and Maya!

This one might go in the Fred Pics Hall of Fame. 🤎

Dog on a log, dog on a rock, dog on a (sleepy)pod

(source)

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.

i mean. you’re right. but this post is about standards, and the greyhound standard calls for the dogs to be lean and well-muscled, not skin-and-bones frail 😅 a frail, malnourished dog isn’t a dog who can sprint after game, a lean, muscular dog is. credit where credit is due, the greyhound standard is pretty function-focused for the most part.

a perfectly healthy greyhound is always going to look a bit skinny next to a lot of other breeds, just because of the sheer longness of them (long dog is fast dog, fast dog get rabbit). that can definitely be a bit shocking!