You know those game ranches that produce trophy animals for people to hunt?

You know– the ones that both the animal rights activists and the self-styled defenders of the “true hunt” defame?

Well, they are actually saving endangered species! And the US Fish and Wildlife Service used to agree!

Check out this 60 Minutes piece on the role that these ranches are playing in saving certain endangered species.

I have a very different view of these ranches than I once did. I’m opposed to canned hunting in which people shoot animals in cages, but I have nothing against these well-run game ranches.

Altruism alone won’t save many endangered species. Economic value is a very is very important conservation tool, whether people want to admit it or not.

This is amazing footage!

Source.

San Nicolas island foxes (Urocyon littoralis) are thought to be least genetically diverse of all vertebrates. However, they have been able to maintain diversity and heterozygosity of their MHC haplotypes.

On my previous post entitled “Why is inbreeding bad?” I noted that one of the real issues with inbreeding is an impaired immune system as the result of losing diversity and heterozygosity in MHC/DLA haplotypes.

The MHC stands for the Major Histocompatibility Complex.  The MHC is cell surface molecule that is encoded by a relatively large gene family.  The MHC  molecule controls some of the actions of the leukocytes, “the white blood cells.”  As you might remember from your high school health class, leukocytes are the blood cells that act as police, taking out infectious diseases and foreign materials, including cancerous cells.

Possessing a greater diversity in MHC haplotypes allows the organism a heightened ability to control what leukocytes do when exposed to a variety of challenges to the immune system. Reduced diversity winds up restricting the immune system’s ability to fight disease.  Possessing a heterozygous MHC haplotypes also provides greater immune resistance than possessing homozygous MHC haplotypes.

In humans, the MHC is called the human leukocyte antigen system, usually abbreviated as HLA. In dogs, it is called the dog leukocyte antigen system, which is abbreviated at DLA.

One cannot look at an organism and tell what its MHC haplotypes are. It’s not like looking at fur or hair color.

And as a result, these haplotypes are very easily lost within a closed registry system.  Often, the haplotypes not lost entirely within a breed or strain, but because of the popular sire effect and continuous linebreeding  from “the best,” a huge percentage of the population in any one breed can be quite homozyous in its MHC haplotypes.

This has real health and welfare effects.  Autoimmune diseases are becoming more and more common in purebred dogs. Some breeds are highly susceptible to cancer, which might be partially the result of the decrease in MHC diversity of dogs within the closed registry system.  Allergies are also implicated to this reduction in MHC diversity and heterozygosity. The MHC also has some effect upon reproductive cells, which is one reason why certain breeds and strains have issues with fertility.

So what can be done?

Well, the easy answer is to do away with rigid closed registry systems and allow the different dog breeds to exist as very genetically diverse populations.

However, it is possible to breed for great MHC diversity in domestic dogs, even within the closed registry system.

To understand how this is possible, we will have to change species again.

Take the San Nicolas population of the island fox (Urocyon littoralis). This population is considered the least genetically variable of all sexually reproducing animals.

However, despite its lack of genetic diversity, this population of island fox has relatively diverse MHC haplotypes.

How does it do this?

Well, a study led by Andres Aguilar (2004)  found that the San Nicolas foxes likely were able to maintain their diverse MHC haplotypes through what is known as balancing selection. Balancing selection occurs when population keep multiple alleles actively maintained at frequencies that are higher than the mutation rate. It almost always happens within populations in better for an organism to be heterzygous for certain alleles than homozygous for them.

As we have seen with MHC haplotypes, it is better to be a heterzygote, so there is a strong selection pressure for the foxes to keep their MHC haplotypes diverse.

One way in which they likely do this is that they choose mates that have MHC haplotypes that are different from their own.

This might sound a little crazy, but even humans have innate mechanisms that are designed to keep our MHC haplotypes diverse.

There is a famous study in Switzerland that asked women which men were most attractive by smelling the shirts the men had slept in for two nights. Almost without exception, the women selected the men who had different MHC haplotypes from their own. The pheromones that are connected with sexual attraction in humans are also giving out genetic information such as what MHC haplotypes a potential mate might have.  And it’s so innate that women are able to obtain this information without understanding exactly what they are responding to.

