Like those cats with the two-inch long legs.

Some posts you might find interesting:

When you say “The bulldog is profoundly unnatural in shape and gait. In other words, the issues here are not just genetic, but they’re biophysical” you are touching on an area that I have dubbed “Sine Qua Non Disorders” in dog breeding, where the dysfunction is not strictly a deleterious genetic disease, but a biophysical trait that has actually been selected for and is often a trademark of the breed.

http://www.astraean.com/borderwars/category/health-genetics/sine-qua-non-disease

You can see that there is quite a list of breeds and associated disorders that are amazingly not considered deleterious by the fancy. The DACH countries have actually taken legal steps to outlaw many of these breeding fads and practices as “qualzucht:” literally ‘torture breeding.’

While there is a certain AR bent to this discussion that my Libertarian philosophy dislikes, there is a serious extant problem in purebred dogs and their twisted ethics on this issue that does need to be addressed (hopefully not with HSUS funded AR legislation).

The general level of genetic knowledge among dog breeders is horrible, so I have taken up the charge of trying to distill these concepts into posts that open minded breeders could understand. I recently covered Pedigree Collapse:

http://www.astraean.com/borderwars/2011/10/pedigree-collapse.html

And have spent a number of posts trying to rectify the intentionally twisted understanding of inbreeding that most breeders put out as fact:

http://www.astraean.com/borderwars/category/health-genetics/inbred-mistakes

Sadly, even the trained biologists PhDs who are also dog breeders have a tendency to drink the show ring koolaid versus the rationalism of science:

http://www.astraean.com/borderwars/tag/tollers

I’ve even called out one researcher for Academic Fraud given that her personal investment as a breeder of a rare (and highly inbred) breed, the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, led her to manipulate population genetic data to suggest that the breed was not inbred (basically truncating all but 4 ancestor generations worth of pedigree data to lower COI calculations).

It’s a crazy little niche to be writing for, that’s for sure.

http://dognamez.com/dog-name-meanings-of-Algernon.php

I think Bernie suits him too.

Name the little fella “Muscles” or “Talisker”

In many ways this is a true statement.

But, then dog breeders would have a much harder time getting the ‘ideal’ conformation. Those squashed faces and bowed legs would doom a dog in the ring. These breeders are every bit as cruel as dog-fight fans.