FULL TILT

You’d guess that choosing the faster whippets to use as breeding stock would result in healthier dogs. But it has been found, that the fastest whippets are the ones who carry one copy of a mutant muscle gene. I will write a post on it later, after I find some good photos.

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Chest Bumpers

One thing that show breeders pride themselves on is conformation – breeding good bone angles.
But do they all really improve on nature?

More extreme angles does NOT mean better angles.

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Years and years ago, someone started having lure courses. So, I went to some.

Most of the breeds ran more or less the way I expected dogs to run. Technically, the running gait of sprinting dogs is very different than that of heavier breeds, but not enough that a novice would say “wow, what’s with that dog?”, except one breed. Never seen anything like it. (No, I won’t mention the breed by name.)

One breed ran different from the others. Most of these stood straight until they were released, then the ran with their chest so low to the ground, their chest hair swept the ground, but their rump was high up in the air as they ran.

Why would dogs run like that? I’d never seen dogs run like that, although I remember an drawing of a brace of greyhounds running like that.

My best guess (now that I look back on it) is that their hind quarter conformation was typical for sprinting dogs, but their shoulder lay back was extreme, so they ran with their chest to the ground, but their rear in the air.

You find the reverse in typical dogs, the shoulder is straighter, but the hind legs more crooked (angulated).

One smaller female was fun to watch, I figured she moved like the breed was meant to.

Her front legs ran in front of her, and her hind legs ran in back of her. She cornered like a little sportscar. Her whole body was close to the ground even though she was of a large breed of dog. She would lean into the turns, like a barrel racer dragging a stirrup on the inside of a turn, or a bike racer laying into the turns.

It was fun to watch her run, because I’d never seen anything run like her. Then I started to get over the emotional re-action to her gait, and started to get analytical about it. How efficient was her gait?

She ran with her front legs so far in front of her that they came nowhere near getting under her body.

But unlike the others of her breed that ran with their rears in the air, her pelvic angle must have matched better to her extreme shoulder lay back, because she ran with her hind legs camped out behind her.

Neither her hind legs nor her fore legs, were ever swung down far enough down from the horizontal to get any of her legs under her body.

It was funny to watch her run, because her unusual conformation caused her to run with her front legs stretched out in front or her, and her hind legs stretched out behind her, which left her chest so close to the ground that her chest hairs swept the dirt as she ran.

The conformation of racing greyhounds is so different. Greyhounds reach so far forward with their hind feet, that the hind paws on the reach forward, are in front of the front paws on their backswing.

I was wondering about all of this, when the little hairy female I liked to watch run, yelped and quit running.

Her person ran out to her and looked at her chest, and said “It must have been a rock”.

Huh? a rock? Did somebody throw a rock at her?

No, with her chest only an inch off the ground, she ran into a two inch high rock.

I figured they had to be kidding me, seriously, why would anyone breed running dogs that got hurt on pebbles?

Nah, I’m a people, and people aren’t that stupid, are we?

We are.

Someone asked what did I think the guys were doing walking around the field before the lure course?

Well, they were talking, picking up rocks.

And who did this?

The guys who owned the dogs who ran with their chest to the ground.

One guy said that some dogs of the breed could not be coursed because they tripped over their own chest. They’d run full tilt, their chest would hit the ground jarring them to a stop. Then after a few times they wouldn’t run anymore.

He said one dog hit his chest against the ground so hard he went head over heels. I did not see this myself, but another guy said they saw it too. I guess it could happen.

Years later, I went to watch lure courses again. The dogs of that breed ran more or less like other sprinting dogs.

Had the breed changed or were the funny runners just one line of dogs where the breeder manage to achieve a very well laid back shoulder?

I don’t know, I only know that they didn’t run like before.

I kind of missed watching the funny running dogs, yet, I felt bad about it, because I had learned that it’s like fainting goats, not funny but sad.

I guess now, that the breed was meant to corner and turn, and length of stride was traded for a lower center of gravity.

The breeder of chest bumpers probably took a breed meant to have lots of shoulder lay back, and, in breeding for an upright neck, got extreme shoulder lay back, which caused chest bumping.

Then, instead of changing their line of dogs from chest bumpers back into moderately low runners, breeders changed something to keep the more upright neck, without getting an extreme forward reach.

I don’t know what they changed, but some of the dogs high step.

Does it matter? If a dog is going to live in an apartment and walk on a leash, does angulation matter much? So long as the angulation is not so extreme as to harm the dog, I don’t think it matters, but if it gets extreme enough that the dog suffers, changes need to be made – and this extreme shoulder conformation prevents the dog from safely running.

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So you may ask: “How could show breeders not know?”

Well, in the show ring, the judge only sees the dogs when they are standing still, and when the dogs are trotted around the ring while on a leash. The judge doesn’t see the dogs run full tilt – or full tilt, bump, and crash.

You might ask: “But isn’t that the whole idea of conformation judging, that you can see the faults in the dog’s structure even at a trot?”

Yeah, that’s the idea. BUT there are a couple of problems:
1) the judge has to know what to look for, the judge can’t be faking it.
2) the judge has to care.
3) the judge has to value physical health and functional conformation.

It is not only the breeds of dogs with obvious deformities who suffer, sometimes the beautiful dogs, from what one would expect to be an athletic breed, are handicapped too, even if you can’t notice it at a glance.

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