WHY I DON’T BELIEVE THAT WE CAN SAVE DOG SHOWS AND STILL SAVE THE DOGS.
Does anyone know any way that we can have any type of competitive shows and yet still get completely away from the popular sire effect? Outside of having shows ONLY for spayed/ neutered animals?
I have tried and tried, but I can not think of a loophole on this one. It comes down to human nature. If people’s hobby is a competition, then they want to be the ones to win that competition.
I had a teacher, my last year in high school, who asked: If there was a pill which you could take which would cause you to be so strong that you could play professional football for the next ten years, but at the end of those ten years, you would fall over dead, would you take the pill?”
You would be surprised at the large number of people who would. Especially the boys, but girls, even ones who don’t like football, would often happily trade their normal lives, to have ten years of playing a game that they don’t like, if they could become famous for playing that game.
I guess the default setting for our normal lives makes 10 great years better than 60 regular years – to many people. Sad.
Perhaps, I should ask: “If there was a pill, which you could give your dogs, which would cause them to win at dog shows, but would so change their DNA, that they would produce nice looking, show winning puppies, but puppies who will fall over dead between their second and fourth year of age, would you be interested in this pill?”
Without there actually being such a pill (to the best of my knowledge), I can know the answer, because I know of 2 dog breeders who have said “It was a good ride while it lasted.” Explaining, they reveled that they knowingly bred dogs that would inherit lethal genes, get sick and die young, in order to get dogs that would win dog shows before the symptoms began to affect them.
We train our children in school by making them compete, to judge themselves in relation to others. This is wrong, it is not good for our society, it is not good for us, or the children. IMO, dog shows are just one more sick example of this abnormal desire to prove “I am better than you”, except it is “My dog is better than your dog”.
I understand the emotional pull, to breed to win, even if the winning dog is not healthy or not good-tempered. It suckers too many people into it, and sometimes the people whose dogs are winning the most, are the ones who stay in dog breeding, become ‘authorities’ in their breed, and influence the future of the breed. When I meet these people, I can’t help but wonder if they breed to win.
And don’t we all know that at some point, there often comes the day when a dog breeder has to decide if she is going to breed to the healthy good tempered dog, or to the dog who wins even though he has/carries inheritable problems?
I just don’t believe that breeding to win is a good thing.
But back to the popular sire problem. In a nutshell: Lots of dog breeders all wanting to get puppies from the same big winning dog, means the next generation has trouble finding mates that are not related. Like if half the girls had a baby by Elvis, but Elvis children did not marry each other, then with the next generation, most people would have Elvis as a grandfather. To make matters worse: Elvis had glaucoma, an inherited eye problem.
If the following generation, half the girls had a baby by Michael Jackson, then soon, most Americans would be related to both Elvis and Michael. Michael also had an inherited health problem with an enzyme deficiency. We might have had a nation of good singers, but there would be health problems, and even more health problems would double up with each generation where half of the women all had a baby by the most popular singer.
Show dog breeders usually want to breed their dogs to winners not losers – that rather is the point of dog shows, isn’t it? They trouble is that dog breeders tend to want to breed to the dogs that win over and over, or who win the big shows, and that too many puppies come from the same dogs. (Genetic variation is lost, and the remaining dogs are inbred).
This means, that after a while, it is sometimes difficult to find a show dog of your chosen breed who does NOT trace back to one of these big winners. Which makes for more inbreeding, more doubled up recessive genes, and more inherited health problems.
The moral question, for show dog breeders becomes: Is it possible to have competitive events using dogs, where there is NOT a stampede to get puppies from the same big winning dogs?
You could have contests where winners were dogs that were the most trained. But even then, owners of winners might imply that their dogs will produce better winners. And just by being findable at a dog show, and saving the owner of the female the bother of looking around, appeals to some people, just as people often choose which dog to breed to based on who the owner is – a form of social brown nosing.
For example: I know a dog breeder who sold a puppy to a person high up in the dog show world (I understand that the paper’s are in the name of a relative of the high up person). The breeder tells me that very few show breeders want to breed to this dog’s sire, or his brothers – they want to breed to this one dog, although he does NOT have much of a show record.
And, after that, I understood when people would try to weasel up to find out about my friend’s friend’s dog, and two of them, came right out and said that they wanted to breed to this one dog to get a connection to the owner. It is stuff like that which causes some people to say “It’s all politics.”
If we give up competitive events, or at least give up dog shows, what will we be doing instead – because many people who are really into dogs, will find something to start up – what shall it be?