Bug, Bird, and co.

Green sea turtles have been an iconic endangered species since the 1980s, mostly due to bycatch in fishing nets and taking adults and eggs for food. I have core childhood memories of watching Steve Irwin talk about sea turtle conservation in front of a beach full of nesting green sea turtles.

After 45 years of conservation efforts, their population now meets the IUCN criteria for Least Concern rather than Endangered.

For a species with such a slow life history (it takes green sea turtles decades to reach sexual maturity) and a nearly global population, this is a Really Big Deal. This is the kind of long term conservation victory that many of the amazing humans who started working on green sea turtle conservation back in the 80s didn't live to see.

Your husky isn’t “hyperactive”, it’s bred to pull sleds for 8 hours straight and you have it in a 400 sq ft yard.

Your English sheepdog isn’t “pushy”, it’s bred to herd sheep, and you have neither to space nor the herd to allow it.

Your terrier isn’t “nippy”, it’s bred to kill rats and your hamster looks a hell of a lot like one.

Your Catahoula isn’t “mean to animals”, it’s bred to hunt any and all animals smaller than it, and you didn’t acclimate it to your cat.

Your Lhasa Apso isn’t “yappy”, it’s bred to bark at any tiny noise and alert watchmen to intruders

To which I pull up his lips and show them his inch long teeth before saying something like "This is a predator that can run faster, jump higher, and climb trees better than most people. His bred job is bitting. The "perfect" dog you see is two years of my blood, sweat, and tears. You want a golden retriever, or perhaps just a cat."

(I can only imagine how much worse this will be with my new Koolie when we start going out.)

The dog fancy as we know it today comes out of Victorian Britain and is a sibling of the eugenics movement happening there around the same time.

Prior to the Victorian age dog breeds were not what we know they as today. Dogs of course had many different functions and different forms to follow those functions, but they would be better classified as "types" than what we now call breeds. They did not have closed gene pools and there was a lot more ability to have gene flow between types of dogs (yay genetic diversity!)

Eventually the Victorians narrow dogs from types to breeds, closed stud books which narrowed the amount of gene flow allowed between dogs, and created "breed standards" as we know them today. This set up a documented and desirable look dogs had to meet to be considered worthy enough to continue their genes to the next generation. It is this type of language and thought process, the "preservation" and "improvement" language that echoes that of the eugenicists at the time who were actively trying to eliminate black, poor, and "mentally defective" people from the British population while justifying it with science. Eugenics is racism AND colonialism. straight up. So. So. Much of this language is passed down in the dog fancy to this day (as well as a whole lot of classism).

Additionally, once the dog fancy grew outside of Britain, the British Kennel Club started to classify dogs they found outside of the UK and classify them into more restricted breeds. This included indigenous dog types from many parts of the world. These breeds were often stripped of their true indigenous identity and taken from indigenous control (because white people thought they "knew better" and how to "improve" these dogs, given slurs as breed names, were given standards that narrowed their expected look to an extreme, and were put into the dog fancy to have their studbooks closed.

To this day many (most) dog breeds indigenous to colonized areas (north/south/central americas, africa, asia, etc.) have two versions of their dogs: the one the dog fancy deems "correct" and "pure" enough to be put on display in conformation shows and the ones still present in their indigenous homelands where said dogs must go through extensive review to even be consider for "outcrossing" into the kennel club registered population (if that's even an option).

To this day most kennel clubs members are white, conformation is overall unwelcoming to non-white people, kennel clubs are still resistant to outcrossing in most instances despite science on gene diversity saying otherwise, keep studbooks closed, are resistant to changing slur based breed names even upon indigenous request, create new breeds that try and replicate what they view as 'mythologically indigenous" breeds that have no actual basis in any indigenous heritage.