The E-mail Of Death (and the Post of Death that it inspired)
Once again, I find myself reminded that interacting online with 'Dog People' is bad for one's health.
Last night I sent off an E-mail that was possibly the most intentionally angry letter I have ever sent to anyone. I am actually somewhat well-known (and often teased) for my habit of writing E-Mails Of Death when I'm angry, but this is different. What makes my EoDs intimidating isn't so much their tone or content, but rather their sheer length. I tended to explain my frustration to the recipient in ridiculously exhaustive detail, which meant the resulting E-mail would be a 10-page study on Why What You Did Upset Me. Fortunately, I can say I haven't written a TRUE EoD in years, and I am gradually figuring out that 'less is more'... But even my most impassioned E-mail of Death was written in what I strove to make an at least diplomatic tone.
The letter I wrote last night, on the other hand, was not. It was angry, it was sarcastic, it was condescending and it was rude. And I knew this as I wrote it, and I didn't care. The woman who inspired it was one of those Members Of the Church Of the Holier-Than-Thou-Dog-People types, and she had the misfortune to think she could treat me dismissively and call me a 'newbie' and walk away unscathed. She became the target of four years of spleen just waiting for a venting target.
I do, at least, feel better now. ;)
The beautiful irony is that what set me off was NOT the fact that she called me a newbie, but rather that she sent ME an EoD. I don't mind being thought of as a Newbie, and I since I am usually 'the new kid', coming in with neither championed dogs nor an affiliation with a known rescue, they're going to treat me like a newbie anyway. So I usually just embrace the title. But this EoD...holy moly! I thought I was bad, but I must take this moment to bow to the master! The E-mail she wrote me took me a full minute and a half just to SCROLL THROUGH. Printed off, I think it would have spanned more than twenty or thirty pages of printed material. I don't think I could top that even when EoDs were my medium. (I think my EoD to HLAO probably topped out at six pages, max!) How anyone could find the TIME, much less the FORTITUDE, to write something that long to a total stranger over something so positively trivial is beyond me.
My crime, by the way, was that I spoke the forbidden letters of APRI in context with showing.
See, someone on the Keeshond-L list posted an article in which a vendor that does business at AKC dog shows was exploring the fact that dog show entries tend to be on the decline. The entry fees have quadrupled over the past ten years, which is the most common reason cited, but the author of the article made it a point to say that the overall atmosphere at AKC shows is also to blame. Exhbitors tend to see nothing wrong with being rude and snappish with people while they are preparing their dogs for showing, and the minute they're done they tend to pack up and leave, never taking any time to stop and speak with spectators and answer questions. The author pointed out that this is not true of cat breeders, as the setup of cat shows requires that the exhibitors stay on the grounds for the entire day. Therefore, they often have nothing better to do than to sit and chat with spectators, and thus are happier to do so. The person who posted it asked whether we on the list felt that this viewpoint had any merit.
Having attended the show following the Shiba National in Gray Summit with wheniwas28 just a month or so ago, I wonder. Dog breed books -- you know, the kind you buy at pet stores that extolls the virtue of one breed or another, whilst entertaining readers with beautiful full-color photographs of dogs of that breed? -- always have a chapter in them dedicated to 'Purchasing Your Puppy' in which they offer sage advice about finding a breeder, asking the right questions, etc. The most common ways we're told to find a 'good, reputable breeder' is by consulting our veterinarians, contacting local breed clubs, and attending dog shows. In fact, the more serious/activist advice you'll get from Dog people is that you should never purchase a puppy from anyone who does NOT show their dogs, as not showing means the breeder is only interested in breeding for breeding's sake, not for the sake of 'bettering the breed'.
Dog shows (Westminster and Eukanuba not withstanding) are not spectator-friendly sports; the one we went to had one set of bleachers set up, and it was so far away that you couldn't really see any of the dogs clearly while sitting on them. If you didn't think to bring your own chairs, you were forced to stand the whole time. There were no announcements made or information given to explain what was going on, either; even when we stood ten feet from the judge of the Shibas we were watching, we had no idea which dogs were being shown and for what, or what dogs won. All told, it ended up being an hour or so of watching people in suits walking dogs around in circles in the grass, and other people manhandling the same dogs on tables.