It’s likely the same way in island foxes, which, like humans, typically reproduce within a bonded pair system. Foxes, like all wild dogs, are pretty particular about their mates. After all, the survival of their offspring is dependent upon having a partner that can provide for them.

Domestic dogs, for whatever reason, don’t seem to be as particular about their mates, and thus, it has been easier to selectively breed them.  Wolves and other wild dogs very rarely inbreed, but it is relatively easy to get dogs to inbreed and to do so for multiple generations.

And as a result, it has been easier for different breeds to lose their MHC haplotypes.

Further, it is not just the mere number of haplotypes a breed possesses. Heterozygosity has proven to be more important in determining immune health than just possessing a certain number of haplotypes.

That means that within an inbred population, there has to be some conscious effort to maintain both diversity and heterozygosity.

That is pretty hard to do when one is breeding for physical or behavioral traits– and the immune system genes cannot be readily ascertained.

Well, we do have a solution. Genoscoper currently offers an MHC II test, which would allow breeders to see what haplotypes their dogs posess and what to do with them. Mars Veterinary also offers a test that examines the MHC (among other things). It is called Optimal Selection from Wisdom Panel, and it was initially tested with breeders affiliated with the Dandie Dinmont Terrier Club of America (A NEW GENETIC BREEDING TOOL ON THE HORIZON (1)). Over a two year period, this selection tool has allowed Dandie Dinmont breeders to increase their litter sized from 2.75 to 4.0 puppies per litter. Dandie Dinmonts are a rare terrier breed that has issues with genetic diversity, and these tests could be a boon for breeds that have very small founding and effective populations.

So science now allows for us to do with domestic dogs what the San Nicolas island foxes were able to do on their own.  We can maintain relatively inbred populations and still keep the MHC haplotypes diverse and heterozygous.

However, here are some caveats:

First of all, virtually no dogs are bred without some eye to competition. Competition, whether in show or working trials, has a selection pressure of its own, and a breeder has to considered a wide variety of issues before choosing which dog to breed with which other dog. As I’ve noted before, MHC haplotypes are hard to see, so how many breeders would choose diversity and hetrozygosity of MHC haplotypes over the ability of the dog to win in the show ring or in the trial?  I would like to think that very few breeders would choose immune health over ribbons and titles, but that’s probably not the case.  Keeping the MHC diverse and heterozygous is a long-term project, and it requires a bit more dedication and discipline to breed for than physical or behavioral traits.

Further, breeders have to balance a wide variety of issues when selecting which dogs to breed, and MHC haplotype diversity alone should not be the sole criteria.  Other issues with temperament and hereditary diseases have to be considered in light of the MHC.

Finally, many of these breeds have either entirely lost MHC haplotypes or certain haplotypes are very rare within the breed.

You cannot do DIY balancing selection when you don’t have the haplotypes in the first place.

Even if we might have these tools, one should keep in mind that it is much more cost effective and easier to try to maintain genetic diversity within breeds and strains in the first place. It makes much more sense to keep breed registries more open and then operate selective breeding principles within much more diverse populations.  Breeding within much more diverse populations requires some understanding of how different traits are inherited, but one can readily learn these skills. It is not rocket science, but one can figure it out. If people living thousands of years ago0–before there was even a Mendelian theory of inheritance– were able to produce so many different types of dogs, then we surely can.

DIY balancing selection can be a tool within conservation genetics, but I think it has to be paired with a fundamental understanding of how population genetics works.

Otherwise, you’re going to get into silly arguments with people who think that you can just inbreed and inbreed without consequence. No rare dog breed can be saved in the long term if its immune system doesn’t work properly.

It’s really that simple.

In the end, selecting for diverse and heterozygous MHC haplotypes within a limited gene pool is less preferable than trying to maintain genetically diverse strain.  We have intentionally reduced genetic diversity within dog breeds and strains, yet as a population, dogs remain one of the most genetically diverse of all domestic animals. We have the ability to correct some of the errors without resorting to sophisticated genomic technology, but because the dog culture at large values purity and homozygosity at all costs, we are left looking at the only other option available.

