Himself, the Comet, & the Dragon

@darkwood-sleddog have to agree with your tags. And, realistically, a lot of people never consider this because it's not a problem. For THEM. They don't know how to recognize if their pet is uncomfortable when it isn't growling or biting them and so they don't even think about it. "But he loves hugs! He licks my face and rolls over and waggs his tail every time!" And they don't clock that their dog is trying to appease them so they'll stop this nonsense. So they never look into it more deeply.

The clients that contact me and we end up doing consent work are people who's dogs are now blatantly afraid of certain type of touch/interaction or are aggressive over it because their smaller signals have been missed. Explaining to people how having control over your body can reduce stress as like a new technique they can try often ends up with me getting them fully on board. I think it alleviates blame when I phrase it that way which is my goal because if you feel like shit you;re less likely to want to train with your dog (and of course my clients are intentionally seeking out further information and help because they care so much about their dog so why punish that? I spend time with the people that feel bad explaining that you can't be expected to know what hasn't been taught to you. Then know NOW and are changing and that's great!).

And THEN there's the set of people who view their pets as decor and property. They obtained the pet not because they want a RELATIONSHIP but because they wanted something cute and warm and soft to manhandle whenever they feel like. These people expect their pets to always be conveniently available to them and get upset when they aren't. Like when you try to start your car but the battery is dead.

I think the solution to all of this is to start treating pet ownership as a privilege (which it is! It's not a right! There are bare minimum standards of care and not everyone can meet them!) and start teaching kids how to respect other people at a very basic level. If they know how to respect other people and their own friends then it's much easier to transfer that to other living creatures. But yeah, a lot of people can't even do that (looking at you people who think you have a right to touch my dog that i'm walking on a leash. Or cut in line. Or drive like no one else is on the road. Or touch pregnant women's stomachs.)

A large dataset (227 breeds; dataset 1) of median heterozygosity values (H) was obtained through commercial DNA testing of 49,378 dogs. The mean number of individuals per breed was 217.5 (95% Confidence Interval 162–273.1) and the range of individual dogs/breed was 30–4728. Since the H values do not provide a simple relationship to pedigree, we wanted to determine what their equivalency was to the coefficient of inbreeding (F). The genotype-based coefficient of inbreeding was determined in 19 breeds with 8–20 individuals in each breed (dataset 2) for comparison to dataset 1. Dreger at al [8] used 10 individuals per breed and calculated F based on genotypes and the correlation with dataset 2 was 0.85 (12 breeds in common). Yordy et al. [9] used 6–724 individuals per breed and the correlation with dataset 2 was 0.75 (15 breeds in common). F from dataset 2 was highly correlated with H from dataset 1 (Pearson correlation coefficient of − 0.8899 (P < 0.0001) for the same 19 breeds. Linear regression (r2 = 0.79) was performed to obtain adjusted F values (Fadj) for the dataset 1 breeds. Based upon linear regression, an H value of 33.1% was equivalent to F of 0.25. The H values were adjusted based on the regression to provide breed estimates of inbreeding for the 227 breeds in dataset 1 (Fadj). These adjusted values from dataset 1 were compared to adjusted values from [9] which included 97 breeds in common and the Pearson correlation was 0.883 and [8] which included 75 breeds in common and was 0.89. The mean of the Fadj values for 227 breeds was 0.249 (95% CI 0.235–0.263) (Fig. 1). Strikingly few breeds (N = 12) had low inbreeding values (< 0.10). The breeds with the lowest levels of inbreeding were mostly landrace breeds or breeds with recent cross breeding. To put the inbreeding values in context, the breeding of two first cousins produces F = 0.0625, two half siblings F = 0.125 and two full siblings or parent-offspring F = 0.25.

Not sure if these numbers are for SL or WL mals. The SL mals are much less common, so it could be either. Malinois in general have better genetic diversity than either of their longhaired siblings. That's why they are the go-to variety for any intervariety breedings.

“NANCY EVANS KENNEL

FOR THE BEST IN BASSETS THE PROOF IS IN THE WINNING

Four of our lovely young ladies”

Basset Hounds