EIGHTEEN

Where Did That Dog
Get Its Breeding?

Good blood, good breeding—if not for you, then
for your dog, to vouch for your social status. The
schism between working dogs and dogs for show and
dogs for sport and the mass of dogs mimes caste and
class in the human world. Or whose dog is it?

Tragically, the process of replacement of indigenous dogs and people in all its blood and gore and tears was on display in the conquest and colonization of the New World in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, when the American West was finally subdued—brought under the plow or domesticated with virtual extirpation of freely migrating bison and the introduction of domestic cattle, and horses. For native dogs, the depopulation was close to total, and for the indigenous people it was not much better. When the wildlife slaughtered for food, hides, fur, feathers, sheep, “predator control,” and sport is factored in, the magnitude of the loss of life becomes mind-boggling, with numbers reaching into the tens of millions—more than can be fully known or measured.

Individuals in each new wave of immigration brought what dogs they could from their home countries, along with a dog culture—that of the nobility as well as that of yeomen, peasants, tavern owners, drovers, butchers, and traders. Along the expanding frontier, Anglo-European immigrants and dogs replaced their native counterparts with varying degrees of miscegenation, often despite laws prohibiting Indians from owning Anglo-European dogs. The Indians apparently found the English hounds more tractable than their wolflike dogs, while the colonists feared that if the Indians obtained their dogs, especially their mastiffs, they would gain additional advantage in hunting and in warfare. The colonists also thought that the Indian dogs were worthless livestock killers. In any event, although the degree of admixture is unknown, the result of all the crossbreedings were the American version of the English “dogs of a coarser sort,” described by Caius as the “Shepherd’s dog, defending dog, and tynker’s dog.”

They were curs or “curdogs,” pronounced as one word—yellow, ginger, merle, brindled, black, or black and white and tan, sometimes with blue eyes so pale, they were clear as glass, with ears of every sort from prick to lop. Nearly ubiquitous on the frontier and on small farms, they were tough generalists expected to hunt game of all sorts, to guard, and sometimes to herd, whether cattle or pigs and sheep was their choice. Local, regional familial lines of cur existed, like the spotted leopard curs of the Gulf of Mexico coastal region, who hunted Florida’s feral scrub cattle for the lucrative trade with Cuba, the inland but still southern blackmouth cur, various mountain curs from the Alleghenies, yellow dogs, and the like.

The exemplar of the hard-hunting American frontiersman and indifferent farmer of the early nineteenth century was David Crockett, the inveterate tale teller and bear hunter from Tennessee. While he was in the United States Congress in 1834, Crockett agreed to have John Gadsby Chapman paint a full-length portrait of him dressed for the hunt, his rifle nestled in the crook of his arm, three hounds gathered at his feet. Crockett rounded up three cur dogs from the streets of Washington to use instead of Chapman’s blooded hounds, explaining to the painter that they looked more like his bear dogs back in Tennessee.¹

In the American slave-owning South, some wealthy plantation owners and professional hunters of runaway slaves had mastiffs or a Saint Hubert bloodhound or a Cuban bloodhound, a fell mix of mastiff, wolfhound, and greyhound designed to terrorize, if not maim, only runaway slaves, the notion being that the dog was bred to despise black people. Wealthy planters with connections had their own lines of hounds for foxes or bears or whatever brought them status in the world of the hunt. The dogs were characterized by how they took the trail, whether they ran nose up or nose to ground, whether they ran silent or sounded all of the time or only when they treed. They were also identified by owner or breeder, or place of origin. For lack of money or desire, many owners did not have full packs. They ran the blooded dogs at the head of their packs of curs for the show because in most cases the curs performed better from the start. In the South, slave hunters kept packs of dogs that they used only for pursuing runaways, fearful that if they let the dogs pursue more traditional game, like deer and foxes, they might quickly come to prefer it to the brutality of slave hunting.²

The dog was nearly everywhere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as an indispensable assistant, energy source, beast of burden hauling everything from milk to rags and cinders, in addition to its more traditional roles, even while its position in human society was shifting. Unfortunately, it was shifting toward extremes of praise and condemnation. Stories appeared regularly in the broadsheets and magazines extolling the loyalty, tenacity, and sagacity of the dog—its ability to think and solve problems, to communicate even with strangers. Its virtues frequently exceeded those of the people in whose care it landed by accident of birth or circumstance. Such accolades usually went to the farm collie or “coally,” so called either for its black color or because of the black face of the coally sheep that it worked in Scotland. Also the shepherd’s dog or shepherd’s cur in general had multiple varieties who shared a reputation as the wisest and most intelligent of dogs.

Yet for everyone who attributed intelligence, emotion, consciousness to dogs, there were those who followed the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes in declaring that only humans could possess those qualities. Dogs and other animals were, to him, merely unfeeling, unthinking biological machines. Widely accepted until the past decade or two by many people, including scientists, who otherwise claimed to like dogs, Descartes’s mechanistic formulation provided a powerful rationalization for the atrocity of vivisection—live dissection of dogs and other animals, especially cats, that were often stolen and sold to hospitals and individual doctors. In this view, the dog was tolerable because it was useful. When its utility ended, so should its life.

Hardcore behaviorists also view the dog as a biological stimulus-response machine subject to the automatic release of certain neurotransmitters and enzymes reacting to specific stimuli. They believe that people are not fundamentally different. Without launching a long argument, it is fair to say that anyone who has ever stared directly into the eyes of another animal for any length of time knows that it feels and thinks, that it is a sentient creature.

The third voice in this trio belonged to those who feared and loathed dogs—or at least believed dogs should be kept under strict control when in mixed company because they represented threats to human health and public safety if allowed to run free. The same packs of dogs that regularly harassed and killed livestock being driven into city stockyards in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New York and other cities also attacked and stampeded wagons and carriages. In those other cities, however, that problem did not attract as much attention, although the annual summer rabies panic sure did. New York and other cities passed ordinances requiring dogs in the city to be restrained, muzzled, or confined during the rabies season—June to November—or risk being picked up by the authorities. Owners had to pay a fine to free them, or they were killed—or sold to researchers.

What is important from the standpoint of the continuing domestication of the dog or wolfdog or dogwolf is the level of human control exerted over the animal. For much of human and wolf history, even with the first separation event, the attempted control has varied by culture in intensity and effect. Degrees of engagement with dogs vary widely even within cultures and between types of dogs and people, including that ever mysterious chemistry between them. Lack of that chemistry is a primary reason dogs stop working with or for a person, be it a hunter, Frisbee player, shepherd, or police detective, and the obverse. That is why some years ago, I started adding “for me” to the phrase, “This dog won’t hunt.” Indeed, the dog might perform brilliantly for someone else—providing it is capable of acting.

I would like to say that dogs will not work for people who abuse them, that eventually, given the opportunity, they will flee or bite the hand that strikes them—a justified act that, unfortunately, has resulted in the death of many of them—but that is not always true. Dogs have long been ill served by people, their putative best friends—neglected, abused, and tortured. They have long been beaten or cowed into submission, which has led many people to call them innately submissive. But just because a dog or person can be forced into submission does not mean it is by nature submissive.

For all their failures and limitations, dogs and people do come together for companionship, entertainment, hunting, tending to livestock, helping victims of disasters, and saving people from catastrophes, as they did repeatedly along the American frontier. A democratization of dog ownership occurred there, as the heirs to Anglo-European peasants and poachers became freemen who carved their farms out of the wilderness, surviving on their wits, their hard work, their skill and that of their dogs as hunters, protectors, and, if necessary, drovers. That was not the case everywhere. Patterns of land grants and plantation ownership forced non-slave-owning farmers in the American South into piney woods with their acidic soils, and not much but their dogs and rifle.