Inbreeding requires so much scientific knowledge and acumen to pull off correctly that it really shouldn’t be done. And the validity registry systems that ultimately reduce dog breeds to inbred populations needs to be questioned.

This is Reggie. He (we’re assuming it’s a he) is a green spotted pufferfish (Tetraodon nigroviridis).

He’s two inches long and sleeps on the bottom of the tank.

His species has the smallest genome of any known vertebrate.

Source.

It is amazing how similar their behavior and mannerisms are to domestic dogs, even though they are more distantly related to domestic dogs than we are to chimpanzees

Reblogged from :

Dogs are dirty, dirty animals. I know because I’d had several, which currently includes a mud-loving, cockroach-catching, drooly mess of a boxer who enjoys nothing more than sleeping her way over every soft surface in my house. The fact that dogs also transmit diseases, and an incredible variety of them at that, does not help matters! Parasites, viruses, bacterial and fungal infections! To their owners! To me, maybe you, maybe your friends! Your relationship with your pet is, in short, a lot richer than …

From  National Geographic (January 2012):

Puppies pull a play sledge for the amusement of supply officer George Black during Richard E. Byrd’s first Antarctic expedition. They were the offspring of the 94 dogs originally brought along for transport on the journey—and would soon be the youngest residents of a part of the camp called Dog Town. “Oh Lord, all the perfumes in France couldn’t have rid Dog Town of its gamy aroma,” wrote Byrd in a book about his travels, Exploring With Byrd. (This photograph ran in his August 1930 account of the 1928-30 Antarctic trip for National Geographic.) “The air in the tunnels was thick enough not only to be cut with a knife; spiced with a dash of garlic from the bulbs that hung over Noville’s door, it could have been served as pemmican.”

—Margaret G. Zackowitz

Too many dog rescue organizations have too many selective criteria and too many rules to be effective animal adoption organizations.

The demand for domestic dogs continues to grow.

Even in the light of the recession and “slow recovery,” more people want dogs than ever before.

And because more people really want dogs, the people who are offering them can afford to be more selective.

Now, it’s well-known that it can be difficult to get a high quality dog off a breeder. Breeders want to have some control over their lines, and they also do care about the long-term welfare of their puppies.

But really, I don’t know of any breeder of any kind of purebred dog who is quite like the dog foster and rescue crowd.

One can throw fits about how breeders demand that all puppies they sell be spayed or neutered, but breeders, although they probably won’t admit it, understand that they have to market their puppies in some way. That’s really what dog shows and trials and tests are about. They do show the dog meets some objective standard– even if we can quibble about the standard. But it’s still a very good marketing tool.

Many dog rescue people have never heard of that word marketing in relation to domestic dogs, and if you suggest it, get ready to have your head bitten off.

That’s because dog rescuers are rescuers. And that in itself is an entirely different mentality.

Now, not all dog rescuers are like this, and if you aren’t like this, I’m not writing about you.

But some dog rescuers are just nutty about the requirements they have for potential adopters.

Emily Yoffe of Slate Magazine writes about these bizarre criteria that rescuers set up in an article called “No Pet for You.” 

In the article, Joffe describes her attempt to get a second rescue dog, but these attempts were only thwarted by the absolute nuttiness of the criteria that various rescue organizations create to keep “wrong people” from getting their animals:

When my family decided to get a second rescue dog, I felt it was my job to prove to the groups we contacted that I wasn’t a vivisectionist. Fed up, we decided to buy a puppy and found a lovely breeder, and our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Lily, has made us all ecstatic.

After I wrote this, I expected to be skinned alive by animal lovers. Instead, dozens of people posted comments about their own humiliation and rejection at the hands of these gatekeepers.

And gatekeepers they are.

