BERLIN — Some words always seem to find a way to slip through. We have created a whole series of embargoes and decrees on the term race: We prefer to say ethnicity, even if it’s not always much better. In Germany, we sometimes use the English word race rather than that of our mother tongue Rasse.
But Rasse appears in places where English speakers would not expect to find it. If, during a walk in the woods, in the park or in town, a German meets a dog that does not clearly fit into a well-defined category of Labrador, Dachshund or Dalmatian, he forgets all his reluctance towards of this term and might well ask the person holding the head what Dog Breed It is.
Although we have turned our backs on the shameful racial theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of a “purebred dog encyclopedia” or a dog handler who promises insight into almost “all breeds” ( in German, “all races”) remained somewhat harmless.
In an article about a Dresden exhibition on “The Invention of Human Races”, a colleague wrote that after 250 years the German term Rasse has regained its original meaning, being used to describe “domestic animals”, although this usage is just as scientifically inaccurate. No one flinches when we call dogs, horses or cows pure breedsand if a friend’s new dog is a rescue, we have no problem calling him a bastard Or cross.
Fantasy of a glorious past
In one way or another, people have been selectively breeding dogs for as long as dogs have existed. This is why we treat dog breeds as if they were part of the natural order of things, free from any association with the shameful history of a nationalist and colonialist era.
But that’s simply not true. Dog breeds are a product of the same era that invented the idea of dividing humans into distinct breeds, a time when pseudoscientists toyed with craniometry, proposing a so-called scientific basis to differentiate between “master races” and “primitive peoples”. These are the same pseudo-scientists who coined sinister terms like “Aryan,” seeking to attribute distinct “racial” characteristics to almost all nations, and who ultimately created eugenics, supposedly aimed at improving “races.” » humans through selective breeding.
What happened when these new breeds first appeared?
In reality, the invention of dog breeds is akin to a vast project of animal eugenics, which often has the absurd objective of recreating a supposedly glorious past. The revivals of ancient breeds like the Hovawart or the Irish Wolfhound are romantic projects motivated by the fantasy of a return to a glorious past, a the Lord of the Rings dog breeding.
In the mid-19th century, when a city councilman named Heinrich Essig created the Leonberger, a large and heavy dog, now dark yellow, he was explicitly trying to breed a dog that would resemble the lion on his house’s coat of arms. town of Leonberg. The Leonberger had no practical use. He was not bred to herd sheep or drive cattle, to wake wild game or scavenge dead fowl. There was no need for him to run alongside a carriage or pull a sleigh; there was no palace or even a farm to guard.
So what happened when these new breeds first appeared?
Love and bulldogs
For many dogs, this was good news: in the 19th century, our relationship with dogs changed, in part because industrialization depended more on human than animal labor. As working conditions became even more inhumane for disadvantaged people living in cities, dogs began to enjoy a higher status among the more privileged classes.
In Britain, where this change occurred more quickly than elsewhere, the example set by the royal family was followed: Queen Victoria proclaimed that her (many) dogs were part of her family and posed at his sides for official portraits. Edwin Landseer, one of the most famous painters of his day, became something of a painter of yard dogs (and as a result, the black and white variety of the Newfoundland breed was named Landseer in his honor).
Of course, people have always loved their dogs, but sentimental Victorians began to create love stories about them. Dogs were no longer working animals, but officially four-legged friends. No one in Victorian England had heard the story of Greyfriars Bobby, a terrier who watched over his master’s grave for 14 years.
Charles Dickens, always quick to adopt trends, hastily incorporated a dog into Oliver Twist and even sought the professional advice of a certain Bill George – the most famous dog dealer in London at the time, a pioneer of the discipline – in order to make his canine character more endearing. As a young man, George had organized dog fights (including those between dogs and lions), before the introduction of the first animal protection laws forced him to change course and he be responsible for establishing bulldogs as beloved pets.
The breed is now a symbol of hypermasculinity, but it has paid for its status with a wide range of health problems resulting from selective breeding. Since they were no longer fighting dogs, owners wanted them to compensate by appearing even more aggressive, with flat noses and a protruding lower jaw. Towards the end of the Victorian era, British soldiers began to be called “bulldogs”, showing how closely images of humans and dogs were linked.
Form over function
The second revolution was that after millennia of dog breeding focused on ensuring that animals were well suited to specific tasks, appearance began to take precedence. For a long time, the appearance of a good shepherd dog did not matter – the old German dog, now rare. shepherd dogs, which escaped the great selective breeding project, could be Schafpudels, Strobels or Fuchses, with shaggy fur, double or long double coat, black or with black markings, fox red or white.
However, German Shepherds – the standardized breed – were subject to the studbook’s “blood law”, which divided old German Shepherd dogs into a “Horand von Grafrath” or a “Graf Eberhard” (a pedigree that showed a degree of inbreeding of almost 40%). The idea of distinct breeds focused on the subtle differences between dogs. Even today, the names chosen by dog breeders carry a touch of nobility.
A good horse has no color.
In Britain, which set the standard for dog breeding, they were more playful, but no less determined. Just like cucumbers and pumpkins, they have turned dog breeding into a kind of sporting competition. In 1886, Charles Cruft organized the first exhibition of large terriers, which soon became known as Cruft’s Greatest Dog Show and remains the largest dog show in the world. But defining the races they had artificially invented was problematic. In Germany, Caesar – one of the dogs bred by Heinrich Essig – was sometimes called an Alpenhund, sometimes a Saint Bernard, and sometimes even a Leonberger.
Good dogs compared to “pure” breeds
Enter John Henry Walsh, a sports journalist who wrote under the pseudonym “Stonehenge” and was one of the founders of the All England Tennis Club. Driven by the competitive English spirit, Walsh developed a very complex set of regulations. His famous book Dogs of the British Isles set out the famous “standards”.
The book introduced the meticulous measurement of ears, muzzle and waist, an idea unfortunately already familiar thanks to the pseudoscience of human races. There is an old Icelandic saying that a good horse has no color. The same can no longer be said of dogs. Walsh, who believed that it was more important to create good dogs than “pure” breeds, came to bitterly regret the role he had played.
But the genie was out of the bottle and the standards sparked a wave of discrimination in dog breeding. From 1894, the National observer deplored the scourge of “foreign immigration”. When we start talking about races, sooner or later, racism rears its ugly head.
However, John Henry Walsh spared the British the use of such loaded vocabulary. Among the many words in circulation to describe these “breeds” of dogs (species, kinds, strains), he chose not to race but breed. This means that, in England at least, current debates about identity politics are not weighed down by this extra layer of complexity.
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