Cover story: Man's best friend? How cosmetic breeding is deforming domestic animals

Last year the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) invited consultation on a proposed new Animal Welfare Bill. Among the proposals were a ban on cutting off puppies' tails; tighter controls of pet fairs and the exotic-animal trade; a new criminal offence of 'likely to cause unnecessary suffering'; increased powers for police to investigate cruelty; longer sentences and more time for cases to be brought to court; and prosecution of breeders who produce genetically defective animals.

Thanks to lobbying campaigns by breed associations and owners' clubs, every one of these ideas was fiercely opposed: 82% of Defra's respondents wanted the right to go on cutting puppies' tails off; 71% were against regulatory control of the living car-boot sales that pass as 'pet fairs'; 70% didn't want increased protection for imported exotic species; 71% thought that keeping animals in conditions likely to cause suffering should not be a criminal offence; 89% opposed any increase in police powers; 67% were against longer sentences for offenders and 88% against allowing more time for cases to be pursued and brought to court. Such was their fury that bird fanciers threatened Defra with the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the regulation of pet fairs would infringe their right of free association.

Time now ticks by while Defra considers its position and hopes to be given time to introduce its bill in the next session of parliament. Will MPs respond to serious welfare issues, affecting millions of animals but risking public revolt, as vigorously as they pursued the minor but electorally popular issue of fox-hunting? Whereas only 15,000 foxes are killed by hounds every year, nearly half of our 24.6m households keep pets, millions of which are bred to genetically debased standards and traded with less care than house plants. Will parliament inveigh against persian cat and springer spaniel as bullishly as it has driven the foxhound into the coverts? Will it be as revolted by parrots wilting at pet fairs as it was by Reynard fleeing across the lowland fields? Will it seize upon the Companion Animal Welfare Council's (CAWC's) report on the handling of exotic pets as eagerly as it seized upon the Burns report on fox-hunting?

The figures are all but ungraspable. The ornamental fish industry alone employs 10,000 people in the UK. The value of the 1,000-plus species imported each year is between £12m and £14m, inflating a fish population that already stands at 150m. Reptiles and amphibians, too, are multiplying rapidly. Some 100,000 reptiles passed through Heathrow last year, including iguanas, pythons and boa constrictors. A thousand species of bird are kept in captivity, and the range of mammals would challenge the credulity of David Attenborough - opossums, wallabies, flying squirrels, bactrian camels, reindeer, big cats, porcupines, llamas, alpacas and sugar gliders, as well as the ubiquitous guinea pigs, gerbils and hamsters. Add to these 6.1m dogs, 7.5m cats and the voting power of 11.8m pet-owning households, and you have a market of formidable economic and political force. According to the survey firm Mintel, pet foods, products and services in the UK are now worth £3.5 billion a year, with cat and dog foods alone worth £1.75 billion.

For years the pet lobby has been able to keep the legislators at bay. Faced with such powerful opposition, the UK has never signed up to the Council of Europe's Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals - similar in many ways to the proposed Animal Welfare Bill - which dates all the way back to 1987.

You can see why the hackles rise. In March 1995 a resolution was added to the convention that hit the pet world like a declaration of war. In a tightly worded addendum, the CoE hoped to discourage, and if necessary to outlaw, the purposeful breeding of pet animals with genetic defects. Worse: a question in Defra's own consultation now reflects the very same principle. It asks: 'Should it be an offence for breeders to produce an animal, which will not be used for scientific research or medical purposes, that is likely to be genetically defective?'It sounds unexceptionable - who's in favour of disabled dogs and cats? - but banning Christmas would be less controversial. The defects specified in the convention - respiratory problems, skeletal deformities - are the very characteristics that distinguish one breed from another: the squashed face of the bulldog, the miniature legs of the dachshund, the bulging eyes of the boston terrier, the short skull and truncated nose of the persian cat. Breed standards - the blueprints against which show judges award points - are catalogues of deformity. Ban deformity and you ban the breeds.

The worst example is the bulldog: a waddling, wheezing, disease-prone lump of nonsense that has such an enormous head and such narrow hips that it is rarely able to give birth naturally. One of its most outspoken critics is James Serpell, associate professor of humane ethics and animal welfare at the University of Pennsylvania. The breed societies, he says, 'create bizarre cultural artefacts, many of them highly deformed and with lifelong chronic health problems'. The big-head/small-body distortion of the bulldog, he says, is the manifestation of chondrodystrophy - a form of congenital dwarfism that brings acute respiratory problems and a shortened life. 'The breeders are consciously selecting for characteristics known to cause medical problems,' he says. 'That's why it's so ethically objectionable.'

It is also why the CAWC's next priority will be an investigation of cosmetic breeding and its consequences. The problem is not a small one. Almost half the nation's 6.1m dogs are pedigree breeds, and another 25% crossbreeds. By the most conservative estimate, one in 10 of these will suffer health defects as a direct result of its breeding.

Psychologists suggest that flat-faced cats and dogs - bulldog, boxer, pekinese - appeal to us because they remind us of children. Unlike children, however, they pay for their attractiveness with dud respiratory systems and shortened tear ducts that leave them gasping for breath and with perpetually weeping eyes. Anthropomorphism lies behind much of the damage we do. When pets disappoint by rejecting human conditioning, we neglect, mistreat or abandon them. When they reward us with 'love', we abuse them with murderous kindnesses.

John Bower, past president of the British Veterinary Association (BVA), says that 40% of the dogs he sees are overweight. Like their owners, they are overfed and under-exercised. Many are so fat that their bones and muscles can no longer support them - an obscenity that, when it happens to broiler chickens, brings out the protest marchers. The stresses are so intense that dogs often rupture their cruciate ligaments. Ghastly though it is, nobody seems to care. 'If anyone sees an underweight animal,' says Bower, 'they will call the RSPCA immediately. But nobody calls to report an overweight animal, even though it's probably just as cruel.'

It's the same with cats. When they rub themselves around their owners' legs it's social contact they are looking for, not food. But food is what they get. One of the leading authorities on pet behaviour is Sarah Heath, who has clinics at Bristol and Liverpool University veterinary schools and a private practice in Chester. 'The idea that cats need feeding twice a day,' she says, 'is a myth. They eat up to 20 meals a day - they snack. They eat to fuel their next activity, which means little and often.' It is not in the animal's nature to eat huge meals, so there is no need to worry if it doesn't lick the plate. The problem is that the uncomprehending owner thinks his pet doesn't like its food and tries to tempt it with richer and richer treats.

Other species are abused in much the same way. According to the pet trade, the rabbit is the UK's third most popular pet. Emma Magnus of Fur & Feather magazine says it is also one of the most misunderstood. One very fundamental difference is that, unlike the carnivorous cat and dog, the rabbit is a prey species, on the menu of every hunter from weasel upwards. Its natural condition is trepidation, and without sensitive handling it spends its life in fear.

Without companionship it suffers from boredom and frustration, leading to the kind of violent behaviour that will accelerate a young owner's spiral of neglect. Its health fails through lack of exercise, faulty diets and inadequate housing. Osteoporosis is the common result of enforced physical inertia, and obesity the result of feeding chocolate to an animal that thrives on hay. Some rabbits become so fat and are so confined that they cannot even turn round. This means they are unable to perform another essential natural function - eating their own faeces - so their digestion suffers.

Worse, where the rabbit is a long-haired variety that is not groomed every day, the resulting faecal contamination invites flystrike, and the animal will die of stress while being eaten alive by maggots. If it survives all that and is permanently left outside, it has to endure extremes of temperature that, in winter, can result in its ears freezing off.

In a species that now has 60 registered breeds, cosmetic breeding takes its toll too. The netherland dwarf, for example, has misaligned teeth that don't wear down naturally. Unless they are filed by a vet, they will grow up into its nose, make feeding impossible and kill it by starvation.