Because here is a sampling of the responses Yoffe received on her initial piece:

Katie wrote that she wanted to adopt a retired racing greyhound but was told she was not eligible unless she already had an adopted greyhound. Julie got a no from a cat rescue because she was over 60 years old, even though her daughter promised to take in the cat if something happened to Julie. Jen Doe said her boyfriend’s family lives on fenced farm property with sheep, but they weren’t allowed to adopt a border collie—whose raison d’être is herding sheep—because the group insisted it never be allowed off-leash. [A border collie that is never allowed off-leash is going to be a barmy thing that no one could possibly want!] Philip was rejected because he said he allowed the dog he had to sleep wherever it liked; the right answer was to have a designated sleeping area. Molly, who has rescued Great Danes for more than 30 years, was refused by a Great Dane group because of “concern about my kitchen floor.”

Yoffe then describes the story of how a friend of hers was forced to go to Bernese mountain dog breeder after a bad experience with a rescue organization:

My friend M., who looked into getting a family dog when her children were 6 and 9, had a similarly vexing experience. After she and her husband decided rescue was the right thing to do, they looked online and found a mutt named Rusty. Rusty’s rescue group was having an adoption day and the family made the long drive to see him. Adopters were told not to mingle with the animals, but that specific dogs would be brought to them. While Rusty was otherwise engaged, M. asked if they could look at some of the other dogs but almost all were declared not suitable for children. As the family waited, the children sat on the ground and started writing in the dirt with sticks. A volunteer came over, alarmed. He reprimanded them, saying that if a dog sees a stick in a person’s hand it will expect that stick to be thrown, and it’s not fair to frustrate a dog.

Eventually, Rusty was brought over. He was a little hyper but everyone agreed he was fine. M. told the rescue group they wanted him, and when the family returned home they started buying dog supplies. But a call from the group aborted their plans. “We had a report about inappropriate behavior by your children,” M. was told, which meant they would not be allowed to adopt. M. and her husband were astounded and the children were crushed. “We still really wanted a dog, so we did the wrong thing and went to a breeder,” M. says. They bought a Bernese Mountain Dog who basks in constant attention from M. and her husband, who both work at home. “He loves his life,” she says. “Too bad for Rusty.”

Yoffe thinks that a lot of this control-freakishness over adopters of rescued dogs comes from a general aversion to human and what humans tend to do to animals.

Let’s posit that many people who are drawn to humane work don’t have a particularly positive view of humanity. This natural aversion is exacerbated by years of helping abandoned, abused, and neglected animals, which means seeing the worst people do to innocent creatures. Unfortunately, a subset of these people who dislike people have become like admissions officers at selective colleges, rejecting applicants who don’t fit an ideal template.

Of course, that’s certainly the case.

But another part of it is the puffed up ego.  There is a certain mentality that many rescuers have– it’s the messiah complex. I’m saving this dog from a terrible situation, and only someone who has exactly my values can have it.

It’s exactly the same mentality one see on those shows about animal hoarders. How many of those people firmly believe that only they can provide the animals with the homes they need?

It’s really the same mentality– just a softer version of it.

And sometimes not so soft. Yoffe writes about a woman who rescues parrots and other caged birds, who has dozens of birds in her home that she has rescued. She refuses to adopt any out, even though she’s a member of a rescue organization.

The whole process is driving more and more people to go to breeders.

Anyone who gets to this question on one group’s application—“Do you plan to tie or chain the dog out at anytime?”—should know the answer is “never.” (I agree that dogs shouldn’t be chained outside). And you should know that the answer to this inquiry—“Have you ever had a cat declawed? Will you be declawing your new cat?”—is, “I would rip out my own fingernails with a pliers before declawing a cat.”

But other questions are conundrums. If you think having a dog would be great for your kids, or that your personal reproductive plans are not the business of strangers, then consider how to answer this question from a Labrador rescue group: “Are you considering having children within 10 years?” And who knows what number is disqualifying when answering this one: “How many steps are there to reach your front door?”

Ari Schwartz, a business development manager from Tarrytown, N.Y., and his wife, Lisa, a medical student, ran up against these Jeopardy-like quizzes when they went looking for a shelter dog. After filling out a multi-page online application from a local group, they got a follow-up phone call from a representative who noted they hadn’t given the name of their veterinarian. That was because the couple didn’t have a dog, Lisa replied. In Joseph Heller-esque fashion, the rep said that in order to adopt, a referral from a veterinarian was necessary. The representative went on to note the group preferred that one owner be home full-time. They also didn’t like to give dogs to people who lived in apartments, like the Schwartzes. The couple was told to get a cat. “My wife is deadly allergic to cats,” Ari notes. So—surprise!—they decided to go to a breeder. They now have a Shiba Inu named Tofu. “We absolutely love him,” Ari says.