The breed books and websites advise speaking with a breeder as if breeders at shows are generally only too happy to answer questions and talk with their dogs' adoring public. And why shouldn't they be? Given the non-spectator-friendliness of the actual event, anyone who would be there as a spectator would have to be either a die-hard breed fan or esle someone doing the aforementioned 'right thing': looking to connect with the most responsible of all responsible breeders. Unfortunately, the books are misleading. Breeders in general are NOT eager to speak with people at shows. They've spent $20-$30 per dog to enter them in pursuit of a 35-cent ribbon and a few points, which will only be awarded to one or two dogs in each breed class. The field is very competitive, the atmosphere is very tense, the exhibitors either nervous or impatient, depending on how long they'd been doing it and how confident they felt about their dogs' relative merits. Once their dog's time in the ring is done, they are, as the article said, eager to get out and on to either home or the next show. Spectators, really, just get in the way.
Our experience in Gray Summit in...what was it, September? .. was not too bad. It was my first show, so I'm only speaking from limited firsthand experience, but we definitely saw shades of all of this. The newer, less experienced exhibitors were quiet, reasonably friendly. The more experienced exhibitors tended to be more tense and either pointedly ignored us or seemed almost hostile. We tried our best to be respectful, because that's the kind of people we are, but it was hard to know what being respectful entails. Again, since the people running the show clearly didn't gear things to make spectators a priority, there was no clear guide in place that would suggest to us what was and was not appropriate for us to do. Is it all right if we pet the dogs? Should we stand in the pavillion, or did we need to stay outside? Is it okay to ask questions? Is it okay to walk around the area where the exhibitors are parked and meet the dogs, or should we stay away?
We violated the personal space of one breeder, who rather stupidly (I thought) set up her apparently highly excitable standard schnauzers in the main parking lot in open-air pens. This was totally my fault, I admit, but Andy and I had adopted a puppy that was a standard schnauzer mix when we were first married, and I wanted to get a closer look at the dogs. I didn't stop, didn't try to pet. I just walked by, near the pens, so I could look. The dogs barked at us, and the breeder leaped up in an angry swoop, snapping at us that her area 'was not a walkthrough' as she began dragging the pens around to block the path. Newbie mistake; I certainly had meant no harm... But for heaven's sake, it's a PARKING LOT. If your dogs are that excitable, perhaps setting them up in open pens in the main parking area is not the best move?
This sort of experience stays with a person. While I appreciate the fact that some people were nice, the fact that the 'die hards' were, in general, NOT nice does make me less eager to attend another show. And If I felt affronted just as Joe Spectator with nothing invested but the time I spent to drive there, and no stake in wins or losses, I am quite sure I'd take it to heart if I were there with my dog, dealing with the same sort of pressure, and had to deal with that sort of treatment as well. I am too pragmatic to see much point in shelling out $30 and travel costs just to subject myself and my dog to rude treatment. It's just not worth it. Show-breeding is not a profitable business by any stretch of the imagination, as breeders will proudly tell you... so aside from competitive satisfation (which would not be enough of a draw to induce ME), there's really no point.
Bottom line, I could easily see why the culture of rudeness that prevails in dog circles would put off potential show contenders.
So anyway... When I was researching APRI for Cherlyn's website (and, for that matter, for my own edification), one of the things many APRI's breeders said was that they INFINITELY preferred APRI's showing philosophy. Now, as I've noted previously, the acronym 'APRI' is tantamount to a dirty word in dog breeding circles. This is because APRI is a dog registry like the AKC (which means it's a competitor), and because APRI specifically caters to commercial breeders, wholesalers within the pet industry, and pet stores. (Read: Puppy Mills). The APRI's actual practices are above board, and let me just disclaim up front that for all of the bad press applied to so-called Puppy Mills, even the almighty AKC is still perfectly happy to do business with them. AKC loves money just as much as the next person, so as long as an establishment doesn't get itself in trouble with the USDA and pays its AKC fees regularly, the AKC doesn't much care how many dogs are being bred on the premeses. Ergo: the mere willingness to work with Puppy Mills is not enough to make APRI a 'bad registry'.
