Wiston Cap was a most-used sire in trial border collie. Virtually all border collies alive today descend from him. In this case, trialling has reduced genetic diversity.
Specialization is so far advanced in dogdom that even among working lines there are divisions between trial and hunting or herding dogs. Whereas not too many years ago field trials were merely a way to keep a dog employed during the off-season, they have become ends in themselves. Trial dogs, be they pointers, retrievers, spaniels, setters, herders or hounds, tend to be as a rule possessed of high energy, drive, and speed. Some of the trials are timed event with scores awarded for the number of animals treed or flushed, while others require precise execution of prescribed tasks. Intensely trained and drilled, the dogs work close to their handler, taking direction from him or her.
Working dogs must be more independent. Situations on the hunt, the ranch, or the farm are considerably more complicated and subtle than those in a trial, where the goal is to make everything uniform so the dogs can be measured against each other or against a standard of behavior– for example, whether a retriever can follow a beeline for a duck on the ground and bring it back with minimal human direction. A super trial dog, trained to point one tamed bird at a time, might forget forget entirely what to do when in the field on a hunt it encounters a whole covey of wild quail intent on scattering to all points of the compass. Or it might face pheasants whose idea of fun is to keep moving along the ground, forcing it to hold point over empty space or to engage in a kind of moving point, which its handler has worked to discourage.
–Mark Derr Dog’s Best Friend (273-274).
The problem that Mark Derr is discussing here is actually a major issue with virtually any breed of dog that still has a purpose.
Not only do we have working lines, we also have trial lines. In goldens, we also have two types of trial lines– those that do dog sports and those that are used in hunt tests and field trials. The ones that do dog sports are on their way to becoming golden border collies.
Trials are contests by definition. Tests are trials without competition. Tests are based upon a modification of the trial.
But in many cases, I am not so sure that either are very good systems for evaluating breeding stock. They might be fun. The camaraderie of the community of trials and testers is very real.
I’m not denying any of this.
However, it doesn’t answer whether these things are the best ways to evaluate breeding stock.
That’s originally what conformation shows were all about. That’s why the AKC conformation shows require that all animals be unaltered–except in some veteran classes and junior handler competition.
I’m not much into games.
To be honest with you, I don’t get sporting events. I can’t tell you who won the Super Bowl, and I certainly can’t tell you a name of any Olympian.
But I do like dogs.
I have often argued about how conformation shows lead to narrowing genetic diversity in many breeds of dog. The super studs that win well in the shows have always wound up siring many of the puppies in each generation. Golden retrievers have a problem with what is usually called the “most-used sire” effect.
But I’d be lying to you if I told you this problem only occurred in the show lines of that breed. Indeed, the working lines of golden have this problem, and it may be worse. There are just a few really specialized lines of golden that really can do gun dog work at the highest level. It is almost impossible to find a working line golden that doesn’t have the Holway line somewhere in its pedigree. It doesn’t matter if you’re in New Zealand or Scotland. The Holway line is behind almost all working-type goldens. In the US, a particlar Holway (AFC Holway Barty) seems to appear in nearly every pedigree of working line goldens that I have examined.
Now, that problem is something worth discussing in itself, but I’ve done it enough already on this blog. My question still remains: Is this the best way to evaluate breeding stock?
Well, Labrador expert Robert Milner doesn’t think so. On his retriever site, Milner describes American trials and British trials. He’s not at all convinced that American trials are that useful for selecting breeding stock. Indeed, he feels that the selective pressures that make a dog excel in the American trial and test system are fundamentally changing Labradors.
Today a puppy form the Field trial and Hunting Retriever breeding pools has a 40% to 50% probability of being calm enough and cooperative enough that the average hunter can train him and keep him under control.
A great deal of the cause of this phenomena is the field trial evaluation process. Field trials are evaluating and placing value on the wrong behaviors. As explained in the field trial article, field trials have evolved into a game unto itself and bearing little relevance to hunting. The behaviors evaluated for field trials have little value for hunting. In some cases, such as staying in the water, the field trial behavior has a strongly negative value for a hunting dog.
Some of the field trial behaviors, specifically lining behavior, require a great deal of repetition and some pressure to train. The dog that does well at this type training is typically too hot for the average hunter to train successfully. Either our field trial process needs to change or we need to start telling all the hunters to get a PHD in dog training.
My only (very slight) disagreement here is that it isn’t the trial dogs that are wild and intractable. All trial dogs have to be.
But what about their brothers and sisters?
I first started thinking about this after reading Marley and Me. Marley is a good example of what one can get from trial quality Labradors in this country. He was a wild dog that even a correction trainer couldn’t civilize.
These wild dogs aren’t the cream of the crop from trial breeding. They are the cast offs. It’s just like how breeding for flashy markings in boxers produces white puppies. Breeding for Labs that are super active and tough enough to put up with the conditioned retrieves and regular use of the e-collar also increases the change of producing a Marley-type. A Marley-type is of no use to a working retriever person, and he’s a disaster in home (unless you write a best-selling novel about him.)