In all species, the problem with cosmetic breeding is that it blinds us to the animal's nature. 'Because we now breed for looks, not function, people believe function doesn't matter,' says Sarah Heath. 'But the functionality is still there and it becomes a problem if the bred-for instincts are frustrated. The golden retriever is a good example. It is the archetypal pet, but we see a lot of them with aggression problems.' The dog's retrieval instinct makes it want to hold things in its mouth. When this instinct is frustrated, the result is possessiveness, aggression, and an angry and vengeful owner.

With other species the problems are worse. Some are easy to predict: the neglect of a gerbil or hamster by a child that has outgrown its interest, or the abandonment of a python, turtle or iguana that has outgrown its adoptive home. With rarer species the problem is ignorance - in some cases, literally zero knowledge of an animal's needs. In the absence of its natural prey, what would be an acceptable diet for a South American lizard? How much light and heat will it need? How much space? How much exercise? How much contact with other animals? Does it need to forage? What diseases might it carry? The CAWC cites a sample of African grey parrots among which, as a result of inappropriate diets, nearly half developed bone disease.

Popularity is every animal's curse. When we admire a dog, cat, fish or bird we cannot resist the temptation to tinker with it, to chip away at its DNA and match it ever more closely to our tastes. James Kirkwood, scientific director of the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare, explains the consequences. 'For 4 billion years,' he says, 'nature honed its notion of what a dog should be like. Then we come along and say wouldn't it be nice to have one that's bigger or smaller.' We pump them up to the size of a saint bernard or great dane, or boil them down to the toy-cupboard scale of chihuahua, shih tzu or pomeranian - the last, at just 7in tall, having shrunk from an ancestry of sled dogs and elkhounds.The CAWC's laudable ambition is to protect other species from the same kinds of genetic disaster. For some it is already too late: fancy goldfish, for example, are prone to injure their tutu-like, exaggerated frills; inbred chinchillas develop the same jaw defect as dwarf netherland rabbits; white canaries suffer a vitamin-A deficiency that makes it impossible for them to survive without high doses of retinol.

In dogs, the unnaturalness of the selection process is most obvious in the animals' brains. When wild species evolve to become larger or smaller, so their brains swell or shrink proportionally. Not so the designer dog. 'Their bodies get bigger or smaller around brains that remain roughly the same size,' says Kirkwood. The most obvious result of this is that the smaller breeds have much larger heads in proportion to their pelvises and have great difficulty giving birth. It is a classic example of the way selecting for a desired trait will often carry less desirable ones in its wake. There are plenty more. In the 1950s, for example, a single champion dog was responsible for spreading a blinding eye disease - progressive retinal atrophy (PRA) - right through the UK population of irish setters.

The severity and prevalence of inherited weaknesses vary widely from breed to breed - some affect every animal, others are relatively rare - but the list is long. Afghan hounds have a unique form of respiratory paralysis, necrotic myelopathy, all to themselves. Basset hounds are magnets for bone and joint failures. Cavalier king charles spaniels are the champions for leaking heart valves and have a weakness for heart murmurs, cataracts and slipped kneecaps. Toy breeds risk knee damage simply from negotiating the alpine landscape of household furniture; chihuahuas in particular inherit weaknesses for cleft palate, water on the brain and haemophilia. The dachshund's spinal problems are so acute that it can end its life dragging its hindquarters on wheels. Cocker spaniels commonly go blind. Old english sheepdogs and german shepherds, having been selected for their sloping backs, suffer from misaligned hips (hip dysplasia). So do labradors, retrievers and springer spaniels, whose birthright includes also glaucoma and epilepsy.

