One of the things that struck me from seeing some coverage around this recently is that Balto died at age 14 and Togo, another prominent dog in that sled run, died at age 16.
After having a couple German Shepherds as a kid those numbers were striking for large working dogs. Looks like Huskies still have pretty good life expectancy (12-14 years in the US from the AKC), Malamutes a bit less, but both stronger than GSD, which are like <10 years in the US these days.
Hopefully things swing away from the fascination with "purebred" before those breeds see further declines.
From the article it seems like the working dogs, vs the breeding-for-sale dogs, are still pretty healthy: “What we found is that Balto is more genetically diverse and genetically healthier than your breed dog of today but similar to those working Alaskan dogs that we have now—which is what you expect from a group that is still bred for work rather than the aesthetic phenotype that breed dogs are now held to,”
The issue is not purebred dogs. It’s breeding purely for conformation (how the dog looks) rather than for health, longevity, and performance.
A good counterpoint to the idea that most purebred dogs have health issues are gundog breeds that are still judged based on hunting and retrieving field trials, or other dogs with real jobs like police/military dogs, herding dogs, etc.
Athletic breeds with real jobs typically have much longer life spans. Even AKC Border Collies and German Shorthaired Pointers have average lifespans of 12-15 years, with it not unusual to see dogs that are 16-18 years old and still healthy. My own dog is a GSP, and I not only met his father and mother but also his grandmother, who was perfectly healthy.
German Shepherds were epically screwed up as a breed in the 20th century by intentionally breeding heavier dogs with unhealthy body structures that looked aesthetically pleasing. This is a big part of why Belgian Shepherds (Malinois) replaced GSDs and Dobermanns as military and police dogs in many countries. The extreme form of this aesthetics problem is the French Bulldog, which is an abomination that shouldn’t exist according to the laws of nature, because it typically can’t reproduce without caesarians and/or artificial insemination.
I concur. Good, ethical breeders will track COI (coefficient of inbreeding), pull any breeding dames/sires that show issues themselves or in their offspring, mix up the germ lines, and even go so far as to get mail-order sperm from around the world. Good purebred breeding is going to produce a healthier dog on average than your random mutt, which could have great hybrid vigor, or all manner of weird issues.
Me too. Since my grandmother was a child, we've always had German Shepherds in our family. When I was a kid for the first time our dogs started getting hip dysplasia. My mother and grandmother had never seen before, despite being involved in the dog training community.
I’ve had 2 purebreds in a row with major health issues, even though I searched for working line breeders. I’ve given up on purebreds, and now have a GSD mix. He’s a gorgeous animal, going on 11 without any hip issues or health issues.
The AKC in their pursuit of the perfect look and willful ignorance of genetics has destroyed the German Shepard breed.
I spent my first few summers on my grandmother's farm, where there were about five GSD (and a small poodle that mostly stayed out of the way, inside the farmhouse).
Lovely animals, one of my earliest memories is (hand) feeding them when they were taller than me. I also have a vague memory of trying to ride them, like horses, but I'm not 100% sure I trust that thinking about how old I would have had to be, and our relative sizes.
I started seeing this in German Shepards years ago. I’d see shepherds being walked and their hind legs just weren’t moving right. I thought it was just an old dog that developed health problems, but no, they are being bred that way. I’m not sure why you’d want an unhealthy dog.
I can get behind the whole something-poo craze since at least it might put a short pause to pure breds.
> Hopefully things swing away from the fascination with "purebred" before those breeds see further declines.
I doubt the large working dogs of the past were less purebred (or that their descendants today are less purebred). Breeding is an important way -- in fact, the only known way -- to produce dogs that are suited to work you need them to do.
There are two things that have notably changed in the present day:
1. Dogs aren't expected to work, which removes the pressure to be fit to work. This is the effect you've noted, but I suspect it's not as significant as...