If an applicant manages to get approved, the adoption papers should be read carefully before signing. It turns out the contract often specifies the adopter is not the actual owner of the animal. Sure you’re responsible for the pet’s food, shelter, training, and veterinary care, but the organization might retain “superior title in said animal.” This means the group can drop in unannounced at any time for the rest of your pet’s life and seize Fluffy if it doesn’t like what it sees.

Many adoption agreements also have a provision mandating that if things don’t work out with the pet, you must return it to the group rather than find it another home. Let’s call this the Ellen DeGeneres clause. The comedian adopted a Brussels Griffon named Iggy that just couldn’t get along with her cats. DeGeneres gave it to her hairdresser, who has two daughters, then aged 11 and 12, and Iggy basked in the love fest. Then someone from the group called to check in with DeGeneres on how Iggy was doing. She told them about the new arrangement. Not only was DeGeneres in breach of contract, the group didn’t want Iggy living with any children under age 14. They confiscated the dog.

So dog rescue has become crazy land.

There are several people in the rescue community who think things have gotten totally out of hand:

There are people in the rescue community who are aware that zealotry is damaging their cause. (The ASPCA sided with DeGeneres in her dispute). After all, since fewer than 20 percent of new pets come from rescue groups, driving down that proportion is self-defeating. Jane Hoffman is the president of the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, the organization that transports potential pets from animal control to private groups and provides training and other services. “You have two ends of the spectrum,” she says. “Pet stores will sell to anyone with the money. And then there are rescue group who won’t adopt to anyone. We need a happy medium.”

Hoffman, whose organization works to smooth out the adoption process, acknowledges that the attitude of a lot of rescue groups is to “try to screen out people.” She understands the psychology of these wary rescuers. These are people, she points out, who save animals from dreadful situations: wandering lost on the street, facing euthanasia in a kill shelter, being removed from a “skank” owner. “They put in a lot of time and effort and love this dog or cat back to health,” she says. “Some get a little overcautious and are so afraid to make the wrong choice. So they err on the side of rejecting what would be a perfectly good home.”

Even guinea pig rescue has some nuttiness:

My former Slate colleague Jack Shafer, now a Reuters columnist, is allergic to cats and dogs. But he and his wife, Nicole Arthur, have two young animal-loving daughters, so they settled on rodents. Nicole didn’t want to support the guinea pig breeding industry, so she applied to a guinea pig rescue. The girls spent hours looking at the group’s website and their 8-year-old fell in love with a guinea pig that was supposed to be at an adoption event. But when the family got there the guinea pig in question was absent because of illness. The girl wept, but her parents consoled her and said there were many wonderful guinea pigs that needed homes. After the event the family awaited word on when to get their pets. But the word that came was that the family was unfit, because it was clear to the rescuers that the pets were for the girls, and the group didn’t adopt animals for the sake of children. Shafer says, “My question is, what adult wants a guinea pig? Of course they’re for the children!”

So off the family went to the pet store and home they came with Nibbles and Snowflake. They eat lovingly chopped produce and contentedly sit on the girls’ laps. Shafer’s analysis of the guinea pig saviors is unfortunately true of many animal rescuers. “They are trying to do something good,” he says, “and they end up doing something bad.”

Now, that’s pretty bad.

I think virtually all rescuers are into rescue for the right reasons, but unfortunately, too many of them can’t leave their egos at the door.

The point of rescue organization is to find homes for animals.

It’s not to judge other people. It’s not self-aggrandizement.

It’s to find a place for dogs that people might want.

And to do that, we have to accept that different people have different lifestyles.

Some people live way out in the sticks and don’t have to worry about leash laws.  Indeed, I think it almost borders on cruelty for anyone to keep a dog either confined to a yard or on a leash for its entire life– especially if it is from a large, active breed.