The chinese shar pei, like the bulldog, has almost too many ailments to fit on the page (they include inwardly turned eyelids, thyroid malfunction, a potentially fatal fever peculiar to the breed, skin diseases, hip dysplasia, 'tight-lip syndrome' - in which the lower lip covers the teeth and interferes with chewing - and breathing problems caused by excessive folds around the nose). And so on. Weakness built upon weakness; human ingenuity producing inefficient, tormented freaks that could have had no hope of occurring naturally.Mad, lame, unmatable, infirm or injury-prone animals do not survive in the wild to pass on their defective genes. In the Alice in Wonderland world of the pet parlour, however, freakishness is the new normal. Veterinary science is finding more and more ways of keeping alive animals that would have no hope of surviving on their own, but that go on bequeathing their disabilities to new generations.

These are the traits the European convention seeks to eliminate. In particular, it wants to set maximum and minimum heights and weights to avoid skeletal and joint disorders in very large and very small breeds.

It wants also to regulate the length-height ratio of short-legged dogs, such as basset hound and dachshund, to avoid spinal damage; to limit the shortening of skull and nose in, among others, the persian cat, bulldog, king charles spaniel, pug and pekinese; to eliminate fontanella to avoid brain damage in chihuahuas; to correct abnormal leg positions in the chow-chow, norwegian buhund, basset, shih tzu and others; to realign the teeth of boxers, bulldogs and persian cats; to eliminate abnormal size and form of eyes in a long list of breeds including basset hound, airedale, bloodhound, saint bernard, bedlington terrier, bull terrier, chow-chow, shar pei, boston terrier, dandie dinmont, king charles spaniel, pug, pekinese and shih tzu; to reduce the overlong, injury-prone ears of the cocker spaniel, bloodhound and basset hound; to smooth out excessive skin folds in basset hound, bulldog, bloodhound, pug, pekinese and shar pei, to protect them from eczema and eye inflammation. No wonder the UK breed societies rose up in such fury.

In effect, to modify a breed is to reduce its distinctiveness and, say the breed societies, eventually to eliminate it altogether. Ginette Elliott, a bulldog breeder and well-known anti-legislation campaigner, says the UK risks losing more than 100 breeds. The result, she says, would be a 'Euro-mutt'. 'They would all have the same-length legs, all the same-length back, all the same bite. The dachshund would have longer legs, the great dane shorter ones. They'd all be cloned.'

It is a valid point. Whereas (despite the Defra consultation) there is no consensus in favour of avoidable suffering, neither is there likely to be much enthusiasm for losing the country's favourite breeds. Where is the line to be drawn? How might we achieve the utilitarian ideal of the greatest benefit for the least suffering? This is the question David Morton, professor of bioethics at the University of Birmingham, confronts whenever he considers the validity of an animal experiment. The question is difficult enough when applied to medical research. But cosmetic breeding?

For Morton, the issue is 'integrity'. An animal has integrity, he says, if it is biologically fit in its natural state and capable of surviving in a range of environments. 'Integrity is the very essence of what it means to be a dog or a cat.' It is lost when the animal's natural pattern is exaggerated to the point where it can no longer perform its natural function. Inevitably, Morton's prime example is the bulldog. In its original form, when it was bred for bull-baiting, it had longer legs and a snout rather like a modern boxer, and was 'quite unlike the cretin you see in the show ring today'. Far from being capable of surviving in a range of environments, the modern bulldog is incapable of surviving unaided in any environment at all.The same might be said of the pekinese. Mike Stockman, a retired vet and former Kennel Club committee member, was responsible for negotiating changes to some of the very worst breed standards back in the 1980s. For him, the peke is still deeply unsatisfactory. 'It's ever so beautiful round its head, but it's not the sort of dog you'd want to take for a walk. Its breathing passages are not exactly open, are they? It has very short legs, which restrict its mobility, and it can't get a decent lungful of air.' Professor Morton shares his distaste: 'Pick it up by the scruff of its neck and its eyes pop out.'

