Like extraordinary fashion accessories, poodles with topiary cuts and tracts of shaved skin on legs and haunches trot alongside their owners. A spaniel in a shiny pink satin snood waits mournfully in a cage. The dog days of summer are in full swing in Britain, a time when canine events are staged almost nonstop throughout the country. At this year’s East of England Championship Show, dogs with show names reminiscent of wartime coded messages — Mariglen Force the Pace with Becksett, Sequentia Reflection in Arabin — compete for titles and trophies. In between the primping and tense sessions with nervous owners in the ring, the animals spend hours in cages or in the confines of their small slots on long, partitioned benches. According to dog trainer and behaviorist Carol Price, writing in the monthly magazine Dogs Today, some animals “spend most of their lives in crates or restricted runs, only coming out when it’s time for another competition and another chance to make their owners shine.”

Is this supposed to be fun? The answer must be yes for owners like Anne May from Earlswood, near Birmingham, who shows her beloved English cocker spaniels in about 80 events a year. She spends eight hours on an animal preparing it for the ring. For most dogs, however, the answer is surely no. Beauty shows like these have proved increasingly bad for the health of canines ever since the Victorians discovered they could change a dog’s appearance over a few generations through intensive breeding — and that they could show their handiwork for pleasure and profit. Many countries, with Britain among the foremost despite its long dog-breeding tradition, are only slowly addressing the accumulated health problems that may leave animals crippled, blind or deaf.

Dogs were once bred for protection, hunting and herding. The favored traits were those evolved through natural selection: stamina, agility, intelligence and speed. But the Victorians’ emphasis on appearance rather than performance changed all that. Over the decades, changing fashions encouraged exaggerated, distorted features such as massive heads, squashed muzzles, hairless bodies and highly folded skin — all traits that can diminish the quality of an animal’s life, cause serious discomfort and in extreme cases even prove fatal. More pernicious still has been the overindulgence in irresponsible inbreeding, which has spread inherited disorders among pedigree dogs.

The Kennel Club, the top canine body in Britain, working with breed-specific dog clubs has laid out the “right” looks — a narrow set of desirable characteristics that breeders try to match. “Judges judge against a standard, and it’s rewarding and challenging for breeders to try to meet those standards,”

CAVALIER KING CHARLES SPANIELS: These dogs have a serious problem with inherited mitral valve disease, and are more than 50% likely to have heart murmurs by the age of five
DALMATIANS: Inherited hearing defects may be linked to their white pigmentation, and yet dogs with small black spots, not big splotches, and lots of white fur are favored by breeders
BULLDOGS: Once symbols of British stamina, the animals often have problems with breathing, even walking
SHAR-PEIS: Adults lose many of their wrinkles, but these endearing pooches are prone to congenital skin infections and eye problems caused by the eyelid rolling in on the cornea
GERMAN SHEPHERDS: Hip dysplasia, which can bring on crippling arthritis, causes problems for this breed
IRISH SETTERS: They should be screened for hip dysplasia and also for progressive retinal atrophy, an incurable inherited eye disease that gradually leads to blindness

says Geoff Sampson, a geneticist who works for the Kennel Club. But that kind of judging has too often been unrewarding for the dog. In the quest to create the perfect pooch, close relatives will often be mated, sometimes even brother and sister or mother and son. The danger of this practice is that it increases the likelihood that puppies will inherit genetic diseases — some 400 have now been identified in dogs.

Most such disorders in dogs are caused by recessive genes; as long as an animal has a good copy of the gene from one parent, it will override a bad copy from the other. But if both parents pass on the same bad gene — which is more likely if mother and father come from the same family — the puppy is sure to acquire the problem. Even if only one recessive gene is passed on and the puppy remains symptomless, it will still become a carrier of the disease. When such carriers are champion stud males used to father large numbers of litters — in some breeds they may sire 400 litters in a lifetime — they can do widespread damage to the health of their breed.

But pooches with health problems still win prizes. John Smith Baxter, a vet in northern Leeds and once the star of a long-running TV series on vets, recalls examining a top Crufts spaniel and finding that both its patellas (the kneecaps of the hind legs) were slipping out of place, a condition almost certain to have been caused by an inherited developmental abnormality.

