Very revealing is to see how the breeders think. They’re savages, quite honestly. In the scientific sense - they think they know better than geneticists. Sure they probably have a much better understanding of the popular dams and sires but once breeding doesn’t work intuitively they have no grasp of their ignorance even, it’s classic dunning kruger tbh. Except they are nastier.
Inherited defects infiltrate an entire breed mainly through breeders defending their reputations at all costs. As a breeder, your rep in the tiny community of the hobby is all you have. If people think you are selling defective dogs, no one will buy your puppies or come to you for stud service. Whisper campaigns are an ever-present threat.
In my particular sub-breed, working-type Australian Shepherds, there are several breeders who’ve been ‘in the breed’ for thirty or forty years, whom I now know have been producing insanely inbred auto-immune disorder-affected and epileptic dogs for that entire time. They win Lifetime Hall Of Fame awards. If some poor soul buys a pup from them that has to be medicated for the rest of its shortened and suffering life, and tries to report that news back to them, they are threatened with lawsuits and accused of libel. Extremely few breeders dare to expose themselves by publishing health records of their produce; the punishment from within the hobby is dire and swift. After all, these dogs are all related to each other, so if some newcomer breeder makes public any bad news about their first breeding attempts, it immediately reflects badly upon those old-time breeders whose dogs are in their pedigree.
In Aussies, as in other breeds, there are efforts to create transparency, almost always from newer breeders with less to lose (the longer you’ve been lying, the worse it looks when the truth comes out), so there is some headway being made, but it is against a strong current. And of course, there’s the bad science.
And the fact that the majority of puppy buyers are NOT in the dog fancy, don’t take their dogs to shows, and it probably never occurs to them to give followup information about their dog’s health back to the breeder. How can breeders know what their lines are producing (both good and bad), if they never see the majority of their puppies after the age of eight weeks?
It’s a legitimate point. But this is putting too much on a customer simply buying a product. When follow-up puppy-buyer health questionnaires become customary for breeders, and when I see breeder websites with a page devoted to the genetic defects their dogs have produced, I’ll change my opinion.
But the dog isn’t simply a product, but a living being. If customers want a top-quality product, namely a healthy dog, then they are going to also have to play their role in enabling that product’s creation (which means seeking out good breeders who genuinely care about health, and providing followup information so breeders can know if they have trouble developing in their lines).
I think this is one area where the horse/livestock breeders do have a big advantage. Most people who pay big bucks for a fancy horse are intending to show it, which makes it easier for the breeder to follow the animal’s subsequent career. And the livestock folks keep meticulous records, as their profits depend on knowing whether their crosses are working out as well as expected.
That is EXACTLY the sort of thing more breeders need to be doing. (And which breed clubs need to be encouraging rather than discouraging!) And breeders need to explain to their customers that they’re not simply being nosy or over-controlling, but that they genuinely need this long-term health information for the sake of their breeding program. I know my parents did call Buddy’s breeder to let her know about his death (and she was both shocked and very pleased to hear he’d lived such a long and healthy life), but I also suspect they simply never thought to give her an update every now and then while he was alive. Too bad; she may well have found the information useful when planning later breedings.
I’m not arguing with you. However, I’ve owned working Aussies for ten years, I run a very large community website for them, and have at least internetted with if not met almost every major and many minor breeders (which totals up less than 200 people altogether). I know exactly two breeders who post their dogs’ bad genetic news, and one has only bred three litters in fifteen years.
Everyone else, the only way I know what genetic junk has surfaced in their dogs is through the gossip line, and my info is necessarily at least third hand and can’t be verified because almost every breeder I know would either lie to me, evade, or blow up in a fury if I asked them directly. And then I would be on their shit list for the rest of their life. So to require a Joe Blow customer who just wants a pup to find out what I know after ten years of investment in it is pretty damn unreasonable if you ask me.
Hobby breeders, in my experience, are convinced they are doing everything they can to ensure the health of their dogs. But, they are both deluded and deluding. I don’t attribute malice and certainly not venality to them, just delusion and denial. But that’s sufficient.
Oh, I understand what you’re saying, Ulfreida, and I agree with it. There’s a LOT of denial and delusion in the dog fancy. I think part of the problem is that people believe that when (NOT if, but WHEN) the day comes their top stud dog is found to be the carrier of something awful or one of their foundation bitches proves to be passing on something nasty to her kids, it’s a sign they’ve done something wrong. But unless they were deliberately closing their eyes to a problem or avoiding doing any health testing, it’s not. Since all animals (just like all people) carry some ugly recessive genes in their genetic makeup, sooner or later a breeder is going to run across a problem. It’s impossible for anyone to breed 100% genetically healthy animals, they simply don’t exist. Maybe if people would accept that fact and stop getting so defensive about health and temperament issues with their lines, those issues could be addressed before they spread to the point of becoming crippling problems for the breed.
(And if pigs had wings, they’d roost in trees. Still, we can dream.)