Downsides of Dog Design
Posted in: Articles
I’m a big fan of the “campsite rule” in most realms of life. You should be too. You’re going to tinker with something for fun or profit? Make sure you’re contributing positively in both the long and short terms, and above all, do no harm. Seems pretty straightforward, right? So when I stumbled across a series of “then vs. now” photos of dog breed development through the ages my Aghast Button got a good poke. My conclusion was this:
Many purebred dogs are the product of idiotic aestheticized design sense, and engineered to fail.
This might provoke some internal knee-jerks. Whether you’re thinking “Well, MY [favored breed] is happy, healthy and recently rescued a bus full of children from a fire,” or “Sure, all breeders are immoral and should be shot,” I’m not here to argue the meta point on animal husbandry. In fact, I’ll cop to being both a shelter-only wonk and a big Viszla fan. Rather, I’d encourage you to consider the purebred dog as a heritage brand product that has lost hold of the function side of the scales and any vision of the object as a whole. (Think PT Cruiser.)
No denying it, some beloved purebred dogs are terribly configured, and it’s hardly surprising. When you allow aesthetics or a single praised trait to dictate form, you run the risk of compromising overall quality, usability and durability. If there’s one thing pedigreed breeding is all about, it’s single-minded dedication to very specific traits, and when you multiply that dedication over the course of generations… the results can be bizarrely out of touch. Here are a couple of examples.
Bloodhounds: Bred as a practical purpose-built dog for game chasing and savvy sniffing as far back as medieval France, the bloodhound dipped deeply in popularity around the early 1900s (as pictured above) and may have disappeared if competitive dog shows hadn’t taken off around that time. Subsequently, their prized scenting skills have been “improved” on with increasingly unreasonable physical characteristics: a tall peaked skull, ears like grandma’s caftans, sunken eyes, and lots and lots of wrinkly skin. The jowelled face on these guys could belong to an aging president. While handsome to a bloodhound fancier, some of these bred-in traits are in direct conflict with the dog’s hunting nature. What’s worse, they now commonly suffer from eye, nose and ear problems, cancer, and high instances of bloat. Some surveys report an average lifespan as short as 6 or 7 years. Planned obsolescence? Pretty sure that’s unethical.
Post a Comment