Terrierman blogged: Bulldogs: How Did We Come to Select for Defect?

My Comment:

As usual Terrierman makes many inaccurate and inflammatory statements in this piece.

First off, those pictures of skulls that he used are just pictures from a company that makes medical models of bones ... the company is Bone Clones Inc.

As Joanna Kimball pointed out in Implications of the Kennel Club decision on the Pekingese: Pedigree Dogs Exposed, the model used for the Bull Dog (and probably the Pitbull too) are not normative skulls.

That is, the model used is not typical of the breed but may be the skull of an extreme outlier in a breed, if the skull is even based on a real example of the breed and is not just an artistically made mold.

To quote Joanna Kimball specifically:

"This is the exact skull the program said was representative of the English Bulldog:

This is not only an incorrect skull but a grossly malformed one. The dog would have had serious trouble eating or living anything close to a normal life.

By the way, this is a skull sold by a medical research company, which would, of course, have nothing to do with determining the normative Bulldog skull. And it’s on the first page of a google images search for “bulldog skull”– the research done for this program was incredibly shallow and irresponsible.

This is the actual Bulldog skull, as described by the illustrated standard–in other words, this is the skull that is seen as the highest achievement of deliberate breeding:

It is absolutely obvious that show breeders do NOT want the unhealthy skull, would immediately reject the unhealthy skull, and would be horrified by any animal in that condition."

Terrierman goes on to speak on how the Bulldog breed was developed:

" In fact, it was now mostly Chinese Pug crossed with Staffordshire Terrier!"

That is not a known fact but a theory that some have. Others believe the Bull Dog breed developed out of Mastiff type dogs. Not that any of this really matters. Some how or other through selective breeding practices the Bull Dog was developed.

What is factual is that the skull image used by Terrierman to criticise Bulldog head conformation is simply a model produced by a company that makes skeletal models, and the model is NOT a normative Bulldog head, and is not consistent with the standard that Bulldog breeders are striving to achieve.

I find it interesting that in this particular piece that Terrierman refers to someone who asked "Did I have a "before" picture of what an English Bulldog looked like? ... But she wanted dog skull pictures. I have those somewhere, don't I? Now where were they?". Now would that "she" be Jemima?

As Joanna Kimball pointed out in Implications of the Kennel Club decision on the Pekingese: Pedigree Dogs Exposed, "the research done for this program was incredibly shallow and irresponsible".

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