4 ms·

The idea of purebred dogs is a fairly recent concept and a pretty terrible one. We understand the ramifications of inbreeding in humans, so I don’t know why it

The idea of purebred dogs is a fairly recent concept and a pretty terrible one. We understand the ramifications of inbreeding in humans, so I don’t know why it seems to be such a cognitive leap for folks to understand why inbred dogs are less healthy and often develop undesirable traits (alongside some inbred desirable ones). I have had many dogs over the years a number of mutts and a number of pure bred dogs and the pure bred dogs have almost always had both personality and health issues to varying degrees. The mutts tend to have a more even disposition and are longer lived.

suzzer99 4y ago
I agree with all of this except Great Pyrenees, which are the BEST DOGS IN THE WORLD. Mutts are second.
wyager 4y ago
If you need a dog to perform any kind of specific function, you're 95% of the time vastly better off with a purpose-bred dog than some random mixture. Plus, a huge fraction of the dogs up for adoption in the US have strong admixture with breeds with specifically undesirable behavior (e.g. biting children or other dogs), which is often causally related to why they're up for adoption in the first place. Adverse selection, yo.
data-abuse 4y ago
To be fair, this entirely depends on the breed in question. There are some breeds that are known to have weak bloodlines, and some breeds that are better. It is also dependent on the breeder. Breeders that "cheap" out will be more likely to have inbred dogs since it can cost money for a good stud.
ramesh31 4y ago
>The idea of purebred dogs is a fairly recent concept and a pretty terrible one. It's just that the inbred traits are so desirable. I've had many mutts, and loved them very much. But when you want a dog, and you want to know exactly what you're getting, it's hard to beat a pure bred. Yes they will have problems, but it's a known quantity. And what you get in return is a dog who needs minimal training to behave exactly as you wish.
- amelius 4y ago
  Ok, so this is a pretty selfish way of owning a dog.
airgapstopgap 4y ago
The "idea of purebred dogs" is maximization of desirable phenotypic traits, and is identical to the idea of artificial selection throughout agriculture and animal husbandry, which has underpinned the sustenance of our civilization for many thousands of years. The idea that artificial selection is a terrible idea, on the other hand, is a fairly recent one, and it is entirely informed by its political dimension of eugenics as a peculiar form of totalitarian intervention into human life. Inasmuch as it's terrible to preserve purity of dog breeds, this is entirely explained by a problematic breed standard, usually because it emphasizes some aesthetic feature over generic vitality and ability. There's another terrible (and wrong) idea here, namely that the best way to maximize those generically good traits is through random interbreeding and preferring crosses with high phenotypic and genotypic divergence; that "mutts are the smartest and healthiest dogs" and so on. This, too, is overwhelmingly informed by a misguided generalization of opposition to a certain abhorrent political project. But reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and misguided anti-nazism is not a good rule of thumb for animal husbandry. In reality, it's not a surprise that e.g. the best, kindest and smartest assistance dogs come from breeds we know as reliably helpful.[1] It's also not a surprise that Labrador Retriever dogs have unreasonable appetite and high obesity rate: we know the exact specific gene that's broken which explains it. I hope we fix it one day, that's the least they deserve. We easily can fix it, too. And this is the state of health issues with most non-decorative breeds. > We understand the ramifications of inbreeding in humans When we understand something, we usually can quantify its effects. As it happens, we do understand inbreeding and why it's bad, both in humans and in the general case. It's mostly explained by increased occurrence of homozygous-recessive phenotypes. Basically, most deviations from evolutionarily optimized alleles are suboptimal, recessive, and in the limit, get weeded out by selective pressure (purifying selection). But a very limited gene pool can become saturated with recessive alleles, leading to many specimens who are homozygous-recessive and get the suboptimal trait; and in bad cases, a recessive allele reaches fixation. Accordingly we have different relevant metrics and notions, e.g. of effective population size [2] (number of effectively distinct breeding units in the mathematical model of this population; more relevant than census size when you have technically large but highly inbred populations – corn, dairy cattle, pugs, Austrian monarchs…) and of minimal viable population [3] (number of specimens sufficient to ward off the drive to homozygosity and eventual inbreeding depression). The typically given safe number is about 500. Even very small natural human populations (on the scale of tens of thousands of people, a minor ethnicity or tribe) do not have any inbreeding problems, nor get any heterosis aka "hybrid vigor" i.e. benefit from interbreeding and canceling the accumulated inbreeding depression. Observations to the contrary come from extremely bad cases, like people from isolated premodern villages with some 5-10 families moving to the city for the first time in centuries/ever, and their children being markedly healthier in all sorts of ways (that said, even in such cases, improvements in nutrition, education etc. can explain an obscene share of the effect). But these children do not get more (or less) fit grandchildren after they marry even more genetically distant people from another country – they're already free from the curse of inbreeding depression their ancestral populations carried. What drives these effects is heterozygosity, not total diversity. This is true for reasonably maintained (i.e. without severe recent bottlenecks) non-decorative dog breeds as well. They don't produce super-great mutts. They're fine as they are. 1. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/12/18/griffin-service-dog-gets-honorary-diploma-clarkson-university/2346848002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/12/18/griffin... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population

suzzer99 4y ago

I agree with all of this except Great Pyrenees, which are the BEST DOGS IN THE WORLD. Mutts are second.

wyager 4y ago

If you need a dog to perform any kind of specific function, you're 95% of the time vastly better off with a purpose-bred dog than some random mixture. Plus, a huge fraction of the dogs up for adoption in the US have strong admixture with breeds with specifically undesirable behavior (e.g. biting children or other dogs), which is often causally related to why they're up for adoption in the first place. Adverse selection, yo.

data-abuse 4y ago

To be fair, this entirely depends on the breed in question. There are some breeds that are known to have weak bloodlines, and some breeds that are better. It is also dependent on the breeder. Breeders that "cheap" out will be more likely to have inbred dogs since it can cost money for a good stud.

ramesh31 4y ago

>The idea of purebred dogs is a fairly recent concept and a pretty terrible one. It's just that the inbred traits are so desirable. I've had many mutts, and loved them very much. But when you want a dog, and you want to know exactly what you're getting, it's hard to beat a pure bred. Yes they will have problems, but it's a known quantity. And what you get in return is a dog who needs minimal training to behave exactly as you wish.

amelius 4y ago
Ok, so this is a pretty selfish way of owning a dog.

airgapstopgap 4y ago

The "idea of purebred dogs" is maximization of desirable phenotypic traits, and is identical to the idea of artificial selection throughout agriculture and animal husbandry, which has underpinned the sustenance of our civilization for many thousands of years. The idea that artificial selection is a terrible idea, on the other hand, is a fairly recent one, and it is entirely informed by its political dimension of eugenics as a peculiar form of totalitarian intervention into human life. Inasmuch as it's terrible to preserve purity of dog breeds, this is entirely explained by a problematic breed standard, usually because it emphasizes some aesthetic feature over generic vitality and ability. There's another terrible (and wrong) idea here, namely that the best way to maximize those generically good traits is through random interbreeding and preferring crosses with high phenotypic and genotypic divergence; that "mutts are the smartest and healthiest dogs" and so on. This, too, is overwhelmingly informed by a misguided generalization of opposition to a certain abhorrent political project. But reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and misguided anti-nazism is not a good rule of thumb for animal husbandry. In reality, it's not a surprise that e.g. the best, kindest and smartest assistance dogs come from breeds we know as reliably helpful.[1] It's also not a surprise that Labrador Retriever dogs have unreasonable appetite and high obesity rate: we know the exact specific gene that's broken which explains it. I hope we fix it one day, that's the least they deserve. We easily can fix it, too. And this is the state of health issues with most non-decorative breeds. > We understand the ramifications of inbreeding in humans When we understand something, we usually can quantify its effects. As it happens, we do understand inbreeding and why it's bad, both in humans and in the general case. It's mostly explained by increased occurrence of homozygous-recessive phenotypes. Basically, most deviations from evolutionarily optimized alleles are suboptimal, recessive, and in the limit, get weeded out by selective pressure (purifying selection). But a very limited gene pool can become saturated with recessive alleles, leading to many specimens who are homozygous-recessive and get the suboptimal trait; and in bad cases, a recessive allele reaches fixation. Accordingly we have different relevant metrics and notions, e.g. of effective population size [2] (number of effectively distinct breeding units in the mathematical model of this population; more relevant than census size when you have technically large but highly inbred populations – corn, dairy cattle, pugs, Austrian monarchs…) and of minimal viable population [3] (number of specimens sufficient to ward off the drive to homozygosity and eventual inbreeding depression). The typically given safe number is about 500. Even very small natural human populations (on the scale of tens of thousands of people, a minor ethnicity or tribe) do not have any inbreeding problems, nor get any heterosis aka "hybrid vigor" i.e. benefit from interbreeding and canceling the accumulated inbreeding depression. Observations to the contrary come from extremely bad cases, like people from isolated premodern villages with some 5-10 families moving to the city for the first time in centuries/ever, and their children being markedly healthier in all sorts of ways (that said, even in such cases, improvements in nutrition, education etc. can explain an obscene share of the effect). But these children do not get more (or less) fit grandchildren after they marry even more genetically distant people from another country – they're already free from the curse of inbreeding depression their ancestral populations carried. What drives these effects is heterozygosity, not total diversity. This is true for reasonably maintained (i.e. without severe recent bottlenecks) non-decorative dog breeds as well. They don't produce super-great mutts. They're fine as they are. 1. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/12/18/griffin-service-dog-gets-honorary-diploma-clarkson-university/2346848002/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/12/18/griffin... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population