by Josh Dean
—MCDOWELL LYON
I feel like my dogs are my canvas and I paint with genes. When the judge looks at my breeding he or she is looking at my creativity, my art form. And when I walk into the Bred by Exhibitor class I’m signing the bottom corner of my painting.
—PAUL CHEN, “CONFESSIONS OF A BREEDER-OWNER-HANDLER” (FROM DOGCHANNEL.COM)
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If it weren’t for humans, bulldogs would be extinct. The dogs can’t reproduce or deliver young naturally, and so almost all pregnancies are achieved via artificial insemination and all litters are delivered via C-section. You could say it’s more than a little messed up that we’re sustaining breeds that can’t sustain themselves, but there’s also another way to look at it: If it weren’t for humans, bulldogs wouldn’t have existed in the first place.
Bulldogs, as well as pugs, boxers, and Boston terriers, are what’s known as brachycephalic dogs. The term means, literally, “short-headed” and that seems self-explanatory. Beyond the reproductive complications that afflict them, bulldogs and the other brachycephalic dogs commonly suffer from respiratory problems—their shortened airways can cause breathing distress, and they will pant excessively to help compensate for their propensity to overheat. Lacking the protective proboscis of a snout, the dogs can also quite easily damage their eyes, and it makes me cringe to report that it’s not uncommon for them to experience proptosis, or a prolapse in which—I’m sorry—the eyeball pops out of the socket. Most often this is caused by a collision or a fight, but it’s been known to happen when pressure builds up in the head from something as simple as the dog’s pulling too hard on a leash or chain. I know, yikes.
Why would we breed a dog that has breathing problems, can’t reproduce naturally, and has eyes that sometimes pop out during walks? In the case of bulldogs, it’s because they were originally bred for the sport of bull baiting, which pitted dog versus bull, and the architecture of the face was specifically engineered to allow the dog to be able to clamp down and hold on to a thrashing bull without hampering its ability to breathe. The folds on the dog’s face channeled the bull’s blood away from the eyes and off the face like tiny viaducts. The breeding problems come from the head’s size, which is disproportionately large compared to the body and makes it impossible for a baby bulldog to pass through the birth canal of a female. That, too, is functional; putting the bulk of the dog’s weight in the front and giving it a short, stout body was a protective measure that prevented a bull from breaking the dog’s back by thrashing violently.
I feel slightly guilty reporting any of this, because bulldogs are actually wonderful dogs with great temperaments. People absolutely adore them, and they adore people. But it seems a little disingenuous to paint a picture of the purebred-dog world at its most elite level and ignore the fact that in the process of making these wonderful animals we’ve also kind of screwed them up.
Bulldogs actually aren’t the only dogs that have trouble mating. According to our old friend Dan Rice, in his Complete Book of Dog Breeding, toy breeds have major issues, too. “The muscle mass in some tiny breeds is so undeveloped, and skeletal construction is so delicate, that males lack the physical strength, athletic ability, and endurance necessary to mount and breed a female,” Rice writes. “Likewise, some females are so frail they can’t support the weight of a male. The teacup-sized toy breeds are especially subject to those kinds of conformational breeding problems.” Considering their short legs, he writes, “it is little wonder that dachshund, basset, and Welsh corgi males occasionally require assistance when attempting to breed.”
To further complicate basset hound breeding, Rice reports, “many females have an apron of fat and loose skin that drapes downward over their vulvas, effectively preventing normal, unassisted intromission (male penis introduction into the vaginal tract).”
All that said, nature is one powerful bitch herself. Dr. Rice goes on to relate the story of a long-haired dachshund who utilized his tunneling prowess to dig his way out of his fenced yard and into one next door, where a tantalizing golden retriever in estrus roamed free—after all, who’s afraid of a little dachshund? Oops—she got knocked up.
With that in mind, anything seems possible.
