The AKC got shellacked in a piece on HBO RealSports last night.
Soledad O’Brien did a short, Pedigree Dogs Exposed-type segment for the series.
And the AKC proved just how inept it really is when it comes to public relations.
This is what the AKC is promoting as its response to the segment, which supposedly shows that Soledad O’Brien was unfair and deliberately cut out reasonable parts to make it look more sensationalist.
The piece was largely about bulldogs, which are the poster dogs for all that is wrong with the modern dog fancy.
So the questions are all about bulldogs.
And to say that these responses were twaddle is a bit of a stretch. It’s not even twaddle. It’s not even spin. It’s just mantras!
“Happy, healthy dogs” and “the breed standards is a blueprint” are the worst mantras ever.
“Happy, healthy dogs” are perhaps the three most meaningless words in the English language when they put in this particular syntax.
And breed standards are not blueprints. They are actually scripture. And like all scripture, they are up for interpretation, and the interpretation often depends upon how ignorant and/or evil the person doing the interpreting actually is.
The only thing they say that is true is that the bulldog has been bred to this standard for over a century, and this was certainly the first breed to be so severely deformed through competitive dog showing, that within 25 years of it entering the Kennel Club, the very “typey” bulldogs were having all sorts of trouble. And one winning specimen couldn’t even finish a walking race!
It is a circular argument to say that bulldogs have been bred this way for a long time, therefore the standard is good.
The fact is this breed is a monstrosity of canine flesh, and sadly, it has been that way for over a century. i
The AKC better hire some PR people. It is obvious there is now some blood in the water, and it’s just a mater of time before there is a Hollywood documentary in the same vein as Pedigree Dogs Exposed.
If the AKC handles this poorly, as it very likely will, then we will have animal rights legislation of the absolute worst sort shoved down our throats.
This is the real threat.
The AKC doesn’t understand that its values are behind the times when it comes to both science and ethics, and if it continues on, all dog breeders will soon be so regulated as to make dog breeding next to impossible.
I hope it doesn’t come to this. I hope that it eventually brings back innovative breeding experiments that once were common in domestic dogs– innovation that has been stymied through the closed registry system.
But that’s only the hope.
The reality is that there could be a major disaster in the offing.
I would love it if the AKC as an institution would disappear.
But not if it ends dog breeding as we know it.
I don’t think this can be repeated often enough:
“If the AKC handles this poorly, as it very likely will, then we will have animal rights legislation of the absolute worst sort shoved down our throats.
This is the real threat.
The AKC doesn’t understand that its values are behind the times when it comes to both science and ethics, and if it continues on, all dog breeders will soon be so regulated as to make dog breeding next to impossible.”
Their attempt at revisionist Bulldog history pisses me off. Either they are so ignorant about the breed’s own history that they should not be put forth as breed experts on TV, or they are outright lying and hoping that most people watching this show never bother to do any research into Bulldog history for themselves.
Their use of artistically-exaggerated pieces of art in lieu of photographs depicting the earliest Bulldogs speaks volumes, as well.
They couldn’t even do anything like a quick Google search, to find out actual English Bulldog facts? They ARE a sad sack of lumpy, wrinkled flesh, born to be cursed with breathing troubles, fucked-up limbs, stumpy tails and smashed teeth in a small crushed muzzle. But because the AKC is so backasswards, I’m not too surprised by their shitty comebacks, which can’t refute easily-traced and found facts, verifiable accounts and even their own bizarre admittance.
New “better bulldogs” seem to come off various drawing boards from time to time because of this ongoing fascination with brutish (looking) concepts. Will any succeed long term – I rather doubt it partly because the basic design is arguably too dysfunctional and partly because it might be harder to establish what is likely to be a vet dependent design with a wide enough genepool. But when one considers some of the outrageous designs already out there, I could be wrong about that.
Please, is there a transcript somewhere? Three blogs I follow have posted the same clip. Who needs the visuals? We all know how ugly and dysfunctional bulldogs are and there’s little value in watching watching talking heads. Less distracting to just read their words. If you don’t get DSL or cable, seven minutes of video is a killer. It’s unfortunate that rural people are increasingly marginalized from debates.
I wish there was a way to get rid of the administration who is running the AKC, and replace them with administers like the ones who are running the Swedish Kennel Club. Alas, I’m talking out of my ass. Current people who are running the AKC are bound to allow certain breeds to go extinct. No hope.
in addition, they are also allowing their own administration to sink.
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Not specific to any breed, but this study about cancer based on breeds contains exactly what you’ve maintained:
Kennel clubs in Europe and America still impose strict standards on registration of pedigree dogs requiring that the ancestors of each dog must be registered as well. This combined with the frequent use of popular sires and inbreeding practices means that each breed is a closed, isolated population with virtually no gene flow between breeds. Over the past 200 years this practice has resulted in reduced genetic diversity within breeds and greater genetic divergence between breeds. The average nucleotide heterozygosity when considered across dog breeds is comparable to the human population [29], but the level of genetic diversity within any single breed is considerably less than the species as a whole indeed it has been estimated that whilst domestication of wild canid populations resulted in a 5% loss of nucleotide diversity, breed formation caused a 35% loss. In many breeds the effective population size is very small even in normal times but in some breeds, for example, the Bernese mountain dog and the leonberger, genetic variation has been further reduced by serious population declines during war or hard economic times.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2013/941275/