A word on weights and measures

How big are your dogs ?

Rarely have so many seen fit to answer falsely such an insignificant question. Take it from someone well traveled in dogs, the simple sad truth about this question is the answer is almost always a lie. So often in fact that much of the publics eye-o-meters are permanently disoriented.

Personally I don’t care to lie, nor do I care to be the only person telling the truth. So I simply say…… big enough, tall enough, heavy enough, to do anything you could possibly need or want a big dog to do; including impress people just by standing there.

Every breed I use is a hundred plus lbs. Some 150 or more, let’s just leave it at that.

And if all you are looking for is the biggest dog you can possibly buy, if you are buying by the pound, you should probably keep looking, there are lots and lots of breeders breeding for little else. Good luck with that.

But ask yourself what football or basketball would look like if they selected players by simply breeding the biggest people to the biggest people and never had the offspring play the game. If they had no actual selection for athletic ability and then they took only the biggest of those and bred them to each other again, and again……for generations. If they simply called their largest people the best, how well would they move? How long would they live?

And if they then matched them against a group selected for excellence in physical competition for generations…. How do you think that game would turn out?

The sad truth is biggest to biggest has probably been the single most influential and misguided selection criteria in most of the giant breeds. Precisely because the public, in its infinite stupidity, seems to find that most obvious of traits something they can somehow hang their sense of worth on.

I’ve got big dogs, I work with large breeds; but there is such a thing as too big in dogs. And I’ll suffer very little loss of athleticism, health, or anything else to cater to the simple minded pursuit of size.