My Mother is My Father's Grandma

My, but I've been chatty. Please remember, for every successful post there is another failed attempt on finishing this week's food column.

I have been reading a very educational, fun, thought provoking blog lately, Terrierman's Daily Dose  http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/. One of you turned me on to this blog, and while I'm thanking you mightily, I also hate you, just a little.

He has already worked through, studied, researched and written about many of the things I've been just starting to puzzle out. He is thoughtful, opinionated, published, uses bigger words and has better sentence structure than I do.

Being the housebound, OCD lunatic I've become, I can't be happy thinking, Oh, well, if Terrierman said it and it's a line of thought I've been considering, it must be right. Not me, I have to check his resources, read his references, read counter arguments and then try to think my own thoughts. So no, I won't become a Terrierman parrot, I promise, but he is fast becoming a reference I trust, so you'll be seeing his name here and there.

Where he hooked me was when I read his hard look at the AKC and the destruction of dog breeds. My idle thoughts that led me to his posts on the subject was pretty simple. I read an article about several AKC breeds of dogs which were going extinct. The Old English Sheepdog, English Setter, Dandie Dinmont Terrier, Otter Hound and Lancashire Heeler were all on the list.

Can you call the disappearance of a man-made creation, that has only been around for the last 140 years or so extinct? Wikipedia defines extinction as:  In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of an organism or of a group of organisms (taxon), normally a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point.

The definition of species: a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding. The species is the principal natural taxonomic unit, ranking below a genus and denoted by a Latin binomial, e.g., Homo sapiens

The definition of breed: a stock of animals or plants within a species having a distinctive appearance and typically having been developed by deliberate selection.

When I thought a little more and did some VERY casual research, I wondered, if a breed can actually become extinct, when does it become official? 

Here's an Old English Sheepdog in 1860

So, was the Old English Sheepdog extinct here? This is a show dog in 1937.
 It's certainly not the same dog as the one pictured above.

It definitely has to be extinct here, because at this point,

I'm not sure it's still a dog.

Then I thought I might be making things too complicated. Dogs were bred to suit human fancy. So, if we needed a gun dog, a herding dog, whatever, we bred them, right? At least it went that way until we started breeding dogs AKC style, based solely on looks and tossed out any concerns about health, ability or temperament.

I found some drawbacks to the breeds that were on the AKC endangered list.

On Old English Sheepdogs :  They are really big dogs...80 pound average. Inbreeding has made it difficult to find dogs that aren't high strung, nervous and sometimes aggresive. These great big dogs are rowdy, think jumping on Grandma, herding the kids, dragging you down the street...they are notoriously strong willed, messy, hairy, slobbery aaannnnd very, very farty.

Then there's the health issues:  deafness, cataract, gastric torsion, otitis externa, progressive retinal atrophy (PRA), cerebellar ataxia, retinal detachment and hypothyroidism, or major health issues like canine hip dysplasia

English Setters:

Think, high, nervous energy. Although these dogs are gentle and sweet, all that can go straight to hell if you aren't going to get them out where they can run. They are known for separation anxiety too, so keeping the in a crate for 10 hours aday is a very, very bad plan.Stubbornness, hard to housebreak, heavy shedding and silky, easily matted hair round ou the list.
Health Issues: congenital deafness, autoimmune thyroiditis, canine hypothyroidism, hip and elbow dysplasia, allergies, and cancer.



Dandie Dinmont Terriers:

These cute little dogs look like they were made for Aunt Edna's lap don't they? If your auntie is loaded...they carry an average price tag of $800 to $2500 dollars, yes, that's per puppy, and really gnarly, then maybe. The cost isn't because they are better, it's because there aren't very many of them. Think teeny, tiny gene pool. Dandies are known to be self-willed and independent, aggressive towards other animals, and not prone to use an indoor voice. But they have really cute haircuts, I'll give them that.

Health issues: Glaucoma, cataracts and corneal ulcers. Intervertebral disk disease, hip dysplasia, and luxating patella (loose knees). Luxating shoulder can also occur. Allergies, hypothyroidism, Cushing's disease and lymphosarcoma.

So. My next thought was, maybe these dogs don't need to be saved, resurrected, considered endangered, or anything else. Maybe, they are fading away because there is no longer a consumer demand. Since the breeds themselves were created for our personal pleasure, why shouldn't they fade away as they become obsolete? It's not like we'd be eliminating dogs, just no longer breeding the ones nobody wants. 

Who really needs a giant, hairy sheep dog? Bird dogs are becoming harder to find, because there aren't as many people using them. It's interesting to think about what kind of breeds will develop in the future. You know, after Armageddon, when we need our dogs to start working for a living again.  

If dogs were bred like horses, developed because of what they do instead of what they look like...well, except for color, we do like to breed for color.

That's not working out either. 

Take quarter horses for example. The hottest bloodlines come from the winners in the show pen, right? The electric flash of a top cutting horse, the slides and spins of a top reining horse, the elegance of a top pleasure horse. OK. Stop laughing, I mean it.

Equine breeders may be breeding for ability, but what about soundness, longevity, temperament, general health?  

Let's think about HERDA, HYPP, thin soles, bad guts, Overo Lethal White Syndrome...

Where did my train of thought take me? Other than to Terrierman, they took me down a pretty broad path. I'm starting to think over the last couple hundred years, breeding animals is more about playing God than continuing on with the animals that work best with us. We're just not that good at it.

My other problem is, mugwump that I am, I just love my inbred cow horse. I love who she is and what she can do. I'll never forget telling the Big K - " Training this filly has made me realize that up until now, I've been training chihuahua's to be sled dogs and I finally got me a husky."

Plus, while researching the rare breed list, I came across this little guy, the Lancashire heeler  http://dogtime.com/dog-breeds/lancashire-heeler. How cool is he? Everything I read says this is my kind of dog and if I ever get a chance, I'll be getting one.