Photo by Marlies Kloet
On the Pedigree Dogs Exposed Facebook group, debate is very common, and things have heated up in the aftermath of Crufts. So many controversies are going on with Crufts this year, but one of them that has me curious is one involving the issue of breed standards.
Last week, rancorous debate ensued when it was suggested that the golden retriever that won the breed at Crufts was overweight. I don’t have an opinion about the weight of the dog, but I was curious about why golden retrievers in Europe are so divided between show and working types.
The answer I was given was that golden retrievers in Europe were just pets, and it didn’t matter if they were built for the purpose or not.
Earlier I had posted an image of a golden retriever winner at Crufts in 1927, and I asked why they were okay with breed changing so much.
The answer I received was that the breed should just be allowed to evolve.
Both of these answers are problematic.
Everyone who gets interested in dogs learns that dog shows and breed standards were developed to preserve the breed, but if conformation is allowed to slide just because the dogs aren’t used anymore or are allowed to “evolve” based upon fashion, then how can anyone say that dog shows have anything to do with preserving the breed?
I got no answers to that question.
This evening things have taken an even more bizarre turn when the issues turned to those surrounding the tendency to breed for extreme type in conformation with dogues de Bordeaux. On my group, it was asked why dogues de Bordeaux were being bred to look like giant red English bulldogs, and it just so happens that we have video of the author of the FCI standard for that breed excoriating breeders for producing such extreme dogs.
So if the even ideas of the people who helped standardize the breed don’t matter, then the entire edifice of the dog show is pretty tenuous.
It ultimately comes down to people will breed whatever they like, just so long as the judges award them with prizes. Judging requires understanding the standard, but much of the standard is like scripture– quite open to interpretation.
If all it comes down to is what wins in the ring, then this appears to be one of the worst ways of selecting breeding stock. Breed type and what wins in the ring become self-fulfilling prophecies rather than objective ways of evaluating dogs.
I assumed that some of this was going on all along, but I did not expect it be articulated to me in such a way.
It is rather quite distressing.
And yes, people do use golden retrievers in Europe, but it is now all but impossible to have a dual purpose dog in the breed now.
And people still do breed dogues de Bordeaux that look and move soundly.
It is just that dog shows and breed standards aren’t what they are portrayed to be. They are not the final word on a dog’s quality.
I think it may be long past time for the pretense to be dropped entirely.
I must admit hearing about the poisoning of the Crufts dogs upset me quite a bit as it brought back awful memories of one our pointers who was poisoned (he also was a multi show winner as well as being field winner). The dog died a slow and miserable death, but he was our family dog as well as a fantastic hunting dog. It came down to someone poisoning him because they were jealous.
The answers to the problems posed are somewhat complex, but primary is the fact that as new people come into a breed, they lack the background and experience to really understand what the breed was intended to be. Successive generations of newcomers select for what they consider attractive’ with lless understanding of what is “normal’ –usually each edging closer to the extreme with each generation of fanciers. Temple Grandin calls it “the radicalization of inexperience”, the “bad becoming normal”.
As to Golden Retrievers, In the UK the standard has undergone numerous changes over the years; some minor, some major. Any reference to weight or to proportion was removed around 1986. There are others reasons for these problems as well,; too much to get into here. But it should be said, that a judge can only judge what is in the ring: if the exhibitors don’t bring the right sort of dogs, the judge must make do with what is there.
Dog show culture is toxic. How do you reason with people who think it’s normal and OK for “experts” to spread false information about breed history, health, and other basic facts?
Must the judge make do with what is there? If judges had the cojones to refuse to put up a winner at times, it would certainly help a great deal.
Did it take you until now to realise that?
Even inexperienced people could easily look at dogs of the past as a guide. There are loads of references in books and video. If it’s about inexperience, at what point did the first goldens start to slowly change? Wouldn’t the new potential breeders have the current goldens of their day to breed from? Those redder, leaner fit dogs with legs?
I always wonder about those first moments when the scales tipped for breeds. When did someone first see a slightly flatter face on a dog and decide that was okay? When were the first show dogs slighly more teddy bearish deemed okay? And so on?
How do things get changed, how do dog breeds “evolve”? Remember that old game of “Telephone”, where a message whispered through a series of people becomes something else entirely at the end? That’s one way– each person hears or interprets or transmits the message a little differently. And the differences add up. Then there is the fact that it seems to be human nature for each breeder to put their own stamp on “their line” of dogs, to have something distinctive– whether it is historically appropriate or not
Add all that to a breed becoming highly popular for reasons other than its original purpose, becoming a product for the pet market– all sorts of unfortunate things can happen.
As far as “experts”, well, that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.
Depressing, but I was happy to see the gun dog exhibit. I hope for a dual champion in the U.S., there are breeders actively breeding for this goal. I believe that a golden should be an active to moderately active (not active like as GSP) dog, with a good on-off switch. That’s the family for which a Golden is suited. And that’s for a pet Golden. They shouldn’t be bred for a sedentary, TV-watching, video game playing type, nor sold to them.
Crufts has really gone down Hill – too much interchange with dogs now for reasons that shouldn’t be allowed.
The behavioral ramifications of show selection are as reprehensible as the physical ramifications. Svartberg (2006) after crunching the numbers on >13,000 behavioral assessments of Swedish pedigree dogs, concluded: “Selection towards use in dog shows correlates positively with social and nonsocial fearfulness, and negatively with playfulness, curiosity and aggressiveness, whereas selection towards use in Working dog trials is positively correlated with playfulness and aggressiveness. ” (Not his definition of aggression is more assertiveness than likeliness to bite). See: http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/AnimPersInst/Animal%20Personality%20PDFs/S/Sa-Sc/Svartburg%202006.pdf