Cdr Salamander brings the smackdown to the American Kennel Club

Milblogger Cdr Salamander responded to a Congressman who objected to the USA importing its military working dogs.  Here's an excerpt.

Here is the executive summary Congressman; we foreign source our dogs because on balance American breeders in general, and the AKC specifically, are the worst thing to happen to dogs since the Yulin Dog Meat Festival.

Our problem is twofold, vanity and greed.

Let me give you an example. The worse national election of the last year was not Clinton-v-Trump, it was the German Shepard Dog winning the Westminster Kennel Club following the equally horrid disgrace at Crufts last year where the Mother Country picked up our bad ideas. The American GSD is the poster child for systemic animal abuse in the guise of “love” of a breed.

As they have with so many breeds, the “Bench” conformation crowd created a crippled, unhealthy, and generally useless line of GSD that come from the USA. See that sloping back? You do not see that deformity in German, Dutch, and Belgian lines of those dogs. Untold hundreds of puppies are born each year in conformation kennels who spend their lives in pain and misery just to get that look from a few.

As all they are concerned with is superficial conformity to an artificial standard created by people with no care for what the dogs actually are designed to do, nothing else matters. Hips, EIC, cancer, allergies, intelligence, drive, instinct – non of these things matter to the Bench people in the USA - and increasingly elsewhere as our bad habits spread.

The poor puppers have had their purpose bred out of them. Herding dogs can’t herd, retrievers cannot retrieve, pointers can’t point, guards can’t guard, terriers can’t terrorize, and hounds are scared of their own shadows.

There's much more at the link, including examples of specific breeds.  Recommended reading.

I'm no expert on the subject, but I've heard enough veterinary surgeons complain about inbreeding in dogs, and read enough articles about the same (for example, see here), to believe he's probably right.  It's yet another reason why, if Miss D. and I should get a dog, we'll either look for a rescue animal, or buy a puppy from a breeder who doesn't adhere to AKC standards, and breeds his or her dogs in a more natural, healthy way.

Peter