I feel the need to state here that I didn’t meet a single person in a year of attending dog shows who didn’t care deeply about his or her breed; these are people who work tirelessly and methodically to weed out genetic problems. Legitimate breeders, the kinds of people who breed and show the dogs you see at conformation events, are the first line of defense in maintaining healthy stocks. That’s the reason we had shows in the first place. But it’s an ongoing challenge.
The problem lies in the process—the way you create a breed is by interbreeding related animals to magnify desired traits, but that’s a messy business, because you’re also concentrating undesirable traits. In the words of McDowell Lyon’s The Dog in Action: “Our domestic animals are handicapped by the fact that we force the parts upon them and preserve the bad along with the good. The animals of the wild, as complete species, have been more fortunate because of that great selection process known as the survival of the fittest.”
Historically, the way you minimized flaws was to eliminate any diseased or otherwise inferior dog from the breeding program at the first sign of trouble. Today there’s the added help of DNA testing and the ever-increasing knowledge of dog genetics provided by the Dog Genome Project, ongoing at the National Institutes for Health. Like the Human Genome Project, the DGP aims to locate and map genes, in this case canine genes—good and bad—so that a simple blood test can identify which dogs are carriers.
The first dog (a female boxer) was sequenced in 2005.* Canis familiaris, they found, provided a handy subject for genomic study, because the species has been broken down over time into breeds with gene pools that are then closed off, allowing for subsets of traits to be maintained within those populations. By looking at a specific breed of canine, the Dog Genome team can identify and study disease, behavior, and morphology, and in a relatively small number of genes. Initially this had little to do with dogs at all; the point was to help humans.
“If you look at the top ten diseases in dogs,” the project’s Heidi Parker told me, “all but one are top-ten diseases in humans as well. The only one dogs get that we don’t is bloat.” (Bloat, as we shall see soon, is serious business.) Dogs, she said, “get all kinds of cancer,” plus epilepsy, diabetes, and heart disease. This would probably be the case with most animal species, she notes, but the difference is that most animals in the wild don’t live long enough to develop problems like cancer and heart disease, both of which are closely related to aging. “The other thing about dogs is that they’re getting medical care—they get diagnosed.”
The dog genome map has been in place for over five years now, and additional breeds can be mapped in about a month. Whereas the first map cost $1 million, today it’s more like $10,000 a pop. Increasingly, Parker and the team (led by Elaine Ostrander) are racing their human equivalents to uncover gene mutations that lead to problems. Because the genomes are so similar, the discovery of a mutation in dogs will often help lead to that same discovery in humans, and vice versa.
One area of close study for all breeds is the identification of markers that indicate disease. “The development of disease, a lot of it comes from recessive traits being amplified by breeding dogs too closely related.” This can be eliminated, Parker says, by looking at dogs’ ancestral trees to make sure there isn’t excessive crossing.
Generally speaking, the Australian shepherd is considered to be a healthy breed. While dozens of diseases can afflict it, only a couple are pervasive. The most serious is epilepsy, and there is great hope of discovering a gene for this that could be identified using a DNA test. But we’re not there yet.
Few people have better perspective than Jeanne Joy Hartnagle, who, as the breed’s de facto historian, has watched Aussies change over the past half century. “There is a pretty limited gene pool
,” she told me. And epilepsy was a new concern, one that hadn’t been an issue in the past. “Unfortunately, it’s a huge problem now.” What happens when a few dogs that happen to be carrying hidden genetic flaws do really well in the show ring is that those flaws can be spread, because a successful dog’s sperm is in demand. In some cases this is due to a lack of scruples (“People did not give good disclosure,” is how Hartnagle puts it), but often it’s just that the breedings happened when there wasn’t “as much information as genetics.” Either way, “That unfortunately got into the breed.”
All responsible breeders test for a number of heritable problems. To help prevent hip dysplasia—a growing plague in many breeds, especially German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, and most large, working dogs—hips are X-rayed and evaluated by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals (OFA), which assigns a particular dog a rating. Only dogs with “good” or “excellent” ratings should be chosen for breeding. Puppies have their eyes examined at eight weeks for eye defects, and those that are cleared are registered with the Canine Eye Registration Foundation (CERF).