Now, I might quibble a bit with Yoffe’s desire to let her cats outside.

That’s not because of cat welfare, though. It’s because cats destroy native wildlife when they are let outside unsupervised.

Yoffe has raised an important issue– one that must be addressed if dog rescue is ever going to last.

If the dog rescuers won’t let people have access to their rescued animals, then they will go to breeders.

The demand is that high.

So if they actually want people to adopt animals, they need to find ways to make the process easier and far less selective.

Otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels with the people with the soft hoarder mentality.

Sussex spaniels are in deep trouble, but if you read propaganda from their breed clubs, they are long-lived and healthy. Sussex spaniel breeders would rather live in denial than take the steps to solve the breed's problems.

Breed clubs are notorious for inflating the average age of their breeds– especially if the breed is rare.

Most people know about the health problems in golden retrievers and boxers, so it’s really not useful to deny that these dogs have problems. In fact, it’s much more to the club’s benefit it takes health issues seriously.

Well, with rare breeds, one can sort of fudge it. Many people have bought into the notion that if a breed is less common, then it will have fewer health problems. That’s because that a breed club has more power when the dog is lower in popularity. More popular breeds have more people breeding them, and the power structure within those breeds is greatly decentralized. With rarer breeds, the club has much more power over what gets done. As a result, its very commonly stated that popularity is a curse for dog breeds, which results in all sorts of health problems. And there is some truth in it, but the corollary that comes from it is ultimately false– that rarer breeds are going to be more healthy because the breed club has more power over them.

It’s very easy to deny health problems with  certain dog breeds. Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever fanciers continue to deny that their breed is the shortest-lived of all retrievers, and that it has real issues with autoimmune disorders, which are likely the result of low genetic diversity within the breed. You can do that with tollers, but you cannot deny that golden retrievers have a very high incidence of cancer. People already know that golden retrievers have cancer issues.  You can’t deny it.

But you can if they are pretty rare. Most people who own pets from these rare breeds don’t talk to each other, and if one of their dogs dies, the problems really aren’t discussed widely.

So the breed clubs can get away with what are obvious lies.

Here’s a good example of a breed club lying about the longevity of a breed:

The Sussex Spaniel Association (of the UK) makes this claim on its website:

Generally the Sussex Spaniel is long lived to 14-16 years. The Health Survey of the Breed has been completed, and results are available to members from the secretary.

There is a breed health survey that the KC did on its own. The Survey had 42 deaths reported, which is a good enough sample from a breed that is both quite rare and quite inbred.

The results show that “generally” (which is such a weasel word), the breed’s median age at death was 11 years and 2 months, which is just slightly younger than the all-KC breed median of 11 years and 3 months. The most common cause of death was cancer.  And the dogs tended be diagnosed with inherited diseases at very young ages.

How is 11 years and two months 14-16 years?

It’s not.

The truth is this breed has been in trouble since before there was ever an institutionalized fancy or a closed registry system.

The breed we call the Sussex spaniel today is derived from a strain of liver spaniels that was found by Augustus Fuller in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries., who owned the estate called Rosehill Park in Sussex.  He’s usually referred to as just “Mr. Fuller.” The Fuller family made its fortune with Jamaican sugar plantations– meaning they were direct beneficiaries of the slave trade.

The Rosehill spaniels were heavily inbred, for at the time, it was accepted that inbreeding was the best way to establish a strain.  In the eighteenth century, English agriculturalists had managed to greatly increase the productivity of livestock through intense inbreeding. The notion of breeding “in and in” for “improvement” was at the heart of English animal breeding practices at the time, for these ideas had first been promulgated by an agriculturalist named Robert Bakewell, who saw improvements in the English longhorn, the Leicester longwool sheep, and the shire horse through such extreme inbreeding.

Works for sheep, cows, and horses. Must work for dogs.

Well, it didn’t.

A supposed rabies outbreak hit the Rosehill spaniels in the 1840′s.  There is some debate about whether this disorder actually was rabies or whether it affected the spaniels or the hounds. But at some point after the 1840′s, the original Rosehill strain disappeared. There were a few dogs at other estates, and it is from these dogs that the Sussex spaniel breed was developed. The two major strains that make up the Sussex spaniel were the Wolland strain, which was heavily inbred, and the other was the Newington strain, which had some liver English water spaniel crossed in.