The thing is, though, that the AKC does have some policies in place that are designed to govern how breeders conduct their operations that the APRI does not uphold. Nor, to be fair, should it have to: APRI is a completely separate entity, and so they are obviously well within their rights to conduct their business however they like, without reference to the AKC or anyone else. But the fact that they do not respect these policies, presumably put in place 'for the good of the dogs' makes dog people angry and becomes the fuel that keeps anti-APRI sentiments strong in the dog world.
One big example is AKC's DNA testing policy. When a breeder produces a litter of pups to two AKC-registered parents, they then call the registry and 'register' the litter. They tell the AKC people over the phone how many pups were born and which dogs were the parents. The AKC accepts this information and the appropriate fees, and sends out a set of 'puppy papers' -- one set of registration papers for each pup. The accuracy of this process is largely dependent on breeder honor, you'll notice... a breeder could easily lie about which dogs were the parents, about the date of the pups' birth, about the number of pups born, etc. In this way, breeders can sneakily obtain papers for puppies produced when Mama Dog falls in love with an amorous male that isn't AKC registered. Just swap out Papa Dog's name with an AKC-registered stud and you're good to go. Another fun trick is to claim that litters were larger than they actually were, and give the 'papers' away with puppies that would otherwise have not qualified for registration. The dog-buying public may not completely get the whole 'registered vs unregistered' thing, but most of them realize that a dog that comes 'with papers' costs more than one that doesn't, so papers must be important somehow.
To cut down on the potential for deception, AKC put down a policy in 2001 that established mandatory DNA testing on certain dogs, most notably 'Frequently Used Sires'.. male dogs who sire more than 3 litters a year, and/or more than 7 litters in a lifetime. For commercial breeding establishments, this often represented a huge expense because this definition fit all fifty stud dogs they had on site. At $40/test, it was expensive. But I think more than that, the AKC reserved the right to come in and do random DNA testing on litters, sires and dams during inspections , and many breeders, commercial or otherwise, felt this was a violation of privacy. I do not know if in such cases whether they would charge the kennel/breeder for the testing or what, but there was a lot of outcry. Since APRI does not have the same requirements, many commercial breeders simply walked away from APRI and joined AKC instead.
AKC also has in place a policy of 'Full vs Limited Registration'. No matter how stellar a given dog and bitch happen to be, they are going to produce a couple of puppies that are what breeders call 'pet quality'. Usually this means they have some kind of 'conformation fault'. Their color isn't that good. Their markings are off. They aren't perfectly proportioned, their eyes are not the perfect shape, their earset is too far forward, too far back. Neck too long, body not square, whatever. None of these things make these puppies bad dogs or unhealthy pets; they just make them unlikely to win in a show ring. So, the breeders go through the litters, figure out which puppies are likely to be show quality and sell the rest as pets.
The problem is that there is this wonderful phenomenon called 'The Backyard Breeder'. Basically, the thinking goes that no dog that is not show quality should ever be bred for any reason. After all, the reason why pet-quality pets are sold as pets is because their genetics are faulty somehow. Even if the faultiness is slight, so the logic goes, it should not be passed on. Efforts have, of course, been made to explain this to the dogs in question, but sadly they are not interesting in the greater good of their breed. Bring a pet-quality dog to visit a pet-quality bitch in heat, and the two of them will throw all civic-minded restraint to the wind. Dogs just don't understand, I guess, that when pet quality crosses with pet quality, the result is ...well, okay..more pet quality, but POTENTIALLY inferior quality. Right? Right.
So it's up to the humans to handle things. Naturally, the most surefire way to handle this is to ensure that all dogs that are pet quality are neutered/spayed. However, since puppies go to homes at 12 weeks and traditional spays and neuters aren't done until closer to six months of age, breeders have to either sit on the families that adopt their puppies and make sure the thing is done. Oftentimes puppy contracts have a clause in it that specifies that the adoptive family will produce proof of a spay/neuter within an appropriate timeframe or something, but I guess actually ENFORCING those clauses is something of a pain... And frankly, lots of people love puppies and are only too happy to make some money and play with cute little fluffballs at the same time. So.. they get a pet-quality purebred, they DON'T spay or neuter it, and then they arrange to breed it. You know, in their Backyard. Hence: Backyard Breeder. The term basically refers to someone who breeds without showing and without really knowing what they're doing.