Jack is CERF-“clear” and OFA-“excellent”; the only slight tick on his file is in the area of drug resistance. Another common issue among Aussies—as well as other herding dogs, like collies, Shelties, and German shepherds*—is that there exists in the breed a resistance to certain drugs, especially those containing ivermectin and loperamide (which is the key ingredient in Imodium). Dogs carrying this Multi-Drug Resistance gene (known as MDR1) are unable to flush certain toxins out of their brains and can suffer neurologic damage. Generally it’s not a serious problem and is easily uncovered using an over-the-counter genetic test. Three results are possible: “mutant-mutant” (meaning highly drug-resistant), “normal-normal” (A-OK), and “mutant-normal” (mildly resistant). Jack is mutant-normal, meaning that he probably shouldn’t be given dewormers containing ivermectin (Heartgard, for one), or antidiarrheals like Imodium, but they’re not going to kill him either.
Being a responsible breeder, Kerry is always up front about such things, but this problem is one that doesn’t really concern her. “I don’t consider it a big deal at all.”
The BBC swatted at the purebred hornet’s nest with its special entitled Pedigree Dogs Exposed, which premiered in 2008 in England, the country that invented dog shows and reveres them to this day. This somewhat overwrought, not-exactly-nuanced documentary focused exclusively on the problems of purebreeding, which the narrator called “the greatest animal-welfare scandal of our time.” Even more hyperbolic was the head vet for England’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who said, “We’re breeding them to death.”
These types of exposés inevitably focus on extreme examples, and the most wrenching sequence in the BBC doc dealt with a neurological problem found in certain Cavalier King Charles spaniels, which are sometimes born with skulls too small for their brains (described by the narrator as “wedging a size-ten foot into a size-six shoe”). Dogs with this problem suffer from painful seizures that can be cured only by brain surgery that opens the skull to relieve swelling.
Most likely, the special suggested, the problem traces back to a few stud dogs that were overused in the 1950s. The implication is that sometimes the dogs that breeders think are best are not actually the best ones to breed, and the RSPCA vet Mark Evans has no qualms about singling out what he sees as the root of all problems plaguing purebreds: joint problems in Labs, an enzyme deficiency in springer spaniels, Westies “beset by allergies,” German shepherds with sloping rears that cause them to be described by critics as “half dog, half frog.”
“The cause is simple,” said Evans. “Competitive dog showing.” (The man wields a mean sword of inflammatory rhetoric; he also calls the Crufts show “a parade of mutants.”)
One man you will inevitably see quoted if you dive into the matter of the ethics of purebreeding is Dr. James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. And sure enough, there he was in the special. Serpell isn’t antipurebred per se, but he pops up in the BBC doc to raise the point that dogs were first bred for function, “which caused the evolution of modern breeds.” That paradigm shifted in the mid–nineteenth century, he pointed out. “Because dog breeding becomes a sport, and the idea of perfect arises.”
The most outrageous claim in the film is the suggestion that the Kennel Club (the AKC of the UK) is an outgrowth of the eugenics movement, the now-disgraced idea of purifying the human race through breeding, which reached its awful apogee with Hitler. Lest we miss the insinuation, the narrator actually calls the Kennel Club “a eugenicist organization.”
This is the problem with emotional arguments. When you care the most, you say the dumbest things. Animal-rights people typically come from a good place—they care about animals. But they also tend to make gross generalizations and oversimplify things.*
European countries have been quite active in legislating protections for purebreds. Tail docking, for instance, is now banned in England. To help compensate for this, breeders have quickly managed to breed the trait for a naturally docked tail from corgis into other breeds, like the boxer and the Aussie. (It takes only two or three generations.) The Swedish Kennel Club has banned mother-son and father-daughter breedings.
