Working It: Or: There’s more to it than heart and bunchy muscles

I’m a pretty open-minded person. I don’t think I have all the answers, and I believe they can be found in unlikely places.

Some of the best breeding advice I’ve ever gotten was from a couple of old Italian guys in a maze of pigeon coops beneath an underpass on Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens. Ironically, it was only a couple of miles away from a well-known working Corso kennel whose blood contributed significantly — and positively — to what I would argue were some of the typiest AKC champions to walk this continent.

In short, I don’t judge the source if the knowledge is sound.

Ch. Italica's Fifty Shades of Gray, the dog I hold in my mind's eye when I judge Cane Corsos. His bitch line goes back to the working dogs of the Rivale kennel.

That’s why several years ago I joined a Facebook discussion group dedicated to working dogs with a lower-case “w.” By that I mean not those dogs that can be found in the American Kennel Club’s Working Group (working dogs with a big “W”), but rather dogs bred and raised to do the work for which they were created — or a reasonable modern equivalent.

This particular group has a majority of members who are interested in protection work, which intrigued me. I evaluate those breeds all the time in the ring, based solely on their conformation and the most minimal requirements of temperament. (In other words, if you don’t try to eat me or, conversely, piss yourself, we’re good.) I wanted to understand what traits these breeders and handlers were looking for — both physical and mental — and see good examples of honest working dogs.

Now, I may get my Princess Diana vibe on when I go into the ring, but I do not buy into the “drama” of the show ring. I want a moderate dog first and foremost — a dog that has the goods to do its job. If you can make it beautiful — if you can push that moderation to the edge without jumping off the cliff of caricature — so much the better. But I take to heart the words of Frau Stockmann, the brilliant breeder who did so much to establish the Boxer in Germany: “Everything which best fulfills a purpose is also beautiful.”

While I don’t personally work my own dogs, my husband uses them for blood-tracking during bow-hunting season (rarely, as he doesn’t aim to miss), and I sold a bitch of my breeding to a hunter who used her on everything from quail to boar. He once came to visit with a roll cage; one can of tuna and a jar of Marshmallow Fluff later, and we had one spitting, angry raccoon inside. Watching my Ridgebacks work that furious caged boar made me understand my breed standard more than a month of seminars could ever: From their baying styles and how each gave voice — or not — I knew which would fail in an encounter with big game, and which would live to hunt another day.

While there are of course exceptions that prove the rule, the dogs that got the most love on that working-dog page were the ones that had bunchy muscles and a ton of drive. No matter that their ribcages were the size of postage stamps, their loins were as long as freight trains, their underjaws looked like spoons, and one front foot pointed to LA while the wanted to go to Philly. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Now, am I complaining about those things because they’re visually unappealing? Actually, no. Without a good-sized ribcage, you don’t get enough oxygen; without enough oxygen … well, you finish the sentence. If you have a long, lax loin, then you have a very weak connection between your rear and front assemblies, so when that dog is trotting, or galloping, or pushing off its rear to grab a sleeve, you are losing projectile power — to say nothing about the ