I have a prejudice… I don’t want a drooly dog, an excitable, peeing dog, a yappy dog in my house for an extended period. Personal preferance. I have no problem with those that love those types of dogs. I also think that we humans have overbred and interbred breeds to the detriment. Then there’s the whole ‘puppy-mill’ thing.
My neighbor has a sheltie that she leaves out all day whenever the weather is nice. And it barks, at everything…squirels, leaves, cars going by…it is annoying…I couldn’t have a dog like that. I have learned to deal with the sheltie. My ‘barkless dog’ (basenji) is awesome in comparison.
I love to hear my dog barking. It means he is doing his job, guarding, protecting, warning us.
Does not bark at leaves & wind.
I can’t get him trained to go the:
Warning, intruder button.
Warning, bad critter button.
Warning, a car is coming up the drive so the visitors are here button.
I want in button.
The hungry button.
He keeps hitting the wrong button & I spent so much $ installing the system too. ::: sigh ::::
He has taught us his bark system so now we know what is going on just by his bark.
He never barks inside unless it is way serious.
He does not eat or chase our 8 cats.
I have lived near dogs like your neighbor’s & so I sympathize & empathize.
Out here where we are we need a dog like Zeus. 140# of smart.
When it gets cold, we can’t hardly get him inside. ½ St Bernard ½ Pyrenees.
Zeus says,“18°F, perfect, now I can run & play and sleep on the ground or the deck. Ahhhhhhhhh, my kind of living.”
In the 1990s ago my mother used to work in a small laboratory that grew into this, typing up pathologists notes. Being at the time one of only a tiny handful of proper animal labs in Europe, they used to get materials in from all over the place and do quite a bit of research. One of the doctors noticed they were getting in more and more liver samples in from pedigree dogs (I seem to recall they were Dobermans) where the liver was basically turning to mush. Not just the normal biopsy samples with an attached list of symptoms, but cases where vets were cutting open suddenly-dead animals to find the liver had split into chunks, or were attempting to take biopsies from sick animals with liverr-type symptoms and finding the liver just came apart as soon as they put a needle into it (with obviously fatal results). All these various bits of liver kibble apparently showed similar types of degeneration and, being from pedigreed animals, once the pattern was noticed it was very simple for one of the vets there to trace the pedigrees back to a multi-champion dog with acres of red ink in it’s paperwork that was generating masses of lovely stud fees and had umpteen hundreds of pedigreed descendants all over the world. The lab contacted the owner and appraised them of the situation, and found that they were Not Interested. It was completely impossible for their Multi Champion Cash Machine to have any problems, it was perfectly prize-winningly healthy, they were not going to have him sampled or tested in any way or and no one was going to mention anything to stud customers. Shut up and go away.
So the dog (and its pups, and their pups, and so on) kept breeding, samples of liver kibble kept trickling in to the lab, business as usual. Unsurprisingly the lab types were a bit miffed but they were in a bit of a tight spot confidentiality-wise.
A quick bit of googling suggests that it was probably a somewhat-more-acute-than-usual version of Chronic Active Hepatitis or the dog passing on a party-pack of genes for CAH and von Willebrand i.e. blood clotting failure, another extremely common Doberman problem. As usual when googling up the health of any popular pedigree dog, Dobermans are a disaster area.
As for the skull thing, I was getting my wires crossed - I was actually thinking of the horror show that is the King Charles Spaniel, but syringeomelia is apparently not caused by the skull failing to fuse, but by the skull being too small so the brain dribbles out through the back of it. My apologies.
Of course ALL dog breeders are not idiots, but that’s pretty much irrelevant. Unless a breed is either bred purely for working or else so niche that only a handful of breeders are involved with it who are all competent, then you see Gresham’s Law operating in full effect. The puppy mills churn out far more pups and charge far less, while the ‘all for show’ types win every rosette with their perfect-conformation freakhounds. The ‘reputable’ breeders end up with the reputation of having a few very nice healthy expensive dogs who don’t win anything, they have only a few customers, and the healthy genes originating from those kennels are diluted to nothingness in an ocean of inbreeding.