2. The effective population size ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_population_size ) has crashed as the first rule of responsible pet ownership became "make sure your pet never reproduces". When 10% of the population gets to reproduce, you're going to see a lot more inbreeding than you do when 90% of the population gets to reproduce.
Note also that Togo was 12 years old when he led the 261 mile journey. Most of his community who knew, expected Togo would die during or immediately as a result of completing the trip.
I share your views on many purebreeds being immoral, but the "wild-type" breeds with more genetic variability are often much, much more challenging for human owners. I'm personally a huge fan of Australian Cattle Dogs and Australian Shepherds, both of which are very "blended" breeds. But they take soooo much time and energy to raise, they're nearly incompatible with a 9-5 job for the first year or so of their lives.
> But they take soooo much time and energy to raise, they're nearly incompatible with a 9-5 job for the first year or so of their lives.
So are Huskies.
For whatever reason, people bought a ton of them at the beginning of quarantine. Once it was lifted, the dogs started tearing up homes when left alone all day.
Local shelters are currently flooded with these things. Buyer's market right now. We just rescued one from a dumpster.
> the "wild-type" breeds with more genetic variability are often much, much more challenging for human owners
Yeah, fuck mutts. I've owned four in my lifetime and now own a purebred Husky. For the first time, I'm finding dog ownership fun.
You never know what you're getting into with mutts, but it's a little easier these days since they have 23andMe type services for dogs so you can get some insight into what your future holds.
As someone who has had many mutts and rescued purebreds…
I’m assuming you don’t know what you’re doing if you think all mutts are difficult. Generally, people don’t exercise their dogs enough and then run into problems. Doesn’t matter the dog, but a consistent routine of lengthy walks and runs has never failed.
#1 was a half-chow nightmare from Hell (yes, I was clueless) but the next three weren't problem dogs, just difficult to understand. Conventional wisdom did not consistently apply across the three.
It was like multiclassing three characters in an RPG you don't even know the classes of.
Unlike purebreds. You can literally buy an instruction manual for your specific breed. Way easier.
What works is having a test-period before changing ownership. There can be many reasons for incompatibility, and often quite unfair to blame it on the dog who had no say.
There are a two breeds in particular that novices love because of their looks but will almost certainly not be equipped to handle—huskies and beagles.
Huskies are just incredibly high energy. They need space and exercise. If you do not exercise them they are smart and will find creative ways to get their energy out. You won’t like it. Beyond that though they are actually pretty good dogs.
Don’t be fooled by a beagle’s cute looks. They are scent hounds and all they want to do is track and anything between them and tracking is just a short term obstacle to overcome. They will dig through drywall if need be.
> the "wild-type" breeds with more genetic variability are often much, much more challenging for human owners.
I think this depends wildly on what sort of environment the dog is from. I'm currently on my first dog and he's damn near trivial to train, I'm quite surprised to be honest.
He's a rescue. The first year of his life he has spent "in the wild", though I figure he was probably around villages a lot. I had a DNA test done, and there's no trace of any breed going back at least three generations. He has a keen sense of what sort of people to trust. He steers clear of drunks and is very open towards kids. The way I figure is the environment he was in puts evolutionary pressure towards cute kind dogs, as the best way to survive in a village is by getting people to give you food.
So while yes, with a mutt you don't know what you're getting, that doesn't mean all mutts are hard pets to own. The most firm I have to be in correcting my dog is going "Ed, don't."
In my area it's not too hard to find 3+ year old Australian Cattle Dogs and Shepherds mixes at rescues; a great option to not have to deal with that puppy stage but still have a bright pup.
Modern 'huskies' bred and sold in the US48 states as domestic pets are considerably different and smaller than what you might find in Alaska/Yukon 50 years ago. I've seen some extremely small huskies that technically still qualify as AKC registered purebreeds.
As far as sled dogs go, the reverse is true. I own sled dog type Huskies and they are the same size as Togo/Balto and one has the same Agouti style fur.
Togo was only 48lbs and you can see from the photos of both Togo’s team and modern sled teams that they’re short and stout.