So the AKC again stepped up. They developed this fabulous new idea involving two 'levels' of registration. Show-quality dogs that the breeder believes to be worth breeding are given Full registration, while pet quality dogs receive Limited registration. The only real difference between the two is this: the AKC will only register puppies if BOTH parents have Full Registration. By only giving puppies Limited Registration, the breeder can at least control whether or not that puppy will be used to produce AKC-registered pups. I guess that's 'good enough' in the eyes of most breeders.
However, APRI's policy is to dual-register AKC dogs, no questions asked... and APRI does not have Limited vs. Full registrations. Therefore, someone who purchases a pet-quality pup with Limited AKC registration papers can take the papers to APRI and receive 'full' registration from APRI. This infuriates a lot of breeders, as it effectively negates the whole point of Limited Registration.. but APRI's position on it is: papers do not stop a dog from producing puppies. Don't expect us to do your job for you; you want to breed and protect your lines, YOU go and keep tabs on your customers. We're a registry, not the dog police.
And so, APRI is evil. They enable people to 'get around' AKC policies and do not apologize for doing so. They openly support commercial dog breeding. Take it for what you will.
But having established all of that, the one thing that APRI does do that not many other registries do (besides AKC and UKC) is hold shows. And as I noted way up there somewhere, their approach to showing is slightly different from the approach used by the AKC. Many people, including die-hard AKC'ers, admit that the APRI's approach has merit, which is where all of this started.
When you show a dog with the AKC, the basic goal is to be the best-looking dog out there. Each breed has a 'breed standard' that describes what the idea specimen of that breed should look like, and the judge at the show goes through the dogs that turned out that day and decides which dog best 'fits the standard'. In order to do this, the judge examines the dog closely to get a sense of its bone and body structure, and then observes the dog moving at at trot to watch how it moves. The dog and bitch that the judge likes best are given awards and then compete for more points, blah blah blah.
Couple of obvious problems with this, though. The biggest issue is the fact that your dog's performance in a given show has far less to do with your dog's actual merits and far more to do with the other dogs who happen to be there. Your dog can be a terrible example of the breed and still win, just because the other dogs that happened to turn out that day were even worse. Likewise, your dog could be gorgeous, and still walk away empty-handed because another dog there was slightly better. What this means, then, is that a Champion title can potentially have far less to say about your dog's quality than it does about your luck and timing as an exhibitor.
APRI's approach is slightly different, as I said. When APRI holds a show, the dogs are not judged against each other at all. Instead, the dogs are judged on their individual merits and given points accordingly. So the judge, rather than comparing one dog with another and picking the best, simply walks down the line of dogs, watches them move, whatever, and gives each dog a score based on how well the dog fit the standard. A dog scoring X points or above gets a ribbon and points toward his or her championship. A given show can produce several winners or none at all.
Since the point of Conformation showing is, at least to some extent, to divide the true breeding-quality wheat from the chaff, the APRI's approach makes a lot more sense. The dog's actual merits should be the bottom line, not who happened to show up. Moreover, this approach removes the competitve tension that tends to characterize AKC's shows, because no one's dog is going to edge anyone else's dog out of deserved titles and points. At worst, there may be grumbling about a judge's decision, but that's pretty much it.
I made the mistake of pointing this out to the list, and got jumped on immediately by this Debbie person. The way these 'L' lists run, responses to my messages come back both to me and to the list proper, so when her reply came through at first I thought she'd had the common courtesy to 'correct' me privately instead of doing it in front of the entire list. A few minutes later, though, the Listwide message came through and I realized she had called me out in front of everyone. I was very embarrassed, but I replied privately myself so as not to involve the list further. In that response, I was still being nice; I explained what I'd meant, blah blah blah. Then she sent me the EoD, and I refused to even read it. I just sent her a very brief reply and deleted it. She replied, smugly, that I was clearly a newbie and that I clearly hadn't bothered to read her message, and I just flat-out lost my temper with her.