The narrative that mattered was of the sagacious, helpful, intelligent dog. Whether a hunting dog or a shepherd dog sat atop the heap depended on the human’s needs. In another of those ironies that make history appear to have its own volition, dogs were as interwoven into the fabric of the Anglo/European/American culture as they were for Native Americans—perhaps more so in some areas. Then the Western World went through an upheaval that would ultimately change every feature of every society, including the dog-human relationship.

Particularly after the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, the rising mercantile class had close to a consensus desire for legitimacy and social standing in the land of inherited rank and privilege, which increasingly they subsidized. They could not buy rank outright, since those titles were inherited, but they could buy all of the trappings of those titles—the manor houses falling to ruin, the forests and the fields, and the blooded livestock and purebred hunting dogs that they bred themselves. By proving they had achieved the godlike ability to improve on Nature, they showed their superiority, if not to the deity, at least to his self-appointed elite. They showed that inheritance could indeed be changed, although it was a proof that they were reluctant to act upon or advertise for fear of rousing in Britain the sort of revolutionary zeal that convulsed the colonies and Europe.³

Advances in textile manufacture that drove the Industrial Revolution triggered the expansion of sheep husbandry in the British Isles, Europe, America, parts of Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Demand for shepherd dogs increased accordingly, with countries following their own traditions or adapting those of the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, which followed the English model of the active herding dog, with no guard dog. By the time of the French Revolution, France boasted seventeen different herding and guarding dogs—most did both—each adapted to the terrain, livestock, and people of its home region. Germans had a number of regional variations on their wolfdogs and rough versions of schnauzers, Rottweilers, and Great Danes—all used as stock dogs.

The Industrial Revolution also prolonged the life of the plantation slavery system in the American South. The racialist justifications of chattel slavery were given a scientific sheen, which ultimately was transferred to discussions of dogs, the purity of their breeding, and the characteristics that devolved to them by virtue of that.

The end of the eighteenth century brought the development of the shotgun, the ideal weapon for killing upland birds, waterfowl, and any large animal at close quarters. Setters and spaniels already existed for hunting birds, and they were adapted to serve the new weapon, but development of new classes of dog—retrievers and pointers, the gundogs—is as significant in the drive to bring the dog fully into the human orbit as the capture of the genetic mutation for smallness—perhaps more so.

Shotguns and gundogs opened a largely unexploited domain, uncontrolled by nobles, for perfecting one’s skills as a hunter and breeder of dogs. The actual kennel work was done by someone else, but no matter. This was a new type of hunting for a new kind of game. Birds were caught in nets with the aid of spaniels and setters or shot with rifles, but not even together could they match what a single man with a shotgun and a good retriever could cart home in a day. Farm fields were excellent for bird hunting, especially if properly baited. Waterways were fine for waterfowl, and no one had to worry about cost and bother of chasing hounds. The retriever, more even than the pointer, who could be seen as an obsessive perfectionist, became the working class star, responsible for bringing back the bird wherever it landed, whatever its condition, and doing so again and again. The pointer was flash and style; the retriever was tenacity and substance.

Establishing a breed of dog or cat or livestock required writing out a standard, describing its physical and behavioral characteristics, and maintaining a studbook showing the pedigree of each animal in its direct lineage. These practices were sufficient to establish an animal’s “purity.” In 1859, the first recorded dog show was held in England. The Kennel Club itself, the first in the world, was organized in 1873 to bring order to the Fancy, as it was known, and the American Kennel Club followed in 1874, but the mythologizing of breeds was already well under way. Official breeds are cultural and biological entities born of acts of imagination grounded in a few facts about the origin of a particular breed. Because these narratives provide a frame for the breed standard, their historical accuracy has mattered only if it has become untethered from facts all together.

Recently genetic analysis has been added to and, in many cases, reinforced, the breed narrative. Thus, the Japanese Akita is classified as an ancient breed based on analysis of DNA from American Akitas. Descended from dogs brought to the United States by servicemen returning from Japan following World War II, a time when the breed had been so imperiled by fire bombing, that it had to be reconstructed from dogs who had been sequestered in mountain refuges. The Japanese Akita club insists that the American Akita represents a different breed and should be designated as such, whereas the American breed club, violating its own code that a breed is defined by its standard and registry, refuses to recognize a difference. It would be interesting to test the two breeds genetically to see whether they are indeed the same.

As breeds were formed through consolidation of several existing but similar types of dog or by splitting a select group of preferred animals from a larger population purely because they fit the description better than the rest, the parent stock was demeaned. Writing in the May 1872 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Charles Dawson Shanly recommended that people wanting to see “one of the most pastoral as well as sagacious of the canine family” should visit Central Park before dawn when Scotch collies would bring their stock into the yards through crowded streets, walking across the backs of the sheep, if necessary, to rescue a stray. But he also cautioned his readers to be careful not to watch mongrel collies who were not up to snuff.⁴

Conventional wisdom held that any crossbred collie was worthless as a herder and was probably a sheep-killing cur, which now became not a particular kind of roughly bred dog but a hazard, a killer, a low-born wretch that no proper farmer should tolerate. The dogs of the urban immigrant poor were the worst kind of low-born curs to be found. Thus, cur became nearly fully synonymous with mongrel, with mixed-blood, impure, a term of derision applied to dogs and people.

The total bankruptcy of this assessment was exposed in World War I when British Army Major Edwin H. Richardson set up his service’s first dog unit relying heavily on farm collies and crossbred collies, Airedales, retrievers, and lurchers, small and fast crossbred greyhounds. Richardson avoided purebred show collies as mentally and physically deficient, hounds because they followed their noses, and poodles and fox terriers because they were too frivolous for words, much less work.⁵

The call to arms for U.S. military dogs specified “farm collies” for the same reasons Richardson wanted them in the British Army. Unfortunately the lesson was forgotten, if ever learned, by men returning home. In the United States, they wanted families, new homes, new appliances, and purebred dogs. Up until that point, the price of a pure-bred dog was more than the cost of Model T Ford or a year’s salary for most Americans. On the eve of the war, purebred dogs accounted for only about 5 percent of the American dog population; curs and cross-breds were 95 percent. By my calculations, purebred dogs, including those their owners never registered, now account for more than half of the dogs in America.⁶

Numbers alone fail to tell the story of this rush to pedigree. According to estimates by Melissa Gray and her colleagues, in Robert K. Wayne’s evolutionary biology laboratory at UCLA, the initial divergence of dog from dogwolf resulted in roughly a 4 percent loss of genetic diversity, a small number reflective of a minor shift that set the stage for a major transformation thousands of years later. Since the advent of “scientific” breeding—meaning here the extensive use of favored sires and inbreeding—the loss of diversity has risen to 38 percent. More than four hundred genetic ailments have been cataloged in America’s purebred dog population, most of which sort by breed.⁷

With mass urbanization beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present, dogs were moved into cities and apartments where their freedom of movement was sharply curtailed and their reproduction regulated. In France, the United States, and Great Britain at least little companion dogs and some larger gentleman’s terriers were given extreme brachycephalic heads, while others were made to look like perpetual puppies. The broad point is that many of these breeds have been turned into little more than adornments, much the way those first, early little dogs were adornments, bio-jewelry. They are supposed to do nothing but be submissive and devoted to their people. The danger we face in our ahistorical age is having people forget that these animals are not like the ones who came to our forebears forty thousand or more years ago and set up camp.

The phenotypic change in pedigreed dogs is often hard to miss, since much of it has occurred since World War II. More significant may be the behavioral changes that began with the era of purebred dogs two hundred years ago, said Kenth Svartberg, a comparative psychologist studying dog behavior at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science in 2006. Breeds that do well in the show ring, he found, tend to lack any behaviors associated with “inquisitiveness,” including “playfulness,” which is highly desired in working dogs and dogs sought as pets. Instead, show dogs score highly in “social” and “nonsocial fearfulness.” Pets are wanted to be “playful” and “sociable,” Svartberg said. Working dogs should score high in “aggression” and “boldness,” defined as a combination of “playfulness” and “curiosity/fearlessness,” but few breeds are used for work anymore. The mistake people make is in thinking that the behaviors associated with pets and showdogs today are reflective of past behaviors or their history—they are not necessarily.⁸

At their best, dogs and humans have managed to work together in ways that grant the dog the independence it needs to act.