Modern tuxedo colored non-AKC Huskies are a good head taller than my dogs and about 20lbs heavier. My dogs tend to be the smallest Huskies at the dog park. There’s probably a bit of Malamute involved in breeding to add height and reinforce the tuxedo markings.
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.
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.
"observations to the contrary comes from extremely bad cases" do you have any reading on that topic?
I don't have any position. BUt the idea of purebred is a recent one. I think the difference is that it's selecting for even minute appearance instead of a specific desireable trait. Which makes the whole breed very similar to one another as to be clones of each other.
Yes, that dog who wins that award is from a dog breed, but that's because the spirit of the world is heavily biased right now towards dog breeds. No one wants mutt let alone train them.
There is enough research on it, but it often looks at the problem through the lens of incest rather than whole community health and trajectory. E.g. for the UK Biobank sample [1]:
> We thus identified 125 unrelated participants (65 males and 60 females) whose genomes are consistent with their parents being first- or second-degree relatives. That represents a prevalence of [extreme inbreeding] ~0.03%, i.e., ~1/3652
> It is worth noting that complex inbreeding loops between second degree-relatives may also lead to extreme values of FROH. However, mating between first-degree relatives remains a more parsimonious explanation of the empirical observations, in particular in a population of European ancestry where such complex inbreeding loops are uncommon
> We quantified the consequences of EI on multiple traits measured in the UKB. We first analysed ten control traits with prior evidence of inbreeding depression4,8,10,13. Those ten traits are height, hip-to-waist ratio (HWR), handgrip strength (HGS; average of left and right hand), lung function measured as the peak expiratory flow (PEF), visual acuity (VA), auditory acuity (AA), number of years of education (EA), fluid intelligence score (FIS), cognitive function measured as the mean time to correctly identify matches (MTCIM) and fertility measured as the number of children (NCh). ...
> As expected, we found that EI cases had a reduced mean in these ten traits as compared to EI controls. More specifically, we found phenotypic means in EI cases to be between 0.3 and 0.7 standard deviation below the population mean (Table 3). Note, that under normality assumptions, between ~25 and ~40% of the population has a phenotype below 0.7 and 0.3 standard deviations below the mean, respectively.
> We also specifically estimated the inbreeding load (often denoted B), which represents the number of loci with deleterious alleles that would cause one death on average if made homozygous3 ... and found an estimate of B ~1.46
And for India [2]:
> A cohort of 408 children (6 to 15 years of age) was selected from inbred and non-inbred families of five Muslim populations of Jammu region.
> We found significant decline in child cognitive abilities due to inbreeding and high frequency of mental retardation among offspring from inbred families. The mean differences (95% C.I.) were reported for the VIQ, being −22.00 (−24.82, −19.17), PIQ −26.92 (−29.96, −23.87) and FSIQ −24.47 (−27.35, −21.59) for inbred as compared to non-inbred children (p>0.001). The higher risk of being mentally retarded was found to be more obvious among inbred categories corresponding to the degree of inbreeding and the same accounts least for non-inbred children (p<0.0001).
The above reasoning explains the near-universal human taboo against this guaranteed way to increase occurrence of homozygosity and run into inbreeding depression – instantly or in a small number of generations. But small isolated traditional communities risk turning effectively incestuous, and some traditions even normalize cousin marriages. E.g. in Pakistan it's a big problem and is researched intensely [3]:
> Tribal and caste systems are deeply rooted in remote areas of Pakistan. Cheema said that the caste system, particularly among the Arain people living in Punjab province, is especially rigid and leads to many inter-family marriages. She said several genetic disorders are commonly found in this community.
Effective population sizes in those endogamous clan societies are orders of magnitude lower than census sizes, they can be in the low dozens for a given group.
