A quite a bit of social media buzz about the pekingese that won the AKC National Championship last month. The show was televised on Animal Planet this week, and the pekingese won it.
Pekingese are, to put it mildly, an extremely derived form of domestic dog. They are brachycephalic and achondroplastic. They are not my favorite kind of dog, and if you go through the old posts on this blog, you will see that I generally hated them. When you’re doing the angry dog blogging, this breed is great cannon fodder.
But the truth is I have very limited experience with pekingese. I have spent some time with a backyard-bred one, but I seriously doubt that he is representative of the top-level show dogs in this breed.
And this is a problem. Most of the people making these health claims about this breed have never been around one. This backyard-bred one does have some health and grooming challenges. He also does not possess the best temperament, which these show dogs clearly do have.
Most of the commentary I’ve seen suggest that we return to the days of yore, when the British were smuggling pekes out of the Forbidden City. You know, the time when the dogs had less coat and more muzzle, and we could all be satisfied and happy if we just went back to those days.
This is a common trope in this sort of commentary. The original dogs were always better, because they are less derived, less exaggerated. It’s a trope that I once parroted without considering the dynamics as carefully as I should have.
Someone might want to return to that older style of pekingese, which is interesting. Very few pekes are show-bred. The vast majority of them are bred as pets, and most of those have that desired Forbidden City phenotype. If you want one, you can buy one.
But the idea that we can somehow force the show community to accept that aesthetic as the new standard of excellence is a bit off. It is the case of someone thinking they know better than someone else and then forcing that opinion into some sort of edict.
And that is a recipe for any concerns to fall on deaf ears. There are issues with pekingese. There are issues with all breeds. To address them rationally requires a certain understanding of the subculture of the breed, and the social media and internet commentary takes almost no time to do this.
Instead, it’s a game of playing with aesthetics. If your aesthetic is a dog that is only barely derived from a wolf, like a West Siberian laika or a basenji, then a pekingese will never match it.
But not everyone has that aesthetic, and grown-ups in free societies are okay with others having aesthetics that differ from our own.
We also need better science around the issues of dog welfare and conformation. Studies about the welfare issues surrounding brachycephaly do exist. We need more of those, and we need better ones, ones with large sample sizes and even more rigorous statistical methodology.
But even if we had all the science in the world that suggests the pekingese phenotype is somehow cruel, the breeders would want to produce them. They would be open to suggestions, I’m sure, but I don’t think they would want to change the pekingese fundamentally.
And this raises a simple question. We have all these people spouting about dog health and conformation issues these days, but not a single one has come up with a practical solution to the problem, other than, of course, shaming the breeders who produce those dogs.
And you know what those breeders do with those shaming rants? They ignore you, and they double down. They will not take you seriously.
The solution, then, is more nuanced. The solution is understanding that we don’t know everything and that our chest-thumping will lead us nowhere.
So in my long apology tour for the damage I once did here, I offer yet another mea culpa.
I don’t think I served the dogs very well, even though I thought I did. I was just spinning my wheels and asking for adulation. I got the adulation, but I did so without considering the impact of my words.
And for that, I will always be sorry.
I doubt that there is any real “solution”. It is a complex situation, for many reasons (chiefly human nature). But if one seeks a dog like the “original” Peke, there is the Tibetan Spaniel. The ones I have met are cheerful, clever, and active little dogs.
Oh I really like those. They are a bit larger, but they are very similar. In China, there are still lots of dogs of this general type in their village dog population. They usually have smooth coats, so would be “pugs” by our definition.
My solution: sterilise all pekes and be done with it (same with pugs, btw). It is not a matter of aesthetic, it is a matter of veterinary facts, that show that dogs that cannot breathe properly are in discomfort or worse. The end.
There is a difference between saying ‘this dog does not have a perfect health, but neither do I’ or ‘its legs are not perfectly straight, neither are mine’, and ‘this dog has been bread to a conformation standard that guarantee that said dog will forever be in discomfort because it cannot breath properly, etc’.
I am sure we can create a breed that does not have know phenotypic abnormalities known to cause discomfort (or worse) in a dog, that is still more or less the size and temper of a peke.
Please note I am not shaming breeders, I do not care what they think. I am saying their precious dogs should just be all sterilised, whether they like it or not. I also believe that anti-vaxxers should lose parental rights to their kids, if that makes you feel better.