One of the most progressive changes is the movement to curb the number of times a sire can be used to stud. As I said, no one sets out to create dogs with problems—quite the opposite, in fact—but because the nature of judging dog shows is that it’s subjective, it is possible that a top dog (or dogs) can become great champions despite having flaws (visible or not). As suggested by the example of the Cavaliers, a few stud dogs carrying the wrong genes can start a cascade of damage that pours over a breed’s genetic tree.
The most haunting cases involve problems that lurk undetected in a dog’s DNA. In 1968 a German shepherd named Canto von der Wienerau sired a number of litters and then died suddenly at just four years of age. The cause was hemophilia A, and because males of his litters had already been bred many times over by the time he died, that gene was shotgunned around the breed, and every subsequent case of this disease is traceable to this one dog. (Thankfully, the defect has largely now been curbed. Score one for responsible breeding.)
The winner of the 2003 Crufts show, a Pekingese named Danny, was engulfed in controversy after being accused of having a face lift; it turned out that he’d had surgery for a throat infection caused by a genetic flaw. He was bred eighteen times, so the flaw lives on.*
Here in the United States, the AKC’s Frequently Used Sires program requires that any male bred more than seven times, or three times in a year, submit to a DNA test—though the reason has more to do with ensuring that the dogs come from proper stock than eliminating sires with flaws (the rule states that it is for “genetic identity and parentage verification”).
One problem is that no one knows how many times is too many. The club that oversees German shepherd breeding in Germany has put a cap on the number of times a dog can stud in a single year, but that number is eighty, and probably it’s still too many. In England the basenji gene pool got so shallow at one point that a single sire was responsible for 80 percent of the puppies born; certainly that’s too many.
It’s hard to argue with the feeling that some fault in this matter lies with owners and handlers who’ve come to accept as normal the covering up of flaws. “Handlers can finish and show dogs that are not necessarily the best representatives of their breed,” said Mary Stine, a show vendor I met who worked for five years as an AKC field rep. “Then people think they have something special, and they breed it.” This is particularly bad, she said, in the case of a dog that “you do things to to make it look good.”
Stine said she once attended a Shetland sheepdog grooming seminar and watched people put powdered lead in the dogs’ ears to make them droop. “Some will have their ears surgically broken by a vet. They will have teeth fixed; they will h
ave coats dyed.”
She recalled the case of a “rather famous terrier handler some years back” who was on his way to show a dog when an unexpected conflict arose. He passed one dog off to a fellow handler and raced to another ring, forgetting to tell the new handler that the dog he’d given her was still wearing corrective braces in its mouth. When the judge put the dog up on the table, the mouthpiece fell out and hit the surface with a thud. It nearly cost the fill-in handler a suspension. “It wasn’t illegal to have that in the dog’s mouth outside the ring,” Stine says, because “it wasn’t a permanent appliance.” There is a line there, whether or not you can see it. “It’s really crazy.”
Stine used to own and show Belgian Tervurens, and the breed that is still near and dear to her heart currently has a major genetic issue with the dogs’ “tail set.” The standard dictates that a Tervuren carry its tail “with the body”; at rest it should go below the hock. But in many of them today, Stine says, the tail curls, “almost like a husky.” And in many top dogs, “there’s a really gay tail* that’s dominant.” Because it’s dominant, any dog carrying that tail is “going to plaster that all over his puppies.” She says she’s seen puppies come from dogs like this with “beautiful low tails,” and in those cases “you know it’s been done”—she means surgically altered.
“One time I had a dog like that. She had a terribly curly tail,” Stine said. “I literally had a judge tell me, ‘Go get her tail fixed and come back out.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ I didn’t. A breeder told me you can always do it and say she got her tail slammed in the door.”
Let me point out that Stine is definitely not anti–dog show. She makes her living selling purebred-dog products at dog shows. She’s just seen everything, and like most of the people playing this game (one hopes), she wants to think that these issues are anomalous. Or at least not common. Except when they are. “When I was showing, I got to know all the dogs I showed against,” she said. “I realized there were moments when I had the only honest dog in the ring.”
