The Bubble: A Review of Recent Articles

The Bubble: A Review of Recent Articles

There were several interesting articles in the August issue of SHOWSIGHT. First, Sheila Goffe reported on the legislative issues facing the dog world today. The AKC (American Kennel Club) Government Relations department had to deal with 1700 separate bills in states across the US, all affecting the future of the dog world. This should be a reminder to everyone: Please keep an eye on local legislation because you never know when it’s coming to get you.

I learned something new; HSUS (Humane Society of the United States) has been renamed the Humane World for Animals—wait for the high-powered advertising, begging for money. They support a new iteration of the same old anti-breeder bill with a catchy name designed to elicit response from the general public, the “Puppy Protection Act.” Go to Sheila’s column and read the whole thing.

Doug Johnson revisited the ongoing discussion about there being too many dog shows and too few breeders. In my opinion, BOTH statements are true. Bo Bengtson wrote about this very topic about 15 years ago in another publication. At the time, he was writing that AKC registrations had dropped to 50 percent of the number from some years in the past, but the number of shows had doubled! When the laws of supply and demand are that far out of balance a future disaster is inevitable.

Yes, we do need more future breeders, but in order to see that happening there needs to be a cultural shift as to how breeders and breeding are regarded. When I started showing and breeding, well-regarded and respected breeders were not judged by the number of litters they produced. Having three to five litters per year was a frequent occurrence. Today, breeders may have to worry about zoning limits and local regulations, but peer pressure and the social stigma of being accused of breeding too often is worse. Social media is the weapon of choice for the “breed police.” I remember a few years back, while I was still living in the US, that a new breeder was the subject of a social media campaign and they had to “take her down” because “she was a puppy mill waiting to happen!”

Having too many shows does not help increase the number of future breeders. In the past century, when show weekends ran for three days, from Friday to Sunday, entries were more stable. With the arrival of five-day clusters, only professional handlers and retired people traveling in their motorhomes would enter all five days. The rest of us would select two or three. When entries in my area dropped to the point where I had to enter two of a sex to guarantee a single point, I stopped entering and had to send them across the country to a pro handler to be shown. Unfortunately, that meant I had to limit the number of dogs I could show. That is another factor adding to the reduction of entries, when it means shipping them by air and then paying handlers’ fees to have them shown. Very few newcomers are willing to do that, and when they read that dogs and bitches should have “titles on both ends” before they are bred from, the owners give up. It is certainly an admirable goal, but not everyone has both the time and the money to show, work, and train their dogs in more than one activity. I was unable to do that myself, but dogs that I had bred were proven capable when their owners put Lure Coursing titles on them in both the US and Canada, even though I never became active in coursing and focused on showing my dogs.

I enjoyed reading Dédé Wilson’s contribution on the “Vanishing Breeds,” which hit close to home as my own breed, the Afghan Hound, now falls into that category. The annual registration figures for 2024 were downright scary, with just over 200 individual dogs and puppies registered in the US. I do not know if that included imports or not; I have never seen the detailed figures. The writing has been on the wall for the past 20 years, but there was never any consensus as to where it could lead. For every person who saw this as a serious problem there was a critic who thought that ever-descending numbers were good for the breed. It was not. Fifty years ago, Afghans hit peak popularity, and too many were being born, but now we have too few. Too few is worse than too many. What can we do to turn this around? I hope we can.