Quote:
Originally Posted by chachi  By the way Nancy oh Nancy where are you if anyone knows and explains the need for the standard as well as it can be stated its you we need you on this thread |
Ha ha, I've been trying to get Gemy to write a nice sticky about what standard is and why we need a standard. The word “purebred” is a manmade term, it really means very little, it just means that the dog has come from other dogs who were considered to be of this breed. Not all breeders are all that good or even careful, so just because you have an AKC registered dog, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the dog is pure without any mixture, but let’s just say for this discussion, it is. If you take two “purebred” Yorkies, or even 10 purebred yorkies and start breeding them together you can get dogs that have very little in common with the traditional Yorkies. Good breeders pick and choose attributes or physical characteristics that they want to pass on. Bad breeders breed their pets or whatever dogs they have. If you purposely pick out the dogs that were the worst examples of standard, droopy ears, curly coat, long body in relation to legs, etc. you can by selectively breeding the pups get a very different type of dog. I’m not saying that these dogs wouldn’t be cute or even beautiful, they just wouldn’t look like a Yorkie. When knowledgeable people can’t immediately identify the breed of dog, then it means breeders haven’t been breeding to any standard. No dog is perfect, but you try to breed the best examples of the breed that you can, why breed into the line, something that could be dangerous down the road and even a large size could prove dangerous, down the road. Dogs have one of the richest genotypes of any animal and that's why we can get such huge variation of looks between breeds, but we get these variations by choosing which animals to breed and which not to breed. A hundred years ago, it wasn’t so important that people were breeding willy-nilly, most dogs could find a home, many didn’t get good health care and didn’t live long, so that it was fairly easy to find a home for most dogs. Things have changed, it’s a global problem, and in this country we kill millions of dogs a year. In other countries where spay and neuter laws aren’t common, it’s fairly common to see dogs starving to death. While I believe it’s a free country and you can breed your pet if you want to, I think it’s a tragic mistake and it just means another dog will be put to death. The only reason for breeding is to preserve and improve the breed, there are too many pets available. While I love my babies to death, dogs are not human and they aren’t enriched by producing “children”.