A Michael Broad Blog
It is dawning on the UK government and I suspect other legislators that banning dog breeds because they are dangerous is impractical and unsuccessful. Any dog breed can be dangerous and any dog breed can be a wonderful pet. It is all down to selective breeding and training. The sad thing is that any …
Left alone, nature operates natural selection, a process which leads to cleverer animals surviving more successfully. This led to the evolution of larger brained animals and ultimately to the dominance of humans over all animals. But for dogs selective breeding has interrupted this process with a research study deciding that dogs with smaller brains …
This is Nathan Winograd’s pet campaign and it is a good one. I think he hates the lack of science behind the banning of a dog breed because they are aggressive and dangerous. The title to this post sums up the issue. The recent banning of XL Bully dogs in the UK is a …
STUDY RESULT PLUS COMMENT: Dorottya Ujfalussy from the Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, has decided in her study that flat-faced dogs (and I’m going to include flat-faced cats) are more attractive to their owners because they are more helpless. And in being more helpless they are more like human toddlers who are themselves helpless …
Remarkably, the French bulldog cannot breed on its own. They have to be artificially inseminated because their anatomy prevents mating! One website says that because of their “short legs and narrow hips, Frenchies are a bit clumsy when it comes to mating”. In other words, they can’t do it and they need human intervention. …
For some time, now, those who are in the know understand that some dog and cat breeds have been selectively bred to extreme to emphasise their facial features which are dictated by the breed standards. However, breeders tend to overemphasise these guidelines in order to gain an advantage and in doing so you get …
This is a Vietnamese Hmong dog, a breed that first belonged to the Hmong tribe, an ethnic group living primarily in China and south-east Asia. The 13-second clip comes from the Twitter page of @Buitengebieden, a Dutch user, and it has been viewed 225,000 times and rising I suspect. People have been debating whether …
The Cat Fanciers’ Association (CFA) has been under pressure for decades to revise the breed standard i.e. the guidelines, for the flat-faced cat breeds namely the Exotic Shorthair, the Persian and the Himalayan. I hope that the pressure has been ramped up on the news that the Kennel Club has revised its guidelines for …