The trials themselves are not based upon real world hunting situations. The trial dog can be used to work, but it may have been trained out of its talents. I have often mentioned how working strain goldens, which are not markers but are excellent air-scent trackers, have to be trained around their noses to be able to do working retriever work. Nose is useful in the real world, but if nose causes a dog to break its running out line, then that it is a fault.
Now, this problem is hardly limited to retrievers. It seems that this problem also exists in border collies. Border collies are heavily trialed. Although the trial stock in this breed isn’t normally registered with a multiple breed breed registry. The breed has several working registries.
What’s interesting is that border collies are also affected by intense selective pressures to perform at trials. Most trial border collies have the most-used sire problem. Indeed, almost all of them descend from Wiston Cap.
If a show breed had this sort of problem, it would be pilloried on the anti-dog show blogosphere, but since we’re talking about a “functional” breed, this is ignored.
Blog regular Christopher Landauer has taken issue with some of the platitudes that exist in the sheep dog trialing community. Christopher’s blog is an excellent resource for those looking for some relatively unknown histories of border collies. As I also do, he frequently comments on dog culture.
Christopher’s view of the border collie is that it essentially exists as a trial breed. Very few dogs actually work vast flocks of sheep, because as I have written, there aren’t that many sheep in North America.
People like to “play shepherd,” but sheep themselves are not a major part of the US agricultural economy.
Offering a critical view of Donald McCaig’s Dog Wars, Landauer writes:
From Donald McCaig’s The Dog Wars, you’d swear that there were too few working dogs and too much work to do, thus the dire need to “save” the entire breed (all 35,000 new puppies per year) to preserve the working ability only.
But it’s not really so, McCaig admits. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Donald McCaig sings a different tune when he’s talking to fellow sheeple than when he’s pleading the case for his cadre’s supremacy. This is not a new tactic, one story to the ignorant public, another for the in-the-know hobbyists. Notice how his Dog Wars book talks all about the evils of conformation vs. sheep trials, since it’s easy to belittle the pageantry of conformation and it’s clearly not work. But he fails to demonize dog sport in the same manner (at least in the book). Dismiss, yes; belittle, certainly; demonize, no.
Why? Because it’s a hard case to make that Agility is not work. It requires smarts, training, and drive, the only thing missing is the sheep…. and that’s not a bad thing for 99% of us. But with fellow sheeple he talks all about dog sport being THE “Clear and Present” danger to the breed. It’s also hard to make the case that sheep trials are work, not sport. They are sport.
So it’s really not that different from pressures that dogs experience from the conformation shows. The goal is to produce dogs that win in trials. If they win, they produce a ton of puppies. It’s not whether the dogs work vast flocks of sheep in the Montana high country. It’s about winning.
And that is entirely consistent Mark Derr’s criticism of working trials. It’s not about working dogs. It’s about ego. The human ego is the worst thing that ever happened to the relationship between people and dogs.
Now, I do believe breeders do have to have ways of evaluating breeding stock, but these have to be based upon real world working conditions. Kennel-blindness is something that must be fought.
Robert Milner thinks the best way to do this is to develop a British trial system for evaluating retrievers. Of course, the majority of the dogs that are run in these trials are British trial Labradors. Other lines of Labrador are still run in American Kennel Club and UKC retriever trials. And if you mention Milner’s criticism to someone who is in the other system, it doesn’t go over very well.
The reason why I like Milner’s suggestion is that it might be good for goldens. Goldens don’t have the marking ability that Labradors have. They are also more sensitive to pressure, and one doesn’t need so much pressure to train the dog in the British system. Again, these types of criticisms seem to launch people.
And I’m not sure that Milner’s suggestion would entirely solve these problems. I think it would help to increase the average working ability of retrievers, and it would open up new opportunities for non-Labradors to have their working abilities fully evaluated.
But I still think this would not solve the real problems that exist within the fancy and the working dog community.
That’s because dogs are all about institutions and egos. If an institution is threatened by criticism, the egos that are caught up in the institution feel affronted. As you can see from some comments on this blog, it doesn’t even have to be a big criticism. It can be as innocuous as a snide remark in the comments section.
The ego is all caught up in dogs. If you’re not winning, then you’re losing. Your dogs are a failure. Your dogs are stupid.
But if we actually cared about their gene pools or whether these animals can do their work, we would check our egos at the door. We need a more holistic evaluation process for all working dogs. The goal should be to produce healthy dogs that genetically diverse and on average have very good working ability. The current system rewards breeding an elite, but elites are by their very definition a small number of dogs. And we know what that does to the gene pool. It reduces its genetic diversity.
