Do
Wrongs Ever Make ARight? Continued FROM page 30
a lucky accident, indeed!” Horner wrote. Presumably, they were both Mastiffs, but the philosophy is the same: Sometimes practicality wins out over paper. Tolerance of such porous pedigrees in the 19th Century, when many breeds were still in an embryonic stage, is perhaps more understandable than today. But it occurred in the last century as well. In 1959, a purebred Dogue de Bordeaux bitch, Fidelle de Fénélon, was imported to the U.S., and was subsequently registered as a Mastiff by the American Kennel Club. That’s not apocryphal: It’s right there in the studbook at the AKC library. Bred to a bona-fide Mastiff, Merles Alvin, Fidelle produced offspring that went on to produce specialty winners; one of her descendants, the well-known brindle, Devil of Wayside, was exported to Great Britain, where he became a champion and an influential sire. Perhaps the most famous allegations of cross-pollination in the breed were in the 1970s and ’80s, in the Frenchtown, N.J., kennel of Tobin Jackson. Jackson’s Deer Run line is omnipresent in Mastiff pedigrees today; knowledgeable fanciers put the number of DRF (“Deer Run Free”) lines at less than one percent, worldwide. And that’s probably too conservative a number. No one I have ever interviewed saw an actual breeding between a Great Dane or a Saint Bernard and a Mastiff, but many argue that the dogs themselves demonstrated it clear as day: First, from impressively headed but decidedly unsound British-based stock (the late handler Alan Levine likened them to circus seals crossing the ring), Deer Run produced very sound, but relatively plain dogs. Then, once the structural issues were sorted, the dogs regained type – along with longer coats (the infamous “fluffies”) and the occasional piebald. Jackson isn’t around to tell the tale, but at the end of the day he left the breed sounder and just as typey as he found it. Does it matter how he got there? (Jackson was also a beachhead for the Presa Canario in the late 1980s and 66 Dog News
early 1990s, and his Deer Run Arbaco was a foundation dog here in the U.S. Controversy about that dog rages even today, as Spanish Presa breeders argue that his blue pigment was unheard of in the county of origin, and point to the fact that Jackson had a diminutive Neapolitan Mastiff on premise. The debate over whether or not the AKC’s first registered FSS Presa was in fact a mongrel has created schism in the breed, with “purists” renaming it the Dogo Canario. Descendants of Jackson’s Presas include Bane, who attacked and killed San Francisco lacrosse coach Diane Whipple in her apartment-building hallway in 2001.) Mastiffs are hardly the only breed where incursions of foreign blood have happened with regularity. Sometimes, the crossing is intentional – a not-
“Mastiffs are hardly
the only breed where incursions of foreign blood have happened with regularity. Sometimes, the crossing is intentional – a not-unknown happening...” unknown happening, for example, in some of the closely related Terrier breeders. Other times, it’s simply an oops. In my own breed, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, we sometimes see blue Ridgebacks, as well as black-and-tan anomalies. Some of my less cynical peers see these “off” colors as “throwbacks” to founding Rhodesian dogs at the turn of the previous century – blue Danes or Greyhounds and Airedales, is the common refrain. But I apply Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is likely the best. Blue Ridgebacks are particularly common in Germany, native home of the Weimaraner. And the Doberman-Ridgeback cross was a very popular one in southern Africa, when an edgier guarding temperament was required. Both phenotypes are close
enough to Ridgeback type that even a firstgeneration cross could “pass” and continue on in the gene pool. The operant question is not: Do these crosses happen? But rather: Is it a bad thing that they no longer do – or, at least, have less opportunity to, without being detected? Did these occasional crosses, made possible by a registry that operated on the honor system, help their respective breeds? Did the end justify the means? Of course, the problem with such “paper hanging” is that it degrades the value of pedigrees, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Anyone who deals in Neapolitan Mastiff from the country of origin will tell you that some pedigrees are as fictitious as a canto by Dante. When working with any of these bloodlines, a breeder needs access to a parallel universe of pedigrees – the real ones – known by a handful of knowledgeable breeders. Like Dante, without a Virgil to guide you, you’re stuck in genetic purgatory. Perhaps the reason that these crosses happen in secret is the reaction when they are done out in the open. Consider the Dalmatian Backcross Project: In 1973, one Pointer – one Pointer – was crossed to a Dalmatian to help eliminate a uric-acid stone problem that had become endemic in the breed. To say this ignited a huge debate in the breed community would be an understatement. The offspring of this cross – themselves bred back to purebred Dalmatians for four decades – were barred from registration until 2011, when the AKC permitted their inclusion in the registry, albeit with a notation of their spotty – or, in this case, not-so-spotty – history. A sharp contrast to this is the story of the bobtail Boxers bred in the United Kingdom, in anticipation of the ban on tail docking. Bruce Cattanach, a successful Boxer breeder, crossed Boxers with Pembroke Welsh Corgis that have naturally occurring bobtail gene. As you might imagine, the first generation of this cross was a Puggle-like creature that had little resemblance to a Boxer, but, with subsequent breedings back to the Boxer side of the pedigree, the dogs soon regained type – all the while naturally losing their tails, thanks to the Corgi DNA that was being pulled along. After four generations of purebred breedings, the Kennel Club permits backcrossed offspring to be registered as purebred, as these Corgi-derived creatures were. The earth continued to spin on its axis. I recently corresponded with a Scottish Continued on page 74