It’s hard to understand why people cannot simply look at the health pros and cons of any breed or mixed breed of dog and come to the logical conclusions rather than get on the band wagon promoting their favorite breed and ignore scientific evidence. While I am a strong advocate of crossbreeding as the simplest and fastest way to improve genetic diversity, I cringe at people crossing two different breeds of dog simply because the combination of the two parent breeds names will make a cute new name. Crossbreeding should be used to create genetically stronger, healthier dogs.
Another factor to be considered in crossbreeding is that a genetic cause for a certain “disease” in one breed may be caused by an entirely different set of genes in another breed, thus even if the parents of a mixed breed dog each carry a gene for that disability, they (the genes) may be unlikely to pair up and cause the problem in the resulting offspring. When I cross dogs of different breeds I not only consider how well the mix of the two breeds will complement each other, but also how far apart the breeds are genetically. When I cross Irish wolfhound and Alaskan malamute I believe I am introducing relatively unrelated genes that have not been in the same animal for thousands of years. But if I were to cross my Irish wolfhounds with Scottish deerhounds I might well be recombining unwanted genes that were found in a common founding ancestor of both breeds.
Though I personally have no interest in dog shows, I don’t believe it’s actually the show ring that is destroying registered breeds of dogs, but the closed pedigree system required by the breed clubs such as the AKC. When I breed show pigeons or chickens I can cross any breed I want into my birds and as long as the resulting offspring meet the “breed standard” they can win in a show. If this type of breeding program were practiced with dogs, new, badly needed genetic material could be introduced into any breed and the resulting puppies that meet the breed standard could still be shown, and any puppies that didn’t meet the standard could become family pets. If people are insistent on breeding dogs for show purposes this is the only sensible and sane way to go about it. We must do away with the closed registry system. At the same time breed clubs must also rewrite the standards of some breeds, especially for brachycephalic dogs, so they do no harm to individual animals. |