arthurwigglebutts

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Breed Standard

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Any dog under 100 pounds is a “little dog” to me. i will take no further questions

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King Arthur Wigglebutts

Morgana

Kaylee, or a gender bent Sir Kay

Lady of the Lake

Share a picture of your dog and a picture of what your dog is named for!

Fizz and Fizz (league of legends)

Mallow and The Marquess (FKA Queen Mallow) from The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in A Ship Of Her Own Making by Catherynne M Valente

Pidge and a pigeon

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The snow finally melted and temps are above freezing again thankfully. Though that also brings back the rain, and quite a lot of it, so we are back to spending as little time outside as is possible.

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A perfect litter of border collies

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It may be single digits here for the first time in my life, but most of us are having fun!

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By Tanja Askani

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We drove up into the mountains yesterday to play in the snow and find our Christmas tree. This was our first time up this specific forest service road, and it was absolutely beautiful! It's just across the highway from the more well traveled road that we usually venture up, and it was a much smoother ride, with even more breathtaking views.

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Our bedroom door is almost always open. The dogs mostly sleep spread around the room, Kaylee and Morgan will rotate between the floor and the couch or chair in the living room throughout the night. The cats will claw the carpet if they are ever locked in or out of the room, so they are pretty much allowed to be wherever, Lancer almost always sleeps between our feet, sometimes accompanied by Fiona or Leo.

This post is exclusively for dog owners. Is your bedroom door opened, closed or something else? Is the dog inside or outside the room and where are they sleeping

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I have a question. What do you call these three things? They have different names depending on where you live, and I’m curious.

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🥰🥰🥰

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Just add a girth that fits, I must have sold it,, and some open front boots and she might just make a cute little jumper...

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A working girl

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ok here’s all my rambling thoughts about the future of dog breeding. ignore if it pleases you!

caveats: i am not a dog breeder. i am not involved in dog breeding in any capacity. i have a strong interest in the dog–human relationship and the continuation of that relationship. i own purebred dogs. i have absolutely no animal-related academic qualifications.

so. i think the future of dogs is to move away from dog BREEDS. i think dog people really struggle with this. purebred fans struggle because they instantly have a negative response because they adore their specific breed. mixed breeders also struggle with this because still the focus is on BREEDS and mixing them. and then you have all that shelter dog rhetoric which seems confused in itself by the desire to continue to have dogs but the opposition to dog breeding of any kind (pure breeding is bad but mixed breeding is also bad and registered breeders are unethical but backyard breeders are also dodgy).

i have read lots of different dog books. some published before the real Victorian dog breeding explosion (early to mid 1800s) and some published much later (mostly the 90s to now) exploring and documenting the origin of the dog and the current use of indigenous or primitive dogs. so there are people doing what I’m saying ALREADY, TODAY, AND FOR ALL OF DOG–HUMAN TIME (see: landraces).

but what all this has told me is that the real focus should be TYPES. to look at this, you really need to put aside the concept of dog BREEDS as we know them today. dog BREEDS today are defined by hyper specific breed standards that list in extreme detail what the dog should look like and, to a lesser degree, how it should behave. put that aside.

according to Kim Brophey there are 10 families of dogs (i like her categorisation, it makes sense to me). they are Natural Dog (or spitz), Sighthound, Scenthound, Toy Dog, Guardian, Gun Dog, Terrier, Bull Dog, Herding Dog and World Dog (or pariah). using this as a base, then we would jump into TYPES.

so for example. in early sheep and cow centred Australia (early 1800s on), they needed to come up with dogs that would suit the climate and the work. this meant they developed regional variations of Herding Dogs, taking collies (a type) and bobtails (a type) and anything else they had, and refining that into a heeler (type) and a kelpie/koolie (type). it makes sense to me to have these kinds of variations around general principles of environment, working style, temperament, coat, size, ears, tail – that’s how it’s always been done! with TYPES, you could still end up with hundreds of variations. but the key difference to what we currently operate under would be that TYPES have no hyper specific breed standard and they can interbreed whenever necessary while maintaining a general look/working ability.

take one of the breeds i own – papillon. under this proposed model, dogs that look like this would be Toy Spaniels. and when you go looking for a breeder of Toy Spaniels, different people would breed slight variations – up ears or down ears, shorter muzzle, longer muzzle, taller or shorter. however, the focus would be maintaining an open gene pool and producing healthy dogs while still having a general type and a range of reasonable predictability. that is the key difference here. no standards, no stud books. no discussion about “freaks of nature” because a dog bred with another dog. the sport of conformation would have to also radically change in this scenario. but it’s not like you can’t evaluate structure and form of any dog. if conformation must continue, it could change.

contrary to most dog people i tend to run across, i don’t think we should get more specific when thinking about dog breeding, i think we should get less specific. i understand that some scenarios require specificity, but for the most part we as humans should accept that dogs are as varied as we are, with general predictable traits. and our approach to dog breeding should probably be, IN MY VIEW, to find the dog TYPE that is most suitable for our situation, but still accept the individual characteristics within each dog and that no dog is totally predictable nor should this be expected or desired.

so what i am saying is not NEW. it’s just what people did before the Victorians got weird about it.

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A couple of cryptids in the evening fog

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I just wanted to carry this fence post up to the barn...