds.
As if the inability to give birth naturally in animals would stop people from breeding them….
The thing about Belgian blues is they suffer from what’s called the Concorde Fallacy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimblasingame/2011/09/15/beware-of-the-concorde-fallacy/
It is now so expensive to breed these animals that there is absolutely no way they could be part of a profitable beef operation. Not only are they hard to breed, they take much longer to finish and fatten than more traditional market breeds.
Took the words right out of my mouth!
Those cattle look like they are made from hams that someone glued together
I would consider the Belgian Blues depicted in the NatGeo’s “Meet the Super Cow ” video on youtube (sorry, can’t link from my tablet) somewhat comparable to the bulldog, in that it has been intentionally bred in a manner that inhibits its mobility and quality of life, especially the increased stress put on its joints. However, it could be argued that it was bred this way to achieve a specific objective (muscle mass), and that joint stress and whatever other health issues may arrise are irrelevant, so long as the animal reaches market condition in time, and is, in some form or another, still able to produce viable offspring.
The genetic factor for “double muscle” also occurs in whippets, but at least the whippet people recognize the abberation for what it is. Has also happened in American Quarter Horses, chiefly in descendants of one sire. If memory serves, his name was “Impressive”.
To state the obvious, they have much worse problems to think about in the middle east, at the moment, than designer animal breeding. But as Megan writes above, we are spoiled for choice about what we justifiably condemn in that respect.
I would guess that they are breeding goats to look like camels, not likes bulldogs. There’s nothing brachy about that goat.
I think we dog-centered folk underestimate the range of variation in pigs, goats, and horses… And perhaps other domestic animals I know nothing about.
It is brachycephalic.
But its jaws are more like the bulldog than the brachycephaly.
A camel’s head does not look like that. At all.
No question, humans do some awful things in breeding domestic animals. I’m not ready to agree that the goat in question is a mess without physiological evidence. The Google pictures of the breed don’t look strange in comparison to, say, the Google pictures of Nubian goats. Nubes are funny looking, but so far as I know, they’re a healthy breed. These guys do fine in harsh Middle Eastern climatic conditions. So their breathing couldn’t be too messed up.
The usual definition of brachycephalic involves having a cephalic index of over 80, ie breadth / length of the head > 4/5. That clearly doesn’t apply to the goat shown. Nor are the nasal passages near the eyes as in brachy dog/cat breeds. It’s the shortening of nasal passages that causes problems in brachy dogs.
The unusual features are the curved snout — like a bull terrier, the stupid cropped ears, and the undershot jaw. I think you can discount the funny angle of the nose on the second shot . . . goats have mobile faces and that looks like an expression not tied to bone. I doubt if an asymmetrical nose like that would win a beauty contest, particularly for a doe. As for the apparent depth of snout in the first photo . . . the goat probably had its mouth open. If you check around for goat skull pictures, you’ll find the undershot jaw is common in goats . . . maybe it’s useful for nibbling branches . . . dunno.
Point being, it takes more than pictures to say what is healthy and what not. If you gave me a picture of a standing cheetah and I didn’t know anything about cheetahs, I’d probably expect the sway back was a health problem.
Pai, a camel’s head may not look like that to you, but it looks a hell of a lot more like that than a bulldog’s head. Camels often have somewhat curved snouts and overshot jaws.
Whatever you may think a camel’s head looks like, they’re not shaped like a half-sphere like that goat’s above. A -normal- goat’s head looks more like a camel’s.
Looking at the more moderate examples of Damascene goats, it appears to me that a group of folks looked at the rounded shape of the normal goat, latched onto it as a ‘breed type’ beauty feature and are pushing it as far as they can. Just like in show dogs, they’re not trying to make them resemble anything other than ‘super-typey’ examples of the breed.
I know people who breed these “beauty” goats. They have to feed them via a tube down their throats because they can’t chew due to the shape of their jaws. Their teeth cannot make contact with each other. They exist on a liquid diet.
1. The shami (ie Damascene) goat is an ancient landrace. Apparently it shows up in old Middle Eastern literature. What a few Saudis do in a show isn’t necessarily important. The nearest to a breed standard I can find is:
http://www.goatworld.com/breeds/shami.shtml
Note, the warnings about extreme Roman nose and bad bite and emphasis on being a good milker.
2. Goats do have mobile faces. I’m not convinced that the goat shown in the images that have sort of gone viral for ‘beauty’ goat are representative of the individual, much less of the ‘breed’. The first one shown suggests extreme Roman nose but level bite. The second suggests overshot jaw and no extreme Roman nose. They are the same goat.
Anna, I’d be glad to see links or references. I can find none on the net.
I suspect the discussion has an undercurrent of anti-Arab sentiment . . . which isn’t appropriate, as the shami is distributed outside as well as inside Arab domains (eg, Cyprus and Ethiopia). There is no indication that some stupid standard from show goats is affecting the general goat population.
Please do not call me a racist, anti-Arab or anything of the sort.
Have you been to an anti-Iraq War demonstration? Have you not been called an anti-Semite for supporting a free and independent Palestine?
Well, I have.
I RESENT your implication that I am anti-Arab.
I demand an apology right now, or I’m simply going to remove the comment.
Do not call me Anti-Arab, a racist, an anti-Semite, or anything else.
My analysis comes from the American socialist economist Thorstein Veblen. It has nothing to do with Arabs but more to do with economy and class analysis (which is sort of Marxian). I guarantee you that I am to the left of you.
I’ve been called a “n*gger lover” before. I’ve been assumed to be homosexual because I support gay marriage and am not currently attached. I live where people often have very backward views on race and sexuality.
I wrote something very similar about the Chinese and Tibetan mastiffs, which are being bred as symbols of conspicuous consumption.
No one called me anti-Chinese for writing it.
I expect more from my commentators than to call me a racist. So please if you’re going to call someone a racist, at least do your homework.
You obviously know jack about goats. There is a Damascene landrace of goats that does forage. However, these goats are owned by wealthy Arabs. I was being charitable that these deformed ones have a hard time foraging. It turns out that the most deformed ones, the ones that win these prizes, can’t even eat on their own!
People do stupid things for stupid reasons, regardless of ethnicity, nationality or religion. Wealthy people can simply afford to carry that stupidity farther. S’far as I can see, Rman calls ’em when/where he sees ’em.
Every animal that is bred in a way that it cannot even eat on its own any more is ‘necessarily important’ – this is cruelty. No matter where this happens or what ethnicity, religion or gender the breeder belongs to.
Agreed!