Imagine a farm spread across rolling hills where a sheep-herding competition is held. The morning was for novices, and a mix of dogs showed up, all from herding breeds. A beautifully bred kelpie took his turn and did nothing but watch his handler encourage him to pay attention to the sheep rather than her. Good Luck. D.W. said the problem is that the kelpie was trained to work to his human’s direction as a search and rescue dog—work at which he excels—but it has made him handler conscious. After a break for lunch, it was time to collect the flock of sheep being used in the trial. D.W. asked the kennel club’s official to send his Best-in-Show, herding trial–certified Belgian tervuren lying at the entrance to the field where the sheep grazed four hundred yards sway. Carrying his shepherd’s crook, the official commanded his dog’s attention in a firm, authoritative voice. The dog raised his majestic head, looked at his master, blinked, and put his head back down. Laughing, explaining to me that the tervuren was mental, D.W. walked into the deep shade of the paddock and released a chain holding her little border collie, Bam, a dog from one of her litters. “Guy showed up with his son and begged me to sell him a dog, promised, ‘We will take care of him and train him.’ They chained the dog to a tree and left him for six months so that by the time I got him back, I figured just having him was a bonus. He’s my best sheepdog now, doesn’t need any instruction.”

She clicked her tongue to her cheek and threw her arm toward the sheep. Bam left at full speed and never looked back. He made a wide sweep of the sheep from right to left and left to right, stopping near the center rear of the flock, where a big ram, having come through a hole in the fence, turned to challenge Bam. The little border collie feinted a charge and snapped his teeth fast and loud. The ram charged again, but this time Bam dodged and then grabbed his cheek, pulling out wool. The ram turned and, with flock in tow, set off for the paddock. There the ram was taking aim at the hapless tervuren when Bam intervened and forced him into a side chute where D.W. was standing, having opened a gate, but she said not a word to Bam.

In Svartberg’s study only three breeds of putative working dogs retained the personality traits—especially the boldness and aggression—associated with work of any sort: malinois, border collies, and working kelpies (to distinguish them from a line of show kelpies in Australia). Those characteristics also often persist in all-purpose dogs, in the curs and feists, and in some other breeds, but even they are being subjected to breeding practices that promote traits other than those needed for work, including, and especially, playfulness and curiosity. It is paradoxical that at a time when society desperately needs dogs to perform certain tasks, like detecting explosives contraband or assisting people with disabilities, or serving as guards and companions, it has difficulty finding enough that are sound of mind and body to meet its needs. Partly the professionals looking for dogs are constrained from finding them by adherence to breed histories that are, and may always have been, inaccurate. They need to cast a larger net.

The most bewildering breed in this regard is the Labrador retriever. It is no mistake that the Labrador retriever is perennially the most popular dog in the country and one of the most popular in the world—a big dog beating little dogs at their own game. In its original state it appears to have been a curdog from Newfoundland, with a mix of just about every dog that has landed on that Grand Banks weigh station for at least five hundred years, largely aboard fishing boats from Europe, but perhaps with some older Native American dog contribution. British breeders refined the rough water cur, which has black, yellow, and brown coats, and shipped it back to America. It is perhaps the best all-around purebred dog—in many regards one of the all-around best dogs—when bred for performance, structure, and temperament. Poorly bred, it can be a disaster.⁹

Curiously, given the present number of these dogs in North America, the most popular large dog breed in the nineteenth century was another Newfoundland native, the eponymously named Newfoundland dog, a big, robust animal owned and celebrated for its courage, loyalty, and sagacity. Lord Byron memorably mourned his Boatswain while declaiming against the injustice of claiming that humans have souls but dogs do not. Meriwether Lewis’s Seaman accompanied the Corps of Discovery across the continent and back. John James Audubon considered his Plato “a well trained and most sagacious animal.”

