The books always say, when buying a puppy, that locating a reputable breeder is nine-tenths of your search. Because every puppy is cute, all you can really go by is the integrity and experience of the breeder. For the past twenty-five years, I have faithfully followed this advice, and always bought my dogs from extremely reputable breeders. The results have been quite dismal. With the sole exception of Bonnie, all my carefully selected breeders sold me impeccably-papered purebred dogs with a host of physical and emotional debits. Of the two other superlative dogs I've had, one was a childhood mutt, and the other I hand-picked from a litter of old-fashioned-type Corgis I bred twenty-five years ago.
It took me a very long time to come to the sad conclusion that my experience wasn't simply the result of bad luck or lousy background checks. I now believe that reputable breeders, for all their genuine dedication and integrity, are working within a set of premises that cannot help but turn out such dogs in the end. Every registered breed of dog is a genetic bottleneck, with the predictable problems thereof. The main differences lie in the width of the neck, and the criteria used for selection.
It's like the old Woody Allen joke about the man who goes to the psychiatrist and complains that his brother thinks he's a chicken. The shrink says, well, bring him in, I'll see what I can do. And the man replies, I can't do that, Doc. I need the eggs.
No matter how dumb, scientifically speaking, the common practices of purebred dog breeding appear, they continue, because they work. In the short term. If you don't look too closely.
But say I have gotten extremely wary of inbreeding, and yet I still do want a dog of particular characteristics. What are my choices? Well, I can search for pedigrees that show very low inbreeding coefficients, and I can try to locate parents of litters, that have the characteristics I'm seeking.
The first thing I discover is that the pedigree I'm looking for is a very rare occurence, and when I find one, it is usually of a litter a thousand miles away. The second thing I discover is that researching working character of individual dogs is very difficult from a distance. Working videos are not yet a routinely available piece of information. And what do you decide about a dog with an interesting pedigree full of unknowns, who has only been, say, worked on cattle three times?
Roll the dice and hope? Wait, isn't that what I was doing before?
I actually go to church and pray for the right puppy to come to me. I'm not sure how theologically sound that practice is. But it feels right: no matter how much homework I do, it still seems as if it is all in God's hands.