No I’m not a fascist (at least I hope not…)
I’m trying to understand why we’ve normalised the idea of eugenics in dogs (e.g. golden retrievers are friendly and smart, chihuahas are aggressive, etc.)¹ but find the idea of racial classification in humans abhorrent.
I can sort of see it from the idea that Nurture (culture and upbringing) would have a greater effect on a human’s characteristics than Nature would.
At the same time, my family tree has many twins and I’ve noticed that the identical ones have similar outcomes in life, whereas the fraternal ones (even the ones that look very similar) don’t really (N=3).
Maybe dog culture is not a thing, and that’s why people are happy to make these sweeping generalizations on dog characterics?
I’m lost a little
1: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/df/74/f7/df74f716c3a70f59aeb468152e4be927.png
hmm! So we accept it in dogs, because dogs don’t have an idealogy of the “perfect breed” so to speak, and so we still selectively breed them for characteritics that we desire, but there’s not one ideal that can rank one dog over another.
I think you just cleared up a lot of it for me: there’s no dog politics in dog breeding, they’re just diverse.
Well, not quite. Many people find the extreme trait selection present in, eg. French Bulldogs, to be horribly unethical. I’m of the opinion that animals have natural rights as well, and one of those is to not be born into a world of pain for someone else’s amusement. It can be a very political topic! It just doesn’t usually lead to genocide.
Political at the human-level, yes - but at the dog level - they just see themselves as different, not ranked. They don’t themselves subscribe to the idealogy of archetypes.
A well-bred dalmation from a long stock of desirable characteristics (from a human perspective), would still probably breed with a “lesser breed” (again, from a human perspective) because the dogs don’t actually care; their owners do.