The legacy of ill health resulting from too much inbreeding is long. Cavalier King Charles spaniels and boxers are now often afflicted by heart problems. Irish setters, cocker spaniels and collies suffer various inherited eye disorders, while Shar-Peis have congenital skin disorders. Poodles are prone to epilepsy, and 20%-25% of Dalmatians in Britain have some form of deafness. Hip dysplasia, mainly an inherited disorder causing malformed hip joints that in turn can cause crippling arthritis and lameness and even require hip replacement surgery, affects breeds like German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, and Newfoundlands. Elbow dysplasia is another inherited problem. “It is all rather like reading an account of the royal families of Europe after everyone had spent a few hundred years marrying their first cousins,” says American author Stephen Budiansky in The Truth About Dogs, published in Britain this year.

Playing with genetics is complicated by the fact that breeding to emphasize one characteristic can have unforeseen consequences in the complex biological interaction between genes. Dalmatians are prone to deafness, maybe due to some genetic link between hearing and white pigmentation. Dogs with large irregular patches and splotches are less prone, but prize-winning Dalmatians have small spots on a large expanse of white coat — the genetic characteristics that accompany deafness. All these diseases create distress to dogs and owners, and as Dogs Today editor Beverley Cuddy notes, “It’s possible to rack up huge bills at the vet without much trouble, as dogs become more unhealthy.”

The British bulldog, once used for bull-baiting and a national symbol of British endurance, is one of the most seriously afflicted breeds. As a result, endurance is no longer among the dog’s most salient features. Bulldogs today too often have huge heads, short bowed legs and very squashed muzzles. Their pelvises are often so narrow that caesarean operations are necessary to deliver puppies. Says geneticist Malcolm Willis, senior lecturer in animal breeding at Newcastle University, “On a hot summer day you can lose a bulldog.”

Leila, who died before her fifth birthday, is a case in point. Her London owner, Ken Mollett, was not surprised. Even undemanding walks had been too much for Leila and on hot days she would collapse, panting, her tongue blue from lack of oxygen. “Leila led a sad, feeble life,” says Mollett, who has tried to breed old-fashioned bulldogs but has failed to win their acceptance at the Kennel Club. The club feels it has taken due action by modifying the standard head requirement from as big as possible to merely large. Sadly, some judges have not modified their ideas of beauty and still award the prizes to the bulldogs with the biggest heads. And dogs that win prizes tend to be the most valuable to breeders, so the trait is continued through future generations.

So who is to blame for perpetuating the raw deal handed out to man’s best friend? Many believe that Britain’s Kennel Club could do more to bring about health reforms. After all, this 19th century institution, with its royal patronage, has huge influence in the world of British canine fanciers: it maintains the nation’s only stud book, issues pedigree papers to 250,000 dogs a year and keeps 10,000 judges on its books for the 3,000 annual trials and shows it licenses. The Kennel Club’s eminence is such that its registration papers are widely believed to represent a stamp of quality — and a status symbol. In fact, the papers simply mean that the two parents have been registered.

Like others, Cuddy criticizes the institution for never visiting breeders’ premises and for giving out registration papers without health checks. “A breeder can mate a blind dog to a deaf dog and register the offspring with the Kennel Club and no one will know,” says David Hancock, an authority on pedigree dogs. Most reformers would like to see the Kennel Club using registration as a weapon — or reward — in the eradication of congenital diseases. John Bower, former president of the British Veterinary Association, suggests a “gold standard” register for breeders who do test. For years Sweden’s progressive Kennel Club, they note, has had compulsory health checks for some breeds.

Britain’s Kennel Club maintains that breeders must drive health initiatives forward, and that the club has no regulatory function but exists simply to keep a breed register. It worries that if it tried to force rules on breeders, they would leave the club. “We believe we have to persuade rather than mandate,” says Sampson. There is also a financial consideration: breeders pay the club $14 for each of the 250,000 annual registrations.

Even the club’s critics, however, admit that in recent years it has made progress in promoting some good health practices. There is a joint testing scheme with the British Veterinary Association for hip and elbow dysplasia and for eye diseases — although the take-up in some breeds is less than 10%. It also funds health research by individual breed clubs — and of the 750, many are working hard on their dogs’ problems. Other funding has indirectly helped research on the dog genome map, which is now in a workable form. It will allow scientists to begin identifying the disease-carrying genes and then breeders to selectively breed out the problems.

But for any real success in reducing the damage, there must be the will to see the dogs’ well-being put before money, trophies and status. Dogs have been hanging around with humans for at least 10,000 years. Surely such longtime companions deserve better

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