browsing random photos of purebred cats today...

[sciatrix]

...because while I have very little interest in owning a purebred cat, I like looking at them sometimes. And purebred Maine Coons are eldritch motherfuckers, which is always fun to look at.

This is how I stumbled across this Metatron Eyes cattery, which holy shit looks like one of the nicest, most ethically put together catteries I've ever seen. Damn. If I wanted a purebred cat, this is the sort of place I'd want to buy it from and support. I mean, in practice I have a strong preference for mildly special-needs cats with extremely strong personalities, and it's just straight up easier to find that sort of thing by going through rescue, and we have such a massive feral problem worldwide that sourcing random-bred cats isn't hard. But it's nice to know that if people are going to be breeding cats, there are people out there working to do it with as much attention to quality of life in their animals as possible.

(As I was writing this, Arthur Dent stomped up, crawled into my lap, and immediately started purring himself to sleep. Aw.)

I was having an interesting Twitter conversation about the weird cultural projections that different regions of the US put on dogs this morning, including a guess that a dog from rural Georgia might have some blackmouth cur in her (quite possible!) and some regional discussion of what people expect out of dog manners, so this is quite a nice bookend for my day. I've been thinking about how dog culture in the US might change as dogs in need of homes become less and less common (as they already are in many areas), especially as spay/neuter culture penetrates the US South, and how racism and classism inform rescue culture and the way different breeds and types of dogs are often promoted. (Especially with respect to pit bulls. It is impossible to understand the cultural trajectory of pit bulls in the US without understanding the racial associations and aspects of the dogs, and it's uncomfortably interesting watching the ways that different groups try to promote the breed for adoption by, well, presenting them as middle class white person dogs too.

People get pretty weird about it.

Disclaimer because it's a loaded topic: my opinions on pit bulls are:
a) they are dogs,
b) all dogs are perfectly capable of doing horrific damage to a human, if they are so behaviorally inclined,
c) there's a lot of really dumb myths out there about pit bulls specifically,
d) pits do tend towards dog aggression no matter what you do, and "it's not the breed it's how you raise them!" is a somewhat dangerous oversimplification,
e) that said "pit bull" is an enormous and extremely heterogeneous population that contains a wide variety of temperaments, body types, energy levels, drive levels, etc etc as well as at least five breeds of dog, some of them extremely popular in the US,
f) shelter workers are notoriously awful at breed identification and everyone is awful at identifying mixes,
g) that there are a lot of really fucked up expectations in North America regarding dog behavior and opportunities for socialization, and breed based legislation is a way less effective way to minimize dog bites than public education and dangerous dog laws.

I am currently taking a long break from MeFi after I, uh, got hit pretty hard in the exclusion trauma side of things in a thread about wlw. Again. So it's nice to have DW to come back to and natter in, and the hell with everything else for a bit.

Comments

[sciatrix]

So my experience with high-energy breeds of dog is actually that it's not the room they need, it's the time and mental stimulation. (There are exceptions, but generally dogs tire out and settle down if you work them hard mentally just as humans do. And going out and experiencing stimuli outside is pretty tiring! City dogs who don't have a lot of space but spend a lot of time walking get a much more densely stimulating environment than suburban yard dogs who have room and no real reason to use it.)

I think the future of these breeds of dogs will depend heavily on whether there are enough humans who like them and who have some free time to spend with such a dog. The closer to a forty-hour work week we stay, the more I think the future of most dogs is perfectly fine. There are only a few exceptions--mostly the more behaviorally extreme flock guard/estate guard breeds, like the Fila Brasiliero and the Caucasian Ovcharka, and mostly with them I think population density makes it very unsafe to have large, independent, territorially aggressive dogs. But those dogs aren't the same as pit bulls; the Filas are the descendents of the Cuban bloodhounds and Spanish mastiffs that were used heavily in the US to hunt escaped slaves, and the Ovcharkas are flock guard breeds with very high levels of aggression and defensiveness. By contrast, flock guard breeds of dogs who are less extreme in their levels of aggression, like Great Pyrenees and Anatolian Shepherds, are doing just fine. Both are actually very popular pets in my neck of the woods, because there are a lot of intact dogs who are kept on farms and the pups who don't go on to take guard jobs often wind up in pet homes. With a little socialization and training, they make great pets.

I don't think that people should keep dogs "for security," in part because... well, bluntly, a dog who lives his whole life in a tiny yard (or worse, on a chain) isn't going to do jack to someone trying to break into a house. That house isn't part of the dog's territory, the place where the dog lives is the dog's territory. Anyway, a dog is much more helpful for home protection as a watchdog rather than a guard dog--a little yappy dog who will bark when something goes off is not something a burglar wants to risk, and that's actually a bigger deterrent than the threat of a bite. But you want a dog who knows what normal looks like, and a yard dog... won't.

(Tribble is actually the first dog I've ever had who I am 100% sure would try to bite if someone tried to hurt me, and I'm not really thrilled about it: I want my dogs to think that protecting me from other humans is not their problem.)

We actually also have a lot of stray dogs in our neighborhood--I think a lot of people dump them out here?--and they're also often pit or mastiff types. My spouse and I are pretty good judges of canine body language and usually will try to catch them with a slip lead and drop them off at our local shelter, which tries very hard to adopt out all its dogs, and the ones we can get a hold of are generally friendly enough.

[silversandbea]

Oh yeah, it's less that it was a good idea to keep guard dogs (I don't think it is, and training dogs to be vicious is one of those things that will reliably make me upset and angry just thinking about it) and more that it was just the predominant context where I grew up - most people didn't have dogs for friendly reasons.

There were some exceptions - my next door neighbor ended up rescuing a siberian husky that ended up being lent out as a running buddy for a few generations of high school cross-country athletes, but for the most part people had dogs to instill fear, and the common reaction to all dogs was at least a healthy sense of caution.

(editing to mention that the next paragraph and attached news article can be upsetting, per the training animals to be vicious and resulting consequences - don't feel like you need to engage or read if you don't want to)

In retrospect, I still can't blame folks in that area for being wary of the neighborhood strays - there was a case while I was in high school where some joggers were mauled by some of the stray dogs in said nearby dumping ground, and one of joggers died. It's an incredibly rare occurrence, and happened because they were being trained to be aggressive, but I also remember refusing to go through the woods alone to avoid getting harassed by the dogs before the incident. I'm not half as wary of stray dogs where I am now, but I also know a lot more folks around me that just have dogs as pets.