If we return to pedigree dogs (in UK again), the overall situation is admittedly not great but there's cause for optimism. Ironically, one of the most stereotypically "fancy" and purebred dog breeds is in the best position: [4]
> For all breeds, the trend was for the rate of inbreeding to be highest in the 1980s and 1990s, representing a major contraction in genetic diversity. Since 2000 however, the general trend has been for the rate of inbreeding to decline to sustainable levels, with some modest restoration of genetic diversity in some cases.
> Rate of inbreeding (ΔF) and effective population size (Ne) Of all breeds with an average of >50 registrations per annum (over each of the seven 5-year blocks, n = 121), five had a negative whole period ΔF implying an apparent overall increase in genetic diversity, and consequently no determinable Ne (Bernese Mountain Dog, Briard, Standard Poodle, Rhodesian Ridgeback and Tibetan Terrier). Of the 116 remaining breeds, the Ne calculated over the period 1980–2014 ranged from 23.8 (Manchester Terrier) to 918.8 (Borzoi). Of these 116 breeds, 68 had Ne of <100, with 29 having Ne of <50.
In wildlife conservation, Ne≥50 is the minimum for short-term population viability (animals are also smart enough to generally avoid mating with close relatives), but isn't considered good by any means. Still, if we adopt some utterly trivial mitigations like not using the same sire to produce 20% of the next generation of pedigreed dogs, we'll quickly eliminate the bulk of the problem.
>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.
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.
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.
The article goes on and on for many paragraphs about the claim that Balto was inherently healthier on the basis of genetic diversity, with no actual assessment of whether today's dogs are healthy, before dropping this sentence:
> Today’s sled dogs are even “faster and more durable” than those of Balto’s era, Moon says.
I had the exact same reaction as GP. :) So there was something about how the point was hidden, TFA could benefit greatly from including your one line summary.
I wondered about if the requirement to not work contributes to an early decline in dogs? Physical fitness is seemingly the number one marker for longevity in humans. If today's pets get but a fraction of the exercise dogs are originally capable of, something will have to give? (Forgive me for being naive).
Breed health was one of the reasons I ended up with a working line dog (Dutch Shepherd). Most dogs are bred for appearance these days, even in some working breeds like the German Shepherd.
Anecdotally, I always felt like 'muts' were some of the healthiest dogs I've been around. They seem invincible, and the genetic diversity probably helps explain that.
I've found many "pure" breeds to be regrettably diminished, they look like the books say but they pay for it in some way. Shorter lifespans, health problems, mental problems, etc.
Out-crossing a purebred with something from a different style of dog can often produce much healthier pups than either parent. Great Danes and Collie make 3/4 sized, slightly skinny dane-like dogs that are shockingly robust and energetic and can live to 16+ in my experience (and that's as active working outdoor dogs).
How would they fare as indoor, backyard dogs taken for twice daily sedate walks though?
My personal (probably unpopular) opinion is that a lot of inner city people should not have the dogs they have - who need to be able to run around at all times, not just waste away.
It's also why I don't have a dog, for exactly this reason - I don't live in the country, with enough free space around.
I share your unpopular opinion and raise you that plenty of suburban families have dogs that waste away in yards when they really would benefit from walks or hikes.
We have an offspring of central american feral dogs, whom we DNA tested via Cornell vet school’s embarkvet.com database.
Interestingly, the notion of breed changed meanings, for me, when they published the results. The only modern breed in her is a great grandparent chihuahua and otherwise she’s genetically varied as feral dogs are, something like an asymptote for the various blends called mutts.
Of the 161 (i think) tracked recessive disorders, she’s a carrier for only two.
p.s. It's unclear to me if, genetically, "mutt" implies a blend of various artificially constrained gene pools (that is, "breeds") or just means less constrained gene pool than what occurs in "breeds".
i've got a 12 year old 35 pound mutt and he's literally never had a health problem. i take him in every 12 months for shots. he did get kennel cough one time from dog daycare but he just... got better on his own after a few days, or something. he just slept it off. at this point i'm only half joking when i wonder if he'll outlive me.