She has not written me back. I am not sure what I will do if she does, really, because I don't have any intention of writing to her again, even if she responds nicely.
Last night I sent off an E-mail that was possibly the most intentionally angry letter I have ever sent to anyone. I am actually somewhat well-known (and often teased) for my habit of writing E-Mails Of Death when I'm angry, but this is different. What makes my EoDs intimidating isn't so much their tone or content, but rather their sheer length. I tended to explain my frustration to the recipient in ridiculously exhaustive detail, which meant the resulting E-mail would be a 10-page study on Why What You Did Upset Me. Fortunately, I can say I haven't written a TRUE EoD in years, and I am gradually figuring out that 'less is more'... But even my most impassioned E-mail of Death was written in what I strove to make an at least diplomatic tone.
The letter I wrote last night, on the other hand, was not. It was angry, it was sarcastic, it was condescending and it was rude. And I knew this as I wrote it, and I didn't care. The woman who inspired it was one of those Members Of the Church Of the Holier-Than-Thou-Dog-People types, and she had the misfortune to think she could treat me dismissively and call me a 'newbie' and walk away unscathed. She became the target of four years of spleen just waiting for a venting target.
I do, at least, feel better now. ;)
The beautiful irony is that what set me off was NOT the fact that she called me a newbie, but rather that she sent ME an EoD. I don't mind being thought of as a Newbie, and I since I am usually 'the new kid', coming in with neither championed dogs nor an affiliation with a known rescue, they're going to treat me like a newbie anyway. So I usually just embrace the title. But this EoD...holy moly! I thought I was bad, but I must take this moment to bow to the master! The E-mail she wrote me took me a full minute and a half just to SCROLL THROUGH. Printed off, I think it would have spanned more than twenty or thirty pages of printed material. I don't think I could top that even when EoDs were my medium. (I think my EoD to HLAO probably topped out at six pages, max!) How anyone could find the TIME, much less the FORTITUDE, to write something that long to a total stranger over something so positively trivial is beyond me.
My crime, by the way, was that I spoke the forbidden letters of APRI in context with showing.
See, someone on the Keeshond-L list posted an article in which a vendor that does business at AKC dog shows was exploring the fact that dog show entries tend to be on the decline. The entry fees have quadrupled over the past ten years, which is the most common reason cited, but the author of the article made it a point to say that the overall atmosphere at AKC shows is also to blame. Exhbitors tend to see nothing wrong with being rude and snappish with people while they are preparing their dogs for showing, and the minute they're done they tend to pack up and leave, never taking any time to stop and speak with spectators and answer questions. The author pointed out that this is not true of cat breeders, as the setup of cat shows requires that the exhibitors stay on the grounds for the entire day. Therefore, they often have nothing better to do than to sit and chat with spectators, and thus are happier to do so. The person who posted it asked whether we on the list felt that this viewpoint had any merit.
Having attended the show following the Shiba National in Gray Summit with wheniwas28 just a month or so ago, I wonder. Dog breed books -- you know, the kind you buy at pet stores that extolls the virtue of one breed or another, whilst entertaining readers with beautiful full-color photographs of dogs of that breed? -- always have a chapter in them dedicated to 'Purchasing Your Puppy' in which they offer sage advice about finding a breeder, asking the right questions, etc. The most common ways we're told to find a 'good, reputable breeder' is by consulting our veterinarians, contacting local breed clubs, and attending dog shows. In fact, the more serious/activist advice you'll get from Dog people is that you should never purchase a puppy from anyone who does NOT show their dogs, as not showing means the breeder is only interested in breeding for breeding's sake, not for the sake of 'bettering the breed'.
Dog shows (Westminster and Eukanuba not withstanding) are not spectator-friendly sports; the one we went to had one set of bleachers set up, and it was so far away that you couldn't really see any of the dogs clearly while sitting on them. If you didn't think to bring your own chairs, you were forced to stand the whole time. There were no announcements made or information given to explain what was going on, either; even when we stood ten feet from the judge of the Shibas we were watching, we had no idea which dogs were being shown and for what, or what dogs won. All told, it ended up being an hour or so of watching people in suits walking dogs around in circles in the grass, and other people manhandling the same dogs on tables.