If breeding a genetically defective animal does become illegal (and lawyers will lick their lips at the prospect of defining 'genetically defective'), then peke and bulldog may be first into the frame. Going straight will not be easy. DNA testing offers some hope that inherited diseases, where they are caused by a single identifiable gene, can be screened out in future (there are already programmes to screen irish setters for PRA and dobermans for a bleeding disorder), but in the meantime most unions of dog and bitch remain a gamble. Many inherited defects do not appear until the animal has reached breeding age and done its worst. Even disease-free dogs are genetic minefields.

'Breeding out an undesirable trait isn't just a matter of not mating animals that display it,' says Sarah Heath. 'The causes are multifactorial, with a range of genes involved in transmission. There are so many variables that we don't know what the genetic basis is. It is unlikely always to be a single gene.'

Physical distortions may be even harder to eliminate. Once you have bred a feature into a dog, it is no easy matter to get it out again. If the gene pool is small and the breeding stock all have short legs, elongated spines, squashed faces, concertina skin, wonky hips, weak knees, bulging eyes or ears that drag along the ground, then where do you find acceptable specimens from which to create an 'improved' generation? Another obstacle is the conservatism of show judges. 'One of the snags,' says Mike Stockman, 'is that if you alter the standards with the view of bettering the dog's life, then you can send the judges all the alterations you like and they'll take no notice.'

Tail-docking is another prime example. The Council of Docked Breeds (CDB) represents 74 breeds whose tails are traditionally cut off shortly after birth. It justifies the practice in four ways. Although no anaesthetic is used, it says, very young puppies feel no pain. Docking prevents injury to the tails of terriers and gundogs working in thorny undergrowth. In long-haired breeds an undocked tail would become matted with faeces and cause blowfly strike. And docking is necessary to preserve traditional breed standards.

The first three are easily dealt with. There is no evidence that puppies feel less pain than adult dogs, and the practice is condemned as unethical by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. More importantly, a dog without a tail may be seriously disadvantaged. 'It's an essential organ of communication, both with other dogs and with humans,' says the BVA's John Bower. Lack of it is going to cause failures of communication and aggression between dogs. Tails are also needed for steering and balance. Even when urinating, a dog will use its tail to counterbalance the lifted leg.

Only a tiny minority of spaniels - perhaps 5 or 10% - are working dogs that risk tail damage in the field, and other breeds hardly at all. The breeds that damage their tails most - great dane, greyhound, irish wolfhound - remain undocked. Well-groomed dogs do not get flystrike.

In truth, all this is by the way. The real urgency for the docking lobby is the preservation of breed standards. Never mind that the Kennel Club now allows undocked alternatives in all traditionally docked breeds. As the animals have never been selected for tail quality, nobody knows what the appendage will look like. 'It might go up, down or sideways,' says Graham Downing, speaking for the CDB. 'It may conform to Kennel Club standards, or it may not.' If it doesn't, the dog is useless as a show animal and loses a big slice of its value. Even a good tail will offend breeders and judges, who can't even imagine a boxer with a tail. In a way, it is a trivial issue to set against animal cruelty worldwide. Yet it is a perfect example of the ethical conflicts that bedevil our relationships with other species, and of the tenacity with which we defend our right - godlike in its sweep but all too human in its failures - to bend them to our purpose.

Breeds on the hit list

If the new Animal Welfare Bill follows the example of the European Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals, many popular cat and dog breeds in their present form could be banned. As follows:

UNAFFECTED
border collie
fox terrier
staffordshire bull terrier

BANNED
afghan hound
basset hound
boxer
chow-chow
dachshund
english bull terrier
english cocker spaniel
english toy terrier
king charles cavalier spaniel
pug
st bernard
shar pei

ALSO ENDANGERED
airedale terrier
bedlington terrier
bloodhound
blue merle collie
boston terrier
brussels griffon
bulldog
chihuahua
dandie dinmont
finnish spitz
japan chin
merle bobtail
merle corgi
newfoundland
norwegian buhund
pekin palace dog
persian cat
scottish fold cat
shih tzu
swedish lapphund
tibet terrier