There are diminishing returns to exogeny, especially in species with a high degree of genetic redundancy (like dogs, cf https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17437958/), whereas with guided endogeny you can achieve better outcomes than you would via random cross-breeding (on task performance, health, or whatever else the breeders are optimizing for).
To expand for those who don't know: Togo and Balto were both lead dogs owned/raised/trained by the same man (Leonhard Seppala) but they ran different sleds. Togo led the "A" team and Balto, being a lesser sled-dog, led the "bench" or "B" team.
For the famous "serum run", Togo's team ran 261 miles, including the most dangerous section: 42 miles over frozen body of water. Whereas Balto's team only ran the final 55 miles. However, Balto got the credit because he carried the medicine into the town while Togo's team was still out in the wilderness.
Seppala wrote: “I hope I shall never be the man to take away credit from any dog or driver who participated in that run. We all did our best. But when the country was roused to enthusiasm over the serum run driver, I resented the statue to Balto, for if any dog deserved special mention it was Togo.”
There is a Disney movie named "Togo", which does a fantastic job of telling the story. According to comparison with best-available primary and secondary sources, the movie has astounding historic accuracy -- even though many, many times it seems like it "jumps the shark". The "true" story of Togo's life is so unbelievable that Disney's inaccuracies are more leaving things out that audiences would never be able to believe rather than putting in exaggerated over-the-top things.
That was a difficult movie to watch. It was filled with so much excitement and jitter. The periodic breaks into history did little to suppress the anxiety.
I think though, I might have to find someone skilled in pigs? My thought, is they're the closest to humans?
And then, who wants to do it... even if they can?
I think it would be awesome, to have a skin on display in a cemetery. A marble construct, tower like, with a airtight sealed glass front, with my skin, it in all its fineness.
OH, I didn't realize you meant human taxidermy. I believe that's not allowed except for science/education purposes such as "BODIES" and "Body World" exhibits: https://bodyworlds.com
I'm about to receive a service puppy. They have been selectively raised from different stock for awareness, bravery, and intelligent non-reactivity. They're unlike work, guard, or companion dogs. They have to be to serve people who have disabilities as their last line of defense in risky and dangerous situations.
is this an “old wives tale” (for lack of a better term atm) that turned out to be true? i swear my parents used this as a reason to get a mutt for me as a kid in the 90s..
today’s pure breed dogs are sometimes sad to see..
Working dogs were bred, historically, for character traits. Breeders didn’t care if the parents were one breed or another. It was about getting the desired size, intelligence, disposition for a job.
We've been breeders for at least 10s of thousands of years, not just with dogs, but endless work animals, livestock, plants.
Empirically one can go a long way, into understanding that inbreeding is bad, that diversity is good. I wouldn't be surprised to see Greek, or Sumerian texts on breeding...
Amazingly this isn’t true. You would think selective would have been invented by the Greeks or Romans, someone, but the first evidence of long run sustained breeding programmes for a desired trait using careful record keeping was during the British Agricultural Revolution of the 1700s. For more detail read the link https://gwern.net/review/bakewell
Togo is actually a direct ancestor of the vast majority of Siberian Huskies in the United States today. He had a very, uh, fulfilling retirement and as a consequence he’s part of almost every modern day husky’s genetic line. The dog that played him in the movie was something like his twelfth generation descendant.
After having a couple German Shepherds as a kid those numbers were striking for large working dogs. Looks like Huskies still have pretty good life expectancy (12-14 years in the US from the AKC), Malamutes a bit less, but both stronger than GSD, which are like <10 years in the US these days.
Hopefully things swing away from the fascination with "purebred" before those breeds see further declines.
From the article it seems like the working dogs, vs the breeding-for-sale dogs, are still pretty healthy: “What we found is that Balto is more genetically diverse and genetically healthier than your breed dog of today but similar to those working Alaskan dogs that we have now—which is what you expect from a group that is still bred for work rather than the aesthetic phenotype that breed dogs are now held to,”