I read this at the Wishbone site about that stupid dog with it’s own television show. Maybe I should say lucky dog.
“HISTORY
The Jack Russell terrier breed was established in the early l9th century for the hunting sport, by the Reverend Jack Russell of Devon, England, who was an avid fox hunter and needed a dog with spirit and endurance.”
So does that mean that he just mated a couple of different terriers and came up with the Jack Russell? Have all the different combinations of dog breeding been tried?
What would happen if you artificially inseminated a chihuaua with the semen of a St. Bernard? Would the fetus kill the mother? What if you took it out prematurely, could it survive?
“In 1966 a domestic cat gave birth to a hairless kitten in Toronto, Canada. It was discovered to be a natural mutation and the Sphynx cat, as we know it today, came into existence.” http://www.cfainc.org/breeds/profiles/sphynx.html
The spynx cat looks like it’s from mars. You saw one in Austin Powers. Mini Me tried to eat its ear.
the ocicat is bred to look like an ocelot:
“The Ocicat is an agouti spotted cat of moderate type. Originating from interbreeding of Abyssinian, Siamese and American Shorthair, it is the only spotted domestic breed selectively bred to emulate the cats of the wild.” http://www.cfainc.org/breeds/profiles/ocicat.html
“In the early 1960’s, a woman from California named Ann Baker created the Ragdoll by breeding a white female
Persian to a male Birman. She then introduced a female Burmese into the breeding program. This combination
resulted in the Ragdoll breed.” http://www.fanciers.com/breed-faqs/ragdoll-faq.html
So, basically, you try to come up with some combination of characteristics through breeding or chance (is there a difference?) and then develop a fan base.
It’s odd that the breeds developed recently are completely useless except as ornaments. The sphynx has to wear a sweater if the weather isn’t tropical. The rag doll cat has no instinct to protect itself if attacked. The balinese appears to have been bred specifically for its unusual cyan eye color. No wonder cats hate us and secretly plot our destruction as a species.
I would guess the answer to this would be no. There are too many breeds of dog, and different authorities/organizations have different definitions of how many breeds there even are. The number is always changing, upward. Also, there is little incentive for people to try breeding, say, Alaskan huskies with greyhounds, to take one example slightly less ridiculous than yours.
I would think that it would be impossible to have a finite end of dog breeding, as each time a new breed is bred, it gives access to a whole new sequence of combinations permutations (yes, permutations; it may matter if some traits are passed on only through sex).
I give you two dogs of two types. They breed a third type. that third type can mix with the original two breeds for a total of two new doggie types… etc.
Louis Dobermann was a dog catcher in, IIRC, Bavaria. He was also the local tax collector and needed an intelligent, agile, intimidating dog to assist him in his duties. Being the dog catcher, he had access to breeding stock. He bred Rottweilers, Pointers and other intelligent dogs to create the breed that bears his name today.
Most new breeds that I hear about are the smooth-coat/long-hair/wire-hair varieties of a breed diverging into a breed of their own.
How about the *Munchkin[\i] cats? There was a mutation that shortened the forelimbs of cats that bred true, and the owner of the cat decided to breed them. So now there’s a whole bunch of cats that can’t jump.
The majority of dog breeds around today owe their existance to hunting and it would appear to me that there is little reason to create another breed since every likely task is catered for.
I would think that the only real chance of attempting to create another breed would be in the ornamental type of animal such as a toy breed.
To create a breed would mean producing enough of it to have a reasonably widespread ownership, and that the offspring would very nearly always be the same as the parents, not too many rececessive genes in there to cause throwbacks.
It would take many generations of this new breed before this could be guarunteed with any certainty and is one reason why the Jack Russell is not accepted as a purebreed by many organisations.
FYI, it took almost thirty years to develop the Boston Terrier from crosses of pit bulls (bull terriers used in dog fights, what else would you call them?) and French bulldogs. I don’t know why they did it; I suppose it got kind of dull in Boston in the mid-1800s.
Because of the efforts of those Bostonians I have a black-and-white dog who snores worse than I do. (Say hi, Duchess! {snort, snarfle})