Why Breeding Pedigree Dogs Is Just Eugenics By Another Name

Eugenics is the now-defunct (and creepy!) practice of breeding supposedly superior humans to achieve genetic improvements while sterilizing undesirables. Sound familiar? It's the exact same thing we now do to dogs and it's responsible for a range of health and behavioral issues in them. Ed.

This chapter is excerpted from "A Matter of Breeding: A Biting History of Pedigree Dogs and How the Quest for Status Has Harmed Man's Best Friend" by Michael Brandow (Beacon Press, 2015 ). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

Does a dog need to have a certain look to behave in a certain way? Seeking some explanation for our present-day obsession with predictability, many are surprised to find the trail leads back to eugenics, that dirty word recalled with fear and loathing but a set of assumptions that have as much to do with pets as they once did with people. Few know that many of our core beliefs about bloodlines, appearance, and skill retain more than a tinge of those ugly theories that have made some people and pets seem superior for their complexion or ancestral profiles, and others inferior for having substandard markings or a checkered past.

Most upright citizens have officially sworn off applying eugenics to humans these days, but for some strange reason, they continue to breed and buy their dogs along old eugenic lines. Anderson Cooper was shocked and appalled on his show in May 2012 to report that forced sterilizations of "undesirables" were conducted by the tens of thousands in the United States until as recently as the 1970s. [1] But at home, he had a Welsh springer spaniel, a breed born to what AKC writer Freeman Lloyd once called "a doggie family that has existed in its approximately pure state for many hundreds of generations." [2] Despite its illustrious past, Cooper's brand of choice is now prone to a number of serious health issues and has an average inbreeding coefficient higher than that of first cousins. [3] Blood "purity" has worked against the springer, which has been subjected, like many breeds, to the same outdated theories of "better breeding" that get pups culled for having the wrong coat color, make "good" families feel superior to not-so-good onesand get millions of innocent people killed for their ethnic or racial background. Sterilization, euthanasia, segregation, holocausts, and judgments at Westminster all have a common heritage in eugenics, and despite the fact that English isn't among the many languages that still use "race" and "breed" interchangeably, we have no excuse for not knowing or caring about this history.

Terrible but true: who among us, at one time or another, hasn't been guilty of stereotyping? And who among us has never let looks determine likability? Old biases aren't easy to shed. Perhaps the most obvious crime against progressive thinking can be found in our own backyards, where it's still socially acceptable to say, "I have a chocolate Lab at home," but not, "I only hire Latino/black/Asian/fillin-the-blank maids because they clean better." Why is "We grew up with two goldens" in fashion, but "We've adopted a pair of Orientals" is not? What's wrong with "I have a dog" or "Two dogs are better than one?" I myself have no degree in statistics but question the myth that all pedigree German shepherds are loyal, smart, and trainable because one in a million qualifies for service work. Not all golden retrievers are heroes because one was depicted with a fireman at Ground Zero in a painting that hangs in the AKC's art collection, no more than all Americans are champion athletes because Michael Phelps won some gold medals.

The "science" of eugenics was founded in the mid-nineteenth century as a tool for keeping people in their proper places. "It is, too, a strange fact," wrote Gordon Stables, a firm believer in head shape as an indicator of character, "that the more highly civilised a nation is, the greater its care and culture of the canine race." [4] Based on a similar observation that fair-skinned folk with certain anatomical features were supposedly more attractive and intelligent than "darkies" (too repugnant, many thought, even to serve food on First-Class dining cars), eugenics devised an elaborate and complex system of color coding and measurement, an apparatus that grew more elaborate and complex with time. Focusing on a somewhat selective selection of mostly random and coincidental characteristics that conquerors and ruling classes had haphazardly amassed along their uphill climbs, traits certain groups just happened to share, such as blond hair, blue eyes, a taste for classical music, or a fondness for fox huntingby-products of generations of inbreeding and upbringing only with their own kindeugenic investigators compiled an exhaustive catalog of hair-splitting nuances to prove that races were, indeed, separate and unique. Some races, they felt, were essentially better than others, and mixing racesor "mongrelization"was unhealthy and probably dangerous to all races involved.

The eugenic inventory of racial indicators grew so encompassing and complex that experts managed to convince many that their observations simply had to be true, if only because, it was thought, no sane person would have observed them if they weren't. The subtleties of human skin tone, the way the eyes were set into the head, the precise angle at which the jaw protruded, neck length, hair texture, nose curvaturethe convolution of spirals in brain matter, the spaces between the toes, the distance between the navel and the penisevery detail was carefully gauged and painstakingly documented, then compared and contrasted in ways that somehow always seemed the most flattering to white, Northern Europeans and their white, Northern European descendants across the Atlantic (or people who looked like them). Superficial distinctions were exaggerated to the point that different racial or ethnic groups were said to have descended from separate prehistoric ancestors, a theory only recently disproved by DNA, not unlike the freshly debunked myth that not all dogs evolved from wolves. Embellished bloodlines based on outward appearance, and a rudimentary understanding of genetics that made heredity seem as simple as pigmentation in guinea pigs, were used to explain deeper character traits like morality, criminality, intelligence, and "feeblemindedness." Before long, eugenics had just about every aspect of human diversity neatly mapped, categorized, and evaluated based on looks or social ties. Anatomical and behavioral traits, even personal quirks, were correlated to family, class, race, and ethnic background, or to whether a person ended up working as a banker, baker, soldier, stenographer, poet, or piano tuner. Eugenics explained it all: infertility, spelling, dancing, neatness, insanity, gambling, gout, disobedience, double-jointedness, punctuality, "pug" noses on ill-born Irish, even ball playing. [5]

Among the many errors of eugenics were to misinterpret outward appearance, behavior, and culturally biased test results as indicators of other qualities; to confuse heredity with environment; to overestimate the role of individual genes in the inheritance of complex behaviors; to focus on human pedigrees instead of individuals; and to cling to an archaic belief in inbreeding for blood "purity," already proven as detrimental to half-mad, hemophiliac royal families as it would prove to be for fancy, "scientifically" bred dogs in the century to come.

Like so many attempts at improvement in the nineteenth century, eugenics dressed old habits in new garb. Ancient, quasi-mystical arts of physiognomy and phrenology, and a more recent discipline called craniometry, went into these dazzling demonstrations of mental gymnastics. What eugenics brought to the table was a protective layer of statistics and documents, modern additions of the nineteenth century that lent authenticity to the usual slants on race, class, and any other basis for bias. The arcane assumption that head shape indicated personality or intelligence was now provable with an extensive set of precise measurements. Skulls could finally be placed side-by-side in glass display cases at natural history museums as updated reliquaries to be interpreted as eugenic high priests saw fit. Primitive, gut reactions against outsiders and oddballs because of the way they looked, acted, or dressed now had the blessing of observations showing darker-skinned people did, in fact, tend to be dishonestbecause they didn't blush, which they couldn't, at least not visibly, being darker-skinnedincontrovertible proof that they were born with something to hide. In the same vein, the medieval notion of "blue blood," based on the fact that bloodlines tended to be more visible on fair-skinned aristocrats than on darker-skinned workers, Africans, Jews, or Arabswhose own blue veins were, indeed, less visible because they had darker skinnow had the blessing of a host of new parameters for defining race and inevitably showing fair-skinned testers in the fairest light. National types, patriots declared confidently, could now be clearly defined and separated from outsiders"race," until quite recently, meaning national origingiving them carte blanche to discriminate at home and dominate abroad through conquest and colonialism. [6]