![]() ![]() This is why even purebred dogs who don’t have exaggerated physical deformities still have higher rates of many hereditary disorders. Compound it with bottlenecks, overrepresented sires, and the sterilization of most offspring, and you’re left with a gradual loss of diversity and an accumulation of deleterious mutations. Similar dogs from the same family and region get repeatedly subdivided up into separate, smaller groups who are then banned from mixing outside their small gene pool. They’re still pretty healthy dogs, but again it could be better. 12% of tested dogs were heterozygous for the mutation linked toĮnamel hypoplasia. The Saint Bernard as we know it now is another good example of a kennel club fabrication.Īfter a century of pedigree breeding with a small founder population the Samoyed has an inbreeding coefficient nearing 30% (Dreger et al 2016) despite the UK KC listing 8.5% (because they measure COI by reading registered pedigree ancestry instead of genetic testing). So many breeds in their current state were invented by the kennel clubs then retroactively labeled as unchanged for hundreds of years. But the dogs they are preserving are so often completely different from the dogs written about in the origin stories! It’s the Nenets people of the 21st century who are more closely preserving the true spirit and image of the historic Samoyed dog. ![]() This disconnect wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for the breeders espousing the breed myth as sacred text to justify purity above all else for breed preservation. The Samoyed story is mostly true, the Nenets and Samoyed people do rely on these dogs for herding and companionship, but if you’re imagining the large plush white dogs you see in the suburbs you’re being a bit misled. Particularly egregious examples are the myths like bloodhounds and bassets having long dragging ears to “pick up” a scent, or that excessive 20th century wrinkling on the bulldog was somehow useful in bull baiting. ![]() For instance I think the Shih Tzu or Pekingese becomes more appealing once you explain that they were bred by imperial royalty. I think it flatters some people’s egos to imagine they own a piece of history. Many dog breeds have a breed mythos that is varying degrees of truths and some almost completely fictitious to explain where the breed came from, what it does, and why they look the way they do. In the 1890s the Norwegian Fram expedition to the antarctic purchased 33 nenets dogs for their journey, and the white surviving dogs became the foundation stock for the modern Samoyed breed. The Nenetskaya Laika or Nenets herding laika is a landrace reindeer herder from northern Russia kept by several indigenous peoples. ![]()
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