The breed books and websites advise speaking with a breeder as if breeders at shows are generally only too happy to answer questions and talk with their dogs' adoring public. And why shouldn't they be? Given the non-spectator-friendliness of the actual event, anyone who would be there as a spectator would have to be either a die-hard breed fan or esle someone doing the aforementioned 'right thing': looking to connect with the most responsible of all responsible breeders. Unfortunately, the books are misleading. Breeders in general are NOT eager to speak with people at shows. They've spent $20-$30 per dog to enter them in pursuit of a 35-cent ribbon and a few points, which will only be awarded to one or two dogs in each breed class. The field is very competitive, the atmosphere is very tense, the exhibitors either nervous or impatient, depending on how long they'd been doing it and how confident they felt about their dogs' relative merits. Once their dog's time in the ring is done, they are, as the article said, eager to get out and on to either home or the next show. Spectators, really, just get in the way.
Our experience in Gray Summit in...what was it, September? .. was not too bad. It was my first show, so I'm only speaking from limited firsthand experience, but we definitely saw shades of all of this. The newer, less experienced exhibitors were quiet, reasonably friendly. The more experienced exhibitors tended to be more tense and either pointedly ignored us or seemed almost hostile. We tried our best to be respectful, because that's the kind of people we are, but it was hard to know what being respectful entails. Again, since the people running the show clearly didn't gear things to make spectators a priority, there was no clear guide in place that would suggest to us what was and was not appropriate for us to do. Is it all right if we pet the dogs? Should we stand in the pavillion, or did we need to stay outside? Is it okay to ask questions? Is it okay to walk around the area where the exhibitors are parked and meet the dogs, or should we stay away?
We violated the personal space of one breeder, who rather stupidly (I thought) set up her apparently highly excitable standard schnauzers in the main parking lot in open-air pens. This was totally my fault, I admit, but Andy and I had adopted a puppy that was a standard schnauzer mix when we were first married, and I wanted to get a closer look at the dogs. I didn't stop, didn't try to pet. I just walked by, near the pens, so I could look. The dogs barked at us, and the breeder leaped up in an angry swoop, snapping at us that her area 'was not a walkthrough' as she began dragging the pens around to block the path. Newbie mistake; I certainly had meant no harm... But for heaven's sake, it's a PARKING LOT. If your dogs are that excitable, perhaps setting them up in open pens in the main parking area is not the best move?
This sort of experience stays with a person. While I appreciate the fact that some people were nice, the fact that the 'die hards' were, in general, NOT nice does make me less eager to attend another show. And If I felt affronted just as Joe Spectator with nothing invested but the time I spent to drive there, and no stake in wins or losses, I am quite sure I'd take it to heart if I were there with my dog, dealing with the same sort of pressure, and had to deal with that sort of treatment as well. I am too pragmatic to see much point in shelling out $30 and travel costs just to subject myself and my dog to rude treatment. It's just not worth it. Show-breeding is not a profitable business by any stretch of the imagination, as breeders will proudly tell you... so aside from competitive satisfation (which would not be enough of a draw to induce ME), there's really no point.
Bottom line, I could easily see why the culture of rudeness that prevails in dog circles would put off potential show contenders.
So anyway... When I was researching APRI for Cherlyn's website (and, for that matter, for my own edification), one of the things many APRI's breeders said was that they INFINITELY preferred APRI's showing philosophy. Now, as I've noted previously, the acronym 'APRI' is tantamount to a dirty word in dog breeding circles. This is because APRI is a dog registry like the AKC (which means it's a competitor), and because APRI specifically caters to commercial breeders, wholesalers within the pet industry, and pet stores. (Read: Puppy Mills). The APRI's actual practices are above board, and let me just disclaim up front that for all of the bad press applied to so-called Puppy Mills, even the almighty AKC is still perfectly happy to do business with them. AKC loves money just as much as the next person, so as long as an establishment doesn't get itself in trouble with the USDA and pays its AKC fees regularly, the AKC doesn't much care how many dogs are being bred on the premeses. Ergo: the mere willingness to work with Puppy Mills is not enough to make APRI a 'bad registry'.
