Mending the Chains of Knowledge
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold …
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Things have got to be pretty bad if I am quoting Yeats at his most apocalyptic.
Yet here I am.
At the risk of sounding like a complaining old lady — which chronologically I am — someone has to stand up and say that today’s dog world has changed dramatically from what it was when I started some 30 years ago. And not for the better.
Definitely not for the better.
Back then, there were established, experienced and respected breeders who set standards and expectations. God help you if you walked into the ring with — or decided to breed —something that was of poor quality, or that carried an unforgiveable fault. These older breeders — many of them women with all the bedside manner of a Valkyrie — would grab you by the metaphorical ear, yank you to a corner, and give you a tongue-lashing whose memory would make you wince for weeks after.
They were scary, but they were usually right. And they would teach those who were willing to listen — after making them jump through a few hoops, of course, just to ensure they were serious and not wasting their valuable time.
Today, the faithful students of these formidable mentors have reached ripe old ages of their own, but their opinions and observations are no longer sought after, their observations dismissed with a wave of the hand and the electronic glow of a smart-phone screen.
Dogue de Bordeaux fanciers have always paid close attention to what "Monsieur Standard," Prof. Raymond Triquet has to say about their breed.
Thanks to shortened attention spans and the false omniscience of social media, the chain of custody of our breeds has been broken. No one seeks out the best kind of wisdom — the kind learned by sheer experience, year upon year spent evaluating, examining, scrutinizing, comparing, asking, stumbling, dusting off and trying again. Instead, a quick Google search will suffice.
And we can already see the exquisite damage rendered by artificial intelligence: People regurgitate "information" they receive from AI searches, which bases its answers on the misinformation scattered across the internet. Garbage in, garbage out.
To achieve standing in a breed today, all you need to do is own one — or more, the more the better. To be a successful breeder, all you need to do is put puppies on the ground — the more, the better.
Never mind that your dogs look like buckets of nuts and bolts, none of which match. So what if you’ve produced a color or pattern that’s not described in the standard — if it’s in your whelping box, it must be right. No matter that you think a stifle is an old-fashioned way of saying shut up. Your dogs are the best, and you know this … because?
Because you said so.
You Talkin’ to Me?
There’s a name for this steadfast belief in one’s own superiority in the absence of any real knowledge or experience: the Dunning-Kruger effect. Wikipedia defines it as “a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability.”
In short, you don’t know what you don’t know.
If I had to name a poster child for this phenomenon in Molossers, it would have to be the Cane Corso. Never before have I seen a breed in which so many people just simply find knowledge to be optional. In which I am told with a straight face that bandogs bred in the United States under the banner of Sicilian Branchiero are more authentic than the actual dogs of the Southern Italian Meridionale — or that the American standard predates the Italian one (it does not) and so is more authentic (yeah … no). In which breeders and so-called experts have never bothered to read the incredibly rich and detailed original standard written by that great Italian judge Dr. Antonio Morsiani. Nor do they know who Basir was — the foundation dog who served as one of the main inspirations of that first standard.
Instead, I see idiotic memes with photos of “American type” and “show type” and “working type” and “Blah Blah Blah Type.”
No, genius. There’s only one type:
Correct type.
Ignore memes like these. They also are responsible for hugely misleading AI results.
(As with all breeds, there are very dedicated and knowledgeable Corso breeders out there. But they are vastly outnumbered by those who think the breed is a Neo that’s been kept in the dryer for too long instead of what it really is: the ultimate all-purpose trotting Molosser, raised by proud, savvy country folk who knew how to make a lot out of a little and who wouldn’t feed 90 percent of what’s being bred today.)
Unlike many other Molosser breeds, Cane Corsos started with a distinct disadvantage: With demand outstripping supply almost as soon as the breed recovery began, there were very few mentors to learn from — unless you count the make-a-quick-buck salesmen, whose techniques were learned to perfection.
Contrast this to the more established British breeds. My earliest mentors on both sides of the ocean in Bullmastiffs are still going strong — hello, Billy and Grant — and as a result the breed is still in pretty good shape. (Although American breeders need to start paying attention to profile again: The most recent club magazine had a lot of excessively long dogs accompanied by light bone — not a path they want to continue on.)
And no matter the breed, the true teachers are there if you make the effort. And that includes Corsos: If I’ve managed to find my way to the Antico Cerberus kennel where Basir was raised — and I don’t even own the flippin’ breed — then dedicated Corso breeders can, too. (Which reminds me — I really should dig up that footage.)
Anna Battaglia and her husband Giancarlo Malavasi of the Antico Cerberus Cane Corso Kennel in Mantova.
Are You Experienced?
The amount of time someone has spent in a breed doesn’t necessarily mean they are knowledgeable. After all, there are some breeders of 30 years who just repeated their first year 30 times — they have learned nothing.
Knowledge doesn’t come as a thunderbolt. It’s a slow drip-drip-drip, a build-up of observations, like the rings of a tree trunk. It arrives in quiet moments, when you are sitting at the edge of your whelping box with your morning coffee, studying your latest litter, and suddenly a ray of understanding shines. Hey, he has the same croup as his grandfather. Hey, look at how thick his tail is, even though he’s the smallest of the bunch. Hey, that bitch’s loin looks a lot shorter than everyone else’s.
No matter what the endeavor — painting or cooking or masonry work or brain surgery — the best always operate from instinct. But don’t let that word fool you: Instinct isn’t a shortcut, a hall pass to get you out of biology class. It’s the build-up of knowledge to the point that you have internalized it. You feel, you react, before your brain does. It’s a reflex. But it comes from a lot of hard work up front — watching, studying, searching. And asking the most important question of all:
Why?
That Yeats quote that tops this tirade says it all. The best lack all conviction. Yes, the ones who truly know, who have all the knowledge and experience to answer your “why” questions, have all but given up. They are tired of trying to teach graduate-school concepts to a bunch of kindergarteners more worried about when snack time is scheduled for. Or worse — getting jumped at recess because the truths they offer require too much work, or reveal their lack of substance. And with every day that goes by, more slip away — and all their knowledge with them.
While the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. Yes, the know-nothings are always the loudest ones in the room. And the first to attack those with true knowledge on social media, further convincing that first group that it just isn’t worth the time or effort to teach those who have no desire to learn.
Help Mend the Chain
If you’re reading this and it’s struck a chord — if you got the sense that there was more to know than the glibness you read on Facebook — then do something about it. Seek out those older breeders and sit down with them. Ask if you can visit and watch them do their thing — whether it’s watching your breed being judged from ringside, or attending a litter evaluation, or sitting in on a training session.
One of the forms I filled out for my AKC application to judge Mastiffs. Bill Newman was a hugely important mentor to me. And like so many, he is now gone.
The fact that you’ve read this far is another glimmer of hope. One of the reasons that I converted Modern Molosser to an online resource was because I hated to see all the wisdom stay trapped in the printed pages of a long-shuttered magazine. I post to it as often as I can because I am still learning after all these years.
It’s my fervent hope that you are, too.
What’s your opinion? Send comments to denise@modernmolosser.com.