And genetic diversity is a real problem when we start talking about the health of both working and show dogs.The trial system also is based heavily in the dominance model. The dominance model is going to die. Most people aren’t using it — especially the younger generation. If we want working dogs to last through the next century, we are going to have to transcend this thinking.
I seriously doubt that the trial system is producing the best thinking dogs that we can have. Problem solving isn’t encouraged in any working trial– except those for scent and sight hounds. As a result, we are not breeding the smartest dogs and the most efficient workers. We’re breeding the most subservient animals.
I don’t think that any of these structural problems help people purchase good working dogs, and they certainly aren’t helping breeders choose their breeding stock.
It’s all one big game, and the results aren’t that much different from solely breeding for conformation. It’s just a different set of selective pressures.
It’s the same bitter wine, just in a different bottle.
But I had to stop.
1. Because I’m tired of it.
2. Because everyone already knows about the problems– including many people in the purebred dog world. The AKC is losing registrations. If it wants to survive, it will begin reforms. Reform is going to happen in the realm of dog breeding. It’s just a matter of when.
3. There are other things about dogs that are infuriating– at least to me.
However, I’ve noticed that many of the things I find infuriating about dogs a large percentage of my readership finds either acceptable or a sacred cow.
I’m not changing my views to fit readership. If I lose readers, I lose readers. I’ve always had these views, but I kept them to myself.
This blog is getting 4,000 views per day. It’s maturing.
And it’s time to move on.
Not everyone in a AKC breed club is a devil. I’d rather keep these people as friends.
Not everyone who believes in animal rights is crazy. On some issues I agree with them entirely– such as the keeping of cetaceans in captivity. Why would I want these people totally against me?
What I’ve learned through this blog is that there are rotten people in all different parts of the dog culture. I have a very strong anti-authoritarian streak. It pops up every once in a while. I’ve discovered is there is an authoritarian tendency that runs through just about everything in dogs. It’s not just the fierce arguments that people have about things. It’s also how much people believe in dominance theory, even if it has been debunked very thoroughly.
I don’t know what about dogs brings this out in people. Maybe it’s the ego. If our dogs are absolutely obedient, it reflects well on us. If they are free thinkers, we are bad trainers, and our dogs are stupid. We project so much onto these animals that it is really amazing that they have anything to do with us.
Several years ago, I saw an ad for dog testicle implants. These implants were supposed to assuage the guilt that some men feel when they have their dogs castrated. The dog still looks like he has all of his equipment and won’t be the butt of all jokes. ( How we anthropomorphize!)
But I think now we have an even better invention that will take the place of the neuticle as the coolest doggy gadget.
We now have a dog chastity belt. From Fox News:
Bob Barker, a well-known advocate for spaying and neutering your pet, might be pleased with one Louisiana man’s invention as an alternative.
According to a report by AOLNews , 51-year-old Dexter Blanch created a strap-on chastity belt for dogs.
PABS , or Pet Anti Breeding System, is a belt made of polypropylene that consists of an eight-buckle locking system and a washable mesh pad for female dogs.
Blanch is not against neutering or spaying, he supports it most of the time.
“In some cases, it is a health risk for the dog. In other cases, the pet owner is squeamish about putting the dog through surgery. And then there are people who plan one day to breed their pet,” Blanch says.
The Northeast Arkansas For Animals web site states that 70,000 puppies and kittens are born every day in the U.S. With an estimate of 10,000 babies being born in this country, the ratio is uneven resulting in potential pets being euthanized.
AOLNews reports that Dr. Kathleen Makolinski, director of veterinary outreach at the ASPCA, says that spaying and neutering is still the most favorable option for pets.
One turn-off for pet owners might be the fact that they have to wash the reusable pad in the belt though, but the apparatus lets dogs do every other bodily function except the obvious.
Blanch says, “I love my dogs. But when they’re in heat, you can’t keep them inside because it’s messy. And you can’t keep them outside, because when they get in that way they’ll chew through any fence to get out.”
***
PABS may have a future with other animals too. Blanch is also in discussion with a Turkish man about a chastity belt for camels, but nothing has been created yet according to AOLNews .
The PABS slogan is “When the heat is on, lock it, and stop it.”
This is actually not a terrible idea, especially when the health effects of spaying and neutering are now being debated once again.
From examination of the photos on the PABS website, it looks rather similar to those devices that are used to keep the bitch in heat from making an awful mess in the house.
If this product becomes successful, it won’t be long before you can buy them in all sorts of different designs.
Oh what a marvelous time in which we live!
I don’t know why anyone would use a miniature pinscher with such aggression issues as a stud dog.
Miniature pinschers are known to be a little bit cheeky, and some of them are quite dog aggressive.
I also don’t know why anyone would have a beagle running around during this process.
The mating process that dogs go through is risky enough.
Why complicate things by adding a third dog?
Do you really think having a little dog fight before the mating makes things interesting?