The thing is, though, that the AKC does have some policies in place that are designed to govern how breeders conduct their operations that the APRI does not uphold. Nor, to be fair, should it have to: APRI is a completely separate entity, and so they are obviously well within their rights to conduct their business however they like, without reference to the AKC or anyone else. But the fact that they do not respect these policies, presumably put in place 'for the good of the dogs' makes dog people angry and becomes the fuel that keeps anti-APRI sentiments strong in the dog world.
One big example is AKC's DNA testing policy. When a breeder produces a litter of pups to two AKC-registered parents, they then call the registry and 'register' the litter. They tell the AKC people over the phone how many pups were born and which dogs were the parents. The AKC accepts this information and the appropriate fees, and sends out a set of 'puppy papers' -- one set of registration papers for each pup. The accuracy of this process is largely dependent on breeder honor, you'll notice... a breeder could easily lie about which dogs were the parents, about the date of the pups' birth, about the number of pups born, etc. In this way, breeders can sneakily obtain papers for puppies produced when Mama Dog falls in love with an amorous male that isn't AKC registered. Just swap out Papa Dog's name with an AKC-registered stud and you're good to go. Another fun trick is to claim that litters were larger than they actually were, and give the 'papers' away with puppies that would otherwise have not qualified for registration. The dog-buying public may not completely get the whole 'registered vs unregistered' thing, but most of them realize that a dog that comes 'with papers' costs more than one that doesn't, so papers must be important somehow.
To cut down on the potential for deception, AKC put down a policy in 2001 that established mandatory DNA testing on certain dogs, most notably 'Frequently Used Sires'.. male dogs who sire more than 3 litters a year, and/or more than 7 litters in a lifetime. For commercial breeding establishments, this often represented a huge expense because this definition fit all fifty stud dogs they had on site. At $40/test, it was expensive. But I think more than that, the AKC reserved the right to come in and do random DNA testing on litters, sires and dams during inspections , and many breeders, commercial or otherwise, felt this was a violation of privacy. I do not know if in such cases whether they would charge the kennel/breeder for the testing or what, but there was a lot of outcry. Since APRI does not have the same requirements, many commercial breeders simply walked away from APRI and joined AKC instead.
AKC also has in place a policy of 'Full vs Limited Registration'. No matter how stellar a given dog and bitch happen to be, they are going to produce a couple of puppies that are what breeders call 'pet quality'. Usually this means they have some kind of 'conformation fault'. Their color isn't that good. Their markings are off. They aren't perfectly proportioned, their eyes are not the perfect shape, their earset is too far forward, too far back. Neck too long, body not square, whatever. None of these things make these puppies bad dogs or unhealthy pets; they just make them unlikely to win in a show ring. So, the breeders go through the litters, figure out which puppies are likely to be show quality and sell the rest as pets.
The problem is that there is this wonderful phenomenon called 'The Backyard Breeder'. Basically, the thinking goes that no dog that is not show quality should ever be bred for any reason. After all, the reason why pet-quality pets are sold as pets is because their genetics are faulty somehow. Even if the faultiness is slight, so the logic goes, it should not be passed on. Efforts have, of course, been made to explain this to the dogs in question, but sadly they are not interesting in the greater good of their breed. Bring a pet-quality dog to visit a pet-quality bitch in heat, and the two of them will throw all civic-minded restraint to the wind. Dogs just don't understand, I guess, that when pet quality crosses with pet quality, the result is ...well, okay..more pet quality, but POTENTIALLY inferior quality. Right? Right.
So it's up to the humans to handle things. Naturally, the most surefire way to handle this is to ensure that all dogs that are pet quality are neutered/spayed. However, since puppies go to homes at 12 weeks and traditional spays and neuters aren't done until closer to six months of age, breeders have to either sit on the families that adopt their puppies and make sure the thing is done. Oftentimes puppy contracts have a clause in it that specifies that the adoptive family will produce proof of a spay/neuter within an appropriate timeframe or something, but I guess actually ENFORCING those clauses is something of a pain... And frankly, lots of people love puppies and are only too happy to make some money and play with cute little fluffballs at the same time. So.. they get a pet-quality purebred, they DON'T spay or neuter it, and then they arrange to breed it. You know, in their Backyard. Hence: Backyard Breeder. The term basically refers to someone who breeds without showing and without really knowing what they're doing.
