Best in Show Daily joins the 21st Century

Link to article

For those that don't know, Best in Show Daily is an online US magazine for show-heads.  It is marked - in my mind at least - for endless scrolling ads for dead-eyed show dogs and an almost total buy-in to the show-world paradigm.

It whinges a lot about those terrible animal rights peeps spoiling their lovely hobby and continues in the main to promote damaging and unscientific breeding practices (top-winning dogs must be the best... nuffin' wrong with popular sires... hybrid vigour in dogs is a myth... line-breeding is good).

As you might imagine, it hated Pedigree Dogs Exposed. 

"Pedigree Dogs Exposed was incorrect, totally and fantastically and horrifyingly wrong, in its conclusions," wrote one of its contributors, Cardigan breeder Joanna Kimbal, who also writes the rufflyspeaking.net blog.

In fact, although Joanna clearly disagreed with Pedigree Dogs Exposed, she writes a lot of sense on her blog. I suspect that if we sat down over a cup of tea we'd find much on which to agree.

And it was a real pleasure to see this new article by Joanna who has been off the scene for a while.

In How we must change as breeders and why, Joanna delivers a strong piece arguing for reform in the way we breed dogs. And, specifically, she makes a very strong case for genetic diversity.

"Maximum genetic variation is essential to a population that can withstand stress. If you lose genetic variation, you end up with substantially lower resistance to disease and you stand a good chance of concentrating deleterious genes. Loss of genetic variation is why we have such huge problems with cancers in Flatcoats, or epilepsy in Poodles, or Fanconi in Basenjis."

She continues (with my bolding):

1) If you�re looking at your potential breeding stock, and your potential breeding decisions, you should add a very important criterion: Genetic �otherness.� We all know the mantra � breed for temperament, health, conformation. But we must � MUST � add non-relatedness to our list. This takes two forms: First, if a dog is substantially non-related to a bitch, their puppies will be more valuable to the breed than the puppies of a closely related dog and bitch. Second, families are best used widely, not narrowly. If there are four breedings to be done, using four sisters once is better for the breed than using one sister four times. 

2) We need more people breeding their dogs. If we�re going to make wider breeding happen, we need buy-in and breeding on a much wider scale. Please note that I don�t mean we necessarily need more puppies � we need more mothers and fathers being used, more dogs left intact, more bitches making the babies. WE NEED MORE BREEDERS. We must critically examine how we sell our puppies, how we restrict our buyers� breeding choices, and how we determine which dogs are breedable. The current model is NOT SUSTAINABLE. Going on as we are doing now is 100% doomed to fail, as our human numbers dwindle and the dogs being shown and bred become more and more closely related. They are two converging lines, and where they meet (where our breed reaches a point at which it is no longer capable of being sustained in a healthy way) is visible. So this is not a choice we have. We MUST change enough to carry our breed forward.

Read the whole thing here.