Mamas, don't let your puppies grow up to be show dogs

If you are a fan of Cul de Sac but not a frequent visitor to Richard Thompson's blog, you're missing half the fun.

Given his years of illustration work and cartooning, Richard has an extensive backlog of wonderful things he can pull up for nearly any occasion, as with this 2003 salute to the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, which starts Monday.

And this panel is one of two, so you should definitely go see the rest of it.

I particularly love the tug-of-war with Mother Nature and the helix.

I have genuinely mixed feelings about the WKC Dog Show.

To start with, it's fun to watch if you've got a dog that enjoys television. My doggy acquaintances have varied from complete indifference to the medium to one who, when he was about six months old, stood up to stare at the lions and antelope running across the TV screen, then stuck his head in the bedroom door behind the TV, under the apparent theory that it was a window and that he would find little tiny lions and antelopes running around back there.

When his owner went to work, she would leave Wild Discovery on and Jack would lie on the couch all day watching the tube until she got home again. Some women have to get married to enjoy that experience.

Several of my dogs have been interested in Westminster, at least the parts where the dogs all run around the ring. And they'd watch as the individual dog was being judged, until the judge moved and blocked the camera, at which point they'd lose interest.

Not sure I'd want a dog that was fascinated by a close-up shot of a big, blue-serge-covered butt anyway.

Vaska had barely arrived here when last year's show was on, so I don't know how much he'll watch, but he was fascinated by the recent Star Wars dog commercial, so I suspect he'll pay some attention to the show.

And he ought to, because his auntie did rather well there last year, winning a certificate of merit, which is two spots down from "Best of Breed." (The other spot being "Best of Opposite," which is given to the best entry of the opposite sex from the winner.)

At this point, ridgebacks are becoming popular but remain obscure enough that the breed is still relatively sane and healthy.

Here, for instance, is a picture of Aunt Esmé, not being a celebrity in the nation's largest dog show, but simply being a doting auntie joyfully beating the bejabbers out of eight-week-old Vaska, shortly before he left home for the Big World Beyond.

But fame and popularity are not without risk, and the better a breed becomes known, the more prone it becomes to being genetically undermined by a combination of factors.

The largest and most toxic of these is puppy-mill breeding. By now, the horrors of commercial breeding are so well known that it is not unfair to say that anybody who buys a puppy from a pet shop is a fool.

The impact of genetic mediocrity, lack of prenatal care and lack of care for the puppies themselves can, if you are lucky, leave you with a dog that requires constant medication or an expensive prescription diet for various long-term health issues.

If you are not that lucky, you can find yourself with an insane dog whose terrors and eccentricities will totally upend your life and that may also bite people for no apparent reason.

Popular breeds also find their soundness undermined by backyard breeders, who perpetuate the sorts of minor genetic flaws a "real" breeder would catch and avoid passing on.

Vaska, for instance, comes from a prominent breeding program but was affordable because he carries a genetic flaw peculiar to ridgebacks. After some minor corrective surgery, he came to me on a "limited registration," which means I can't breed him and sell the pups as AKC ridgebacks. (He also came with a contractual requirement that he be neutered, which has happened.)

But, while there are a lot of very good breeders out there, the irresponsible tugging of the helix is not limited to amateurs and profiteers. There is also a toxic group I refer to as "dog show snots" who, as Richard suggests, tweak the practical designs of nature in order to achieve what they feel is canine beauty.

I don't say this purely out of theory. The most brilliant, insightful, responsive, personality-filled dog I've ever owned, or even known, was Szabo, a Hungarian puli I had when the boys were little. The most concise summary of him was what my son remembered: "When we played monkeys, Szabo was a monkey!"

But you'll notice something, if you've seen the breed at a dog show in the last 20 years or so: Szabo is not draped in floor-length dredlocks.

At the time, in the early 70s, the breed came in two coat-types, straight and curly. In fact, the most prominent dog on the cover of "How To Raise and Train Your Puli" was a straight-haired champion.

The breed standard now states "the Puli coat is wavy or curly and naturally clumps together into wooly 'cords,' which protects them from harsh weather."

Which wouldn't be so bad if the breed didn't also have a delicate temperament. Breeding for a particular type of coat instead of for a particular type of dog has not resulted in an animal that is socially adept, and, certainly, there is nothing in the current breed standard about being able to pretend to be a monkey.

Honestly, the pulis I've met in recent years were hard-pressed enough simply to pretend to be dogs.

Is any of this the fault of the WKC Dog Show?

Not really. Recent Best-of-Show winners have included Scottish deerhounds and Clumber spaniels, and I've still seen few of them anywhere, much less a sudden flood of cheap genetic knock-offs at the dog park.

So we'll tune in Monday night to see the Hound group, and, if Vaska wants to stay up and watch, we'll stick around and see who else does well.

 

(Here's the latest from Team Cul de Sac)

And how I miss Owen Dunne's short-lived "Tommy Watches Television."

Comments

[Sherwood Harrington]

An entirely parallel post could be constructed about CFA and TICA.

How long do you think it will take for St. Bernard - Australian shepherd mixes to take off in popularity?

Emma and Jax have limited registrations, too, as does Guinness.

Sorry for the disjointed nature of this comment. Kelsey's directing it. He wants me to find a dumpster now, so he can have a nice atavistic roll.

Bye.

[Craig L]

Another reason NOT to like the Westminster Dog Show: they've just changed dog food sponsors because they didn't like the old sponsor Pedigree's recent ads, focusing on pound animals needing adoption.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/nyregion/westminster-dog-show-parts-ways-with-pedigree-a-longtime-sponsor.html

They said the dogs in the ads didn't fit with the Dog Show's image because they were "sad", but I think it was because they weren't purebred.

[Mike Peterson]

Wow. I was actually prepared for some flak from the adoption people who would be mad that I talked about getting purebred pups. But, to play with the cliche, most of Vaska's best friends are adopted mixed breeds. And I'll probably go that way next time around, which I hope is about a dozen years from now.

What I wasn't prepared for was to find out that WKC could be such jerks. Ah, well, I said my feelings were mixed.

Less so now than they were 15 minutes ago.

[Owen]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeifMjqpsg0

[Mike Peterson]

I really, really, really despised "A Mighty Wind," because they just didn't get it. They mocked something, not for its own faults, but for what they perceived to be its faults, based on stupid media images they (foolishly) believed to be true.

On the other hand, I loved "Best in Show."