So the AKC again stepped up. They developed this fabulous new idea involving two 'levels' of registration. Show-quality dogs that the breeder believes to be worth breeding are given Full registration, while pet quality dogs receive Limited registration. The only real difference between the two is this: the AKC will only register puppies if BOTH parents have Full Registration. By only giving puppies Limited Registration, the breeder can at least control whether or not that puppy will be used to produce AKC-registered pups. I guess that's 'good enough' in the eyes of most breeders.
However, APRI's policy is to dual-register AKC dogs, no questions asked... and APRI does not have Limited vs. Full registrations. Therefore, someone who purchases a pet-quality pup with Limited AKC registration papers can take the papers to APRI and receive 'full' registration from APRI. This infuriates a lot of breeders, as it effectively negates the whole point of Limited Registration.. but APRI's position on it is: papers do not stop a dog from producing puppies. Don't expect us to do your job for you; you want to breed and protect your lines, YOU go and keep tabs on your customers. We're a registry, not the dog police.
And so, APRI is evil. They enable people to 'get around' AKC policies and do not apologize for doing so. They openly support commercial dog breeding. Take it for what you will.
But having established all of that, the one thing that APRI does do that not many other registries do (besides AKC and UKC) is hold shows. And as I noted way up there somewhere, their approach to showing is slightly different from the approach used by the AKC. Many people, including die-hard AKC'ers, admit that the APRI's approach has merit, which is where all of this started.
When you show a dog with the AKC, the basic goal is to be the best-looking dog out there. Each breed has a 'breed standard' that describes what the idea specimen of that breed should look like, and the judge at the show goes through the dogs that turned out that day and decides which dog best 'fits the standard'. In order to do this, the judge examines the dog closely to get a sense of its bone and body structure, and then observes the dog moving at at trot to watch how it moves. The dog and bitch that the judge likes best are given awards and then compete for more points, blah blah blah.
Couple of obvious problems with this, though. The biggest issue is the fact that your dog's performance in a given show has far less to do with your dog's actual merits and far more to do with the other dogs who happen to be there. Your dog can be a terrible example of the breed and still win, just because the other dogs that happened to turn out that day were even worse. Likewise, your dog could be gorgeous, and still walk away empty-handed because another dog there was slightly better. What this means, then, is that a Champion title can potentially have far less to say about your dog's quality than it does about your luck and timing as an exhibitor.
APRI's approach is slightly different, as I said. When APRI holds a show, the dogs are not judged against each other at all. Instead, the dogs are judged on their individual merits and given points accordingly. So the judge, rather than comparing one dog with another and picking the best, simply walks down the line of dogs, watches them move, whatever, and gives each dog a score based on how well the dog fit the standard. A dog scoring X points or above gets a ribbon and points toward his or her championship. A given show can produce several winners or none at all.
Since the point of Conformation showing is, at least to some extent, to divide the true breeding-quality wheat from the chaff, the APRI's approach makes a lot more sense. The dog's actual merits should be the bottom line, not who happened to show up. Moreover, this approach removes the competitve tension that tends to characterize AKC's shows, because no one's dog is going to edge anyone else's dog out of deserved titles and points. At worst, there may be grumbling about a judge's decision, but that's pretty much it.
I made the mistake of pointing this out to the list, and got jumped on immediately by this Debbie person. The way these 'L' lists run, responses to my messages come back both to me and to the list proper, so when her reply came through at first I thought she'd had the common courtesy to 'correct' me privately instead of doing it in front of the entire list. A few minutes later, though, the Listwide message came through and I realized she had called me out in front of everyone. I was very embarrassed, but I replied privately myself so as not to involve the list further. In that response, I was still being nice; I explained what I'd meant, blah blah blah. Then she sent me the EoD, and I refused to even read it. I just sent her a very brief reply and deleted it. She replied, smugly, that I was clearly a newbie and that I clearly hadn't bothered to read her message, and I just flat-out lost my temper with her.
She has not written me back. I am not sure what I will do if she does, really, because I don't have any intention of writing to her again, even if she responds nicely.