Whatever destroyed them, it is possible that intense inbreeding may have made the Rosehill spaniels more susceptible to disease, for we know that inbreeding reduces MHC haplotype diversity and reduces the effectiveness of the immune system over the generations.  The remnants of the Rosehill strain were outcrossed to liver English water spaniels and to the old short-legged field spaniel.

However, the Sussex spaniel that came up in the new institutionalized fancy was kept mostly through inbreeding. Virtually every text I find on Sussex spaniels talks about how inbred they are– and several of these are nineteenth and early twentieth century texts.

This breed had periods of popularity in Britain as a sporting spaniel, but it almost always collapsed.

The dogs were often described as “delicate,” which is not at all what one would want in a gun dog.

Now, the breed may be capable of doing gun dog work, but that’s not the issue.

The issue is whether it is fit for it.

And if you actually look at the Sussex spaniel objectively, its structure actually drives much of its lowered popularity.

Sussex spaniels have a lot of health problems, not all of them the result of intense inbreeding.

Inbreeding has likely increased the incidence of severe heart problems in the breed, but inbreeding likely didn’t increase the likelihood of the dogs getting hip or elbow dysplasia (over 40 percent have hip dysplasia and at least 20 percent have elbow dysplasia) or suffering periods of paralysis from Intervertebral Disc Disease.

These are all derived from the dog’s structure, which is based upon a heavily-built dog with dwarfism. Dwarf dogs have relatively short legs and longer backs, and this puts stress on the spine. If a disc ruptures or bulges from these stresses, pressure is put on the spinal cord, and the dog is paralyzed. It’s usually temporary, but it can be permanent.

This means that Sussex spaniels have a very high likelihood of being put out of commission for weeks at a time– and a lot of these dogs are going to have both hip and elbow dysplasia.

These structural problems mean that very few people want them as gun dogs– and it’s been that way for a long time.

But that means that the population will stay very low, and very few people will be engaged in trying to breed these dogs, which means fewer and fewer dogs and more and more inbreeding.

Now, as if that weren’t bad enough. The breed very nearly died off during the Second World War, when British dog fanciers were not breeding dogs.

A woman named Joy Freer managed to re-establish the breed’s number from the five dogs that survived World War II, and she very proudly inbred from them.

So this breed has essentially been screwed since the middle to late nineteenth century.

It’s literally holding on by only a thread.

It has spent the decades since World War II circling the drain.  Its popularity continues to decline, and there is no evidence that this trend is changing.

But its breeders continue to make up facts about how long the breed lives.

If they actually were into saving the Sussex spaniel, they would change some of its conformation– and they would allow outcrossing with other spaniels.

Both of these are heresies in Sussex spaniels.

No one wants to admit that the conformation of the dog is destroying it from a functional perspective, and because it is largely structurally unsound, very few people actually want it.

Which just makes its problems that much worse.

I will get some negative comments on this post. I guarantee that most of them will come in the form of people with anecdotes about how good their Sussex spaniels are at hunting or how long one or two of their dogs lived.

Those are nice stories.

But those stories are not scientific data. If you can’t understand this, please do not comment on this blog post, for you simply don’t get what I’m talking about.

Anecdotal evidence is nice, but nothing can be generalized from it.

So until someone shows me a study with at least 40 dogs in it that shows Sussex spaniels live to be 14 to 16 years old on average, I am going to call the Sussex Spaniel Association’s claim a lie.

It is a lie.

It may be a delusion, but delusions are the lies which the liar refuses to admit are untrue.

Which makes them much more dangerous.

The Sussex spaniel is a very good example of a breed that has been ruined the dual forces of extreme conformation and extremely low genetic diversity.

The dog may have had a future had it been bred for greater structural soundness and with some concern for its genetic diversity.

But unless someone begins an outcross program in the breed, it is doomed.

The extinction will be slow, but it will come.

It’s been a long time coming.

***

“It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

–George Costanza