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[Frumple]

Speaking of old boomers...

one of the fucked up medicare advantage plan commercials (the one with "martha", if you've been unfortunate enough to see it) has a variation where they replace the old woman they're using as a way to exploit folks with medicare with a literal puppet

like

there's no subtext, there

it's just text

[Great Order]

I found someone seriously arguing that banning pitbull breeds is the beginning of a cascade into Hitlerian human eugenics.

Where the fuck do these people come from?

[NJW2000]

Dog fanciers can be pretty insane. The stuff some dalmatian owners say about genetically healthier dalmatian crossbreeds being allowed to show at Crufts can be pretty vituperative, considering it's just a bunch of spotty dogs.

iirc, a lot of the problem with shitty breeds nowadays lies with the Victorians (as usual). Massive decrease in the number of different dog breeds, introduced dubious notions about purity that led to way less fortifying, not even very good at developing the breeds they did like.

[Great Order]

"Less fortifying" being a different way of saying "Turning the family tree into a circle"

Not that modern breeders and institutions have clean hands mind, they're the ones who set the standards and continue with the inbreeding.

[JoshuaFH]

It's not just the breeds that are inbred, but the breeders as well.

[Great Order]

Absolute sandwiches, the lot of them.

[hector13]

"Less fortifying" being a different way of saying "Turning the family tree into a circle"

Not that modern breeders and institutions have clean hands mind, they're the ones who set the standards and continue with the inbreeding.

I vaguely remember someone from either Crufts or a breeder (probably the latter ‘cause breeders are by and large cunty) failing to understand that inbreeding a dog is the same as inbreeding people.

He was asked something along the lines of if it’s okay for a dog to breed with it’s grandchild if he would do the same. Or perhaps the passage of time has just made me think that, coupled with my bias.

Like… pure-bred animals usually have a bunch of issues. Pugs and bulldogs have breathing issues because of their faces, King Charles Spaniels tend to get horrific neurological problems because their skull is too small for their brain. Scottish Fold cats have cartilage issues because that’s why their ears are the way they are.

So yeah. If you breed animals for money you’re probably just a cunt.

[scriver]

Those aren't problems stemming from inbreeding per se. Those are problems stemming from selecting for those traits (often because they think it looks good). Take German Shepherds for example. First you have the cultural breeding that gave birth the the "distinctively recognisable base", then on that 100-200 years of breeding without curved backs being a problem. Then in the 80's some idiots gets it into their idea that curved backs looks back on them, it becomes a thing, and thirty years of selecting for that has almost ruined the breed.

Curved backs didn't just spontaneously happen from inbreeding, like some Habsburg Jawline of shepherds. There was way too much genetic material in the "breed base" for that to happen. It was selected for. It was caused.

Healthy breeding does not necessarily mean eradicating "fullbreed" dogs or something like that. It doesn't mean killing all forms of distinctiveness and cultural expression that dogs show and instead having a giant bland "mutt" type. It just means ceasing the selection for unhealthy traits, like shrimped up noses or said curved backs..

[Loud Whispers]

"We selectively bread you wrong as a joke,"

[None]

Absolute sandwiches, the lot of them.

"We selectively bread you wrong as a joke,"

Selective breading does lead to absolute sandwiches, I totally agree.

Oh yeah, it's big grain time.

[hector13]

Breeders won’t do that though, else these problems wouldn’t occur. They’re either getting many pennies for selling purebred animals, or “prestige” from dog shows, which translates to pennies ‘cause now they have prize winning animals to breed.

Fake edit: Christ that was harder to find than I thought. Robert Schaible was a geneticist who bred Dalmatians, and among the various health issues was high uric acid, potentially fatal in that it can cause crystals to form in the urine and if they aren’t passed or otherwise removed, it is bad juju

He started a breeding project in 1973, breeding a Dalmatian with an English Pointer in order to get a gene to bring the uric acid levels down to normal.

Long story short, despite the project successfully reintroducing the gene into Dalmatians, it took 14 generations and almost four decades before the breed was allowed to be registered as a Dalmatian (with an asterisk!) by the American Kennel Club and UK Kennel Club, much to the chagrin of the British Dalmatian Club.

Related to that chagrin, while I am loathe to promote any type of dog show nonsense, as a consequence of the above, a descendant after 15 generations of Schaible’a project was allowed to compete in UK dog shows, eventually allowed to compete at Crufts (this is like… super top dog show in Britain, often televised) which, despite the dog being 99%+ Dalmatian, upset these fine, upstanding citizens, who evidently prefer their doggies to be prone to potentially deadly issues instead of, you know, not.

TL;DR So yeah. Breeders these days prefer breeding desirous traits even if they serve no purpose beyond the aesthetic and leave the animals with horrible genetic defects.

Get a mutt, from a shelter.

[Mathel]

I once saw an old man with a bulldog.

The old man was walking slowly. The bulldog was wheezing and could barely keep up with the man.

It was the opposite of an overly large dog dragging an old human around.

[hector13]

Bulldogs are another special one ‘cause they have trouble mating and can’t give birth naturally because the puppies’ heads are too big.

[Eric Blank]

...I suppose I should be glad all but one of puddles' puppies survived and she had no other trouble, then.

She was a mutt too, but of too different bulldog/pitbull breeds

[Draignean]

...I suppose I should be glad all but one of puddles' puppies survived and she had no other trouble, then.

She was a mutt too, but of too different bulldog/pitbull breeds

The very nature of a mutt usually implies unsupervised breeding and births for each generation which made it a mutt - which means that all close ancestors passed evolution's grand test of being able to bring 1*N babies into the world before croaking. You can get really bad populations of mutts, but you can pretty much guarantee that they'll be able to breed - that being it's own problem.

I once saw an old man with a bulldog.

The old man was walking slowly. The bulldog was wheezing and could barely keep up with the man.

It was the opposite of an overly large dog dragging an old human around.

Slightly old, but relevant:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/wbv7my/i_saw_one_of_the_debreed_pugs_that_can_breathe/