Nearly simultaneously with the promotion of the virtues of pure-bred dogs, public health agencies and animal welfare groups—joined after the formation of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in 1979 by animal rights groups—began drives for leash and fence laws to restrain dogs in order to curb an epidemic of dog bites and control zoonotic diseases. With fence laws came an expansion of animal shelters to pick up and find homes for or euthanize stray and free-ranging dogs. By the 1970s and 1980s, an estimated twelve million unwanted dogs were being killed in shelters annually in the United States, and campaigns to spay and neuter dogs, including higher licensing fees for sexually intact animals, were launched.

The number of dogs in American households has more than doubled since then, to approximately seventy million, the vast majority of them confined in homes and fenced yards. The number of euthanized dogs has fallen by 75 percent, which still amounts to an unacceptable three million dogs a year.

This process of restricting freedom, controlling reproduction, and determining whether the animal lives or dies is domestication in the fullest sense, and for dogs and humans it remains a work in progress, proceeding in fits and starts with more than a little ambivalence and outright distress over the directions it sometimes takes.

Demands to regulate breeding more tightly are intended, at one level, to end the abuses of commercial breeders who mass-produce dogs without regard for their well-being or health, but their effect would be to bring every aspect of the dog’s life under human control in the final act of full domestication. Legitimately concerned about the suffering of animals, some groups have moved abroad with campaigns to spay/neuter free-ranging dogs (and cats) in developing countries where their living conditions are often squalid. A few of those groups recognize the need to understand dogs and people in their time and place and take action from there rather than go in and declare the dogs ownerless, unwanted carriers of disease, scavengers to no purpose. The fact is that people treat each other as poorly as they treat dogs, which is the source of an age-old complaint in every language—“You treat the dog better than you treat me” or “You treat me like a dog.”

That is not high praise. At the same time that these attempts are being made to bring the dog more fully under human control or perhaps because of it, scientists are probing all aspects of the dog’s genome, psyche, and physiology, hoping to study everything from early puppy development and psychological disorders to the effects of domestication. Many of the tests used are designed to measure the animal’s attentiveness to a human handler such that it follows her pointing to or gazing at a hidden object. The idea behind these experiments is to see whether a dog’s attentiveness to humans is more similar to that of a child than that of a wolf. As predicted, it is closer to that of a child, according to Brian Hare at Duke University, who believes dogs were chosen and bred for their attentiveness to humans. No one seems to have tested the ability of humans to follow their dog’s gaze. Ádâm Miklósi of Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary, and his research group have argued that the transformation of wolf to dog involved changes in communication, sociability, and cooperation. Still, other researchers have focused on the dog’s ability to understand human language, and found that it is better than most humans’ understanding of dog language.¹⁰

More than generating specific results, the tests speak to the broader drive to complete domestication of the dog, to bring it more securely into human society through breeding and training. The underlying supposition is that the dog exists in a healthy fashion only within human society, but that is a limited view that denies the dog its true niche in the border zone where the human meets the natural. The dog roams there with one eye looking forward, the other back, one on each world. In that guise it is a companion, guard, and guide, an ambiguity and a paradox who completes us in myriad ways. Attempts to make the dog a milquetoast, a biological doll who waits all day in a steel crate for the objects of its desire to come home at the appointed hour and take it to the dog park, following the daily drill, deny the dog its freedom. Producing purebred dogs with known debilitating diseases and disorders disrespects dogs and people.

The impetus behind scientific breeding was a desire to improve on nature. Arguably it has failed to meet that goal, which should be rethought. People crossbreeding dogs, searching for animals with intelligence, with the ability and desire to learn and to act—whether to play Frisbee or ball or search for victims of disasters or explosives or otherwise devote their talents to a satisfying task—present the outline of a different approach to breeding and raising dogs, one that seeks to honor and set right our ancient relationship.