German shepherds are a classic example. The VDF had "A pleasing appearance is desirable, but it can not put the dog’s working ability into question"as part of the breed standard over a hundred years ago and this whole time they have been battling away with Teutonic thoroughness to keep the breed healthy with limits on numbers and size of litters that can be registered, health certificates, blahblahblah. Even in the sixties when my mum bred them, she had to file jump through all sorts of health and welfare related hoops for the pups of her imported Sieger to be ‘recognised’ in Germany. And yet, what shape is the GSH genome in today? Poor in Germany and appalling everywhere else, IMO.
Who on earth hunts elks by turning dogs loose to maul them, and why haven’t they been arrested yet? I live in ground zero for elk hunting and as far as I know everyone in this country who hunts with dogs uses something large, fast and hairy which is trained to trail them, hold them at bay by barking/circling, and wait for their human to arrive with a firearm. The elk is expected to be completely uninjured other than the bullet holes. ‘Downing’ elk sounds positively medieval.
True, there is a problem that not even responsible breeders can prevent yet: because genetic research is still in the early stages, we breed by phenotype (the physical manifestation of genes). Scientists are now finding that some phenotypes are bound together genetically, like the white fox experiments (dude trying to see if he could domesticate silver foxes in many fewer generations than it took for dogs to naturally domesticate from wolves). He found that for unknown reasons tameness comes along with white fur along the chest, paws, tail tip and face.
Also, racing greyhounds in the U.S. are carefully bred for physical stamina and speed and not much else. The adoptive community noticed that now that the dogs are allowed to live their natural lives as pets (instead of being destroyed at an early age when no longer useful for racing) that a huge number of them were dying from osteosarcoma. It was such a trend that Ohio State University did a thorough study and found a very strong correlation in pedigree lines. That is the disease is inherited, and the genetic codes are pointing strongly to just a few stud sires used in the 1970’s. One of which is a famous dog called Dodgem by Design. He was a beautiful dog that threw a majority if his descendents with fawn coats and floppy forward ears… and unfortunately, bone cancer.
Lots of hunters use animals this way. In the U.S. southwest region, many retired racing greyhounds are used by farmers as coyote dogs. I’ve been told that this is a horrendous practice. Due to the similar size of both species, it’s more of a dog fight than a hunt.
American Bulldog, I would believe, would be a good elk-hunting dog. But an English bully? Really? I can’t imagine – they are one of the worst inbred breeds – that any modern English bulldog would be able to get off the couch and breathe long enough to go hunt an elk.
From the dog breed links above:
I just can’t see an English bulldog not completely overheating to death during an elk chase/hunt.
The American bulldog (what my beloved pup is) is very much capable of hunting and holding down a huge elk.
I would like to add that my American Bulldog’s talents also includes “chewing large logs into mulch”. :o
Well, it did bring to mind an old Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown told Linus, “Snoopy is the kind of dog burglars fear most – they might trip over him in the dark.”
Nonsense. Any decently healthy elk would hear the locomotive-engine snoring that emanates from pretty much every English bulldog and would totally be able to step right over one in the dark.
I don’t think this is true at all. The level of understanding is along the lines of “if this pedigree dog is bred from the offspring have a 20% chance of congenital health problems” and the breeding is by “who cares, they’re gonna be worth a fortune”. You don’t need any genetic research to look at medical records with family trees and figure out that the offspring descended from Champion A are sickly and that you shouldn’t breed from them further, while the offspring of third-place dog B are healthier even if they don’t conform 100%. It’s standard animal husbandry and yet ‘show’ breeders of everything from dogs to goldfish gleefully do the exact opposite, because they care far more about the rosettes than the animals.
Look at Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. Hip Dysplasia, deafness, chronic breathing difficulties, Syringomyelia, strokes, heart valve problems. The entire breed is a genetic catastrophe and I personally don’t understand how anyone can claim to be a responsible breeder and still be propagating such dogs. Just neuter them all and start over with healthy mongrels from the animal shelter.
