Variety

Back to my commenting on what retrieverman said about dog breed splits.

The bad part right now, is that some show breeders produce whole litters that other show people don't want. The breeder might want one puppy out of the litter, and the left overs are sold as "pet quality".

I'm sure many breeders would market the left over puppies as "hunting quality" if they could find hunters stupid enough to buy them.

And, it is wrong to assume that puppymills don't show their dogs, and that they don't buy show bred puppies as breeding stock. Puppy mill owners can fall into believing all the dog show propaganda too.

They can start out with a pair of any type of dog and go from there. Dogs multiply fast.

People often don't use common sense when thinking about puppy mills. Some people assume that they crank out mutts or mixed breeds. Puppy mills want to produce what sells for plenty of money. Mutt puppies don't sell for much money, so why would puppymills breed mutts?

People who are shopping for a puppy are usually very ignorant (like how often do you shop for a puppy? Once every 10 years?) or they are terribly mis-informed (the propaganda is thick enough to be a mist).

Puppy mills produce purebreds because that is what people shopping for a puppy have been taught to want. "It's not so much the people are ignorant, as they know so many things that just aint so."

Marketing the hybrid variety of puppies, is one of the biggest hurdles in reforming the field breds as varieties of one breed for each task. the hybrids are healthier, and less extreme, but buyers don't know genetics.

The idea, if you have been reading on this ring, and it's associated groups, is to split all of the breeds into kingdoms of hunting, working, ballsport, show, pet, etc, and then re-clump them into varieties within a breed.

(Like: All of the field bred curly coated water dogs are varieties of one breed of general purpose water dog, all the other field bred retrievers are different varieties of one breed of retriever, all the field bred pointing dogs . . .)

Such a change is best done if the show breeds split at the same time, so that wars of words don't break out with show breeders chanting " German shorthair Pointer X Vizsla hybrid = a mutt", and the field breeders saying "Your incestuously bred pure show breeds are unhealthy and stupid!"

The field bred suffer from lack of diversity, but for all their vast numbers, so do show dogs.

What did the Imperial College of London say? Pedigree dogs exposed (on YouTube in 6 parts) quoted them. I think it was: most of the breeds in Britain have only the genetic variety of less than 100 individuals.

Simplified, you could call all the rest of the dogs in a breed "copies". Actually, it is that they have only more of the same genes, not unique genes, but "copies" paints the right picture.

If you killed 9,900 of the 10,000 Pugs in Britain, would you loose any diversity? Not if you carefully selected which 100 dogs to save.

Think like, you would don't want to save 50 copes of Spike and 50 copies of Muddles. You would want one copy of each type, not lots of copies of one type. (Okay, that is simplified, but it is the basic idea.)

The system we have now is a mess.