(There is now a White German Shepherd Club, but it will be a long time before the
AKC or the fanciers of this breed accept the color. The gene that carries white in the German Shepherd is said to carry serious
faults as well. But by no means does everyone agree.) In some breeds biting is specified as a kind of ultimate no-no. In no
breed is it considered good manners. AKC rules are very specific. Menacing, suggesting that the dog should not be approached
and cannot be handled safely, calls for dismissal.
I once watched the judging of a Working Dog breed. There were seven dogs in the ring, and each was goofier than the next.
Every time the judge tried to approach a dog, it went ballistic, acting more like a kite on a string than a dog on a lead.
The judge walked up and down the line, studying the dogs from a distance and stroking his chin. At the end he dismissed the
entire class with the comment that there wasn’t a single dog worth pinning a ribbon on at any level. There was a lot of grumbling,
but the judge was right.
Among the 160 or so breeds and varieties of dogs recognized for show purposes by the American Kennel Club, there are thousands
of details like those above that forever separate show dogs from pet-quality purebred dogs. However, understanding that concept
does not assure you of acquiring a show-quality dog. You select your adorable puppy, but some other force will determine what
the grown dog will come to be like. Ultimately, you live with and love the dog that fate has designed for your health and
hearth. If you can’t love your dog, faults and all, you are missing out on a major part of the fun.
Expectations can be high (they usually are in the dog-show world; hope really does spring eternal), expenses can have a brutalizing
impact on a family’s living standards, travel is intense and costly, but if a judge sees three-quarters of an inch too little
ear in an Afghan or a missing black eye rim or any other such catastrophic shortfall, it is back to loving and companionship
for the wanna-be show dog and its owner. He or she, or, in short order,
it
, will be kept forever from having a Ch., for Champion, before his name. It’s amazing how little the dog itself cares about
this.
Random-Bred Dogs
All dogs were once mixed breeds or random-bred, albeit the Bloodhound, Greyhound, Samoyed, Afghan, and many of the others
go back centuries or even millennia in pretty much their present forms. A good many breeds that we still recognize attended
the birth of the Christian era. Others are quite new. Just about a century ago, for example, Louis Dobermann began breeding
what he was sure would be the ultimate police dog in Dortmund, Germany. In fact, his namesake did become a kind of ultimate
guard and protection dog. He started his Pinscher with the Rottweiler (a magnificent descendant of the Tibetan Mastiff via
Rome), a European Pointer of some kind, and some Terrier, and he added some Greyhound—eventually coming up with the Doberman
Pinscher. That is a very different kind of scenario from the Ibizan Hound’s, the “Watchdog of the Dead,” whose look-alike
ancestors with the sacred name Anubis guarded the tombs of pharaohs. The funerary sculptures of Anubis match today’s Ibizan
Hound standards to an amazing degree.
When is a Doberman Pinscher or any other dog a member of a recognizable breed? When it breeds true, or in other words, when
you can have reasonable expectations about what will appear on whelping (birthing) day and in the weeks that follow as the
puppy begins to mature. When a dog is “your guess is as good as mine,” you have a random-bred dog variously known, disrespectfully
and idiotically, I think, as a Heinz 57 (no one shows a pickle—or who knows, maybe they do but in a different context), mutt,
cur, pariah, or mongrel, usually muttered with at least a sense of derision. The most derisive comment of all is surely, “Oh,
it’s just