New Freaks on a Leash at the AKC

The Kennel Club Freak Show continues next week with more dogs fit for the side show, and more gawkers paying their quarter to see the bizarre, strange, and twisted people that glory in breeding defective, diseased and deformed dogs. 

Below are three of the newest breeds to be pulled into the American Kennel Club where dogs registrations are falling so fast that the AKC may be out of business entirely by 2025.

The Cesky Terrier - inbred, non-working, often sickly

The Cesky Terrier is a deeply inbred dog created by simply crossing two Sealyhams and a Scottie and then inbreeding the whelp for 60 years with two more Sealyhams tossed in on top back in the 1980s. Supposedly created as a working dog this dog has, in fact, never worked past the first cross, and the dog's silk coat is totally unsuitable for earthwork. Today this dog is not worked in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, England, Ireland, the US, Germany, Canada, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France or anywhere else in the world. In fact, there are more pictures of the Loch Ness monster than there are of working Ceskys! The good news is that the world has not proven too stupid so far as this dog is concerned, and today this dog is about as rare as a panda because it is ugly, useless in the field, and has some serious veterinary liabilities (a UK health survey found the average age at mortality to be just over 8 years). Who wants any of that? Not many! The hand and vanity of many "creates" many breeds, and many are failures. Instead of purging the failures, however, the Kennel Club pulls them in and dips them in amber so they will be failures for all time.

Norwegian Lundehund - inbred, diseased, mutant

The Norwegian Lundehund is a dog famous for a freakish mutation. In this case we have a very undistinguished-looking small Spitz-like dog whose claim to fame is that it has six toes and a rather serious genetic disorder of the digestive tract (Lundehund gastroenteropathy) in which the dog loses its ability to absorb nutrients from food, resulting in malnutrition or even starvation in extreme cases. The cause of the polydactylism and the digestive tract disease are the same: inbreeding. To be clear polydactylism is NOT useful to the Lundehund in climbing cliffs -- the extra toe is an extra elevated dew claw that is more likely to cause injury when ripped than to provide much more purchase when scrambling over rocks or going into holes -- tasks working terriers do every day with normal feet and often with their dew claws removed. The mutation that causes polydactylism is fairly common, but so unuseful in nature that Mother Nature weeds it out through earyl mortality. Humans, however, like freaks and oddities and in the case of the Lundehund, when a freak spitz dog with six toes showed up, it was easy enough for isolated Norwegian islanders to double down on that dog and inbreed a six-toed dogs even as they cocked up a reason for its existence. Though the Lundehund is supposed to be a puffin-hunting dog, puffins are typically hunted with nooses and nets on long poles -- an ancient technology -- and there is no real evidence the dogs were actually required for puffin hunting, and they were certainly never very common. When several waves of distemper swept through Norway's seacoast island communities in the 1930s and 40s, the Lundehund population dropped down to six dogs, of which five were from the same litter. The dog has remained heavily inbred since then, and with no real work to do, and rather plain features, this dog too remains rarer than the Giant Panda, with less than 1,000 worldwide..

Xoloitzcuintli - deformed, defective, mutant 
The Xoloitzcuintli (aka "Mexican Hairless"), Peruvian Hairless and Chinese Crested Dogs all share the same gene mutation, and all are believed to be descended from a single-dog mutation which occurred in the New World some 4,000 years ago. Hairless dog breeders are intentionally breeding defective dogs for canine ectodermal dysplasia (CED), a mutation of the FOX13 gene that not only results in hairlessness, but also results in fairly serious dental issues (i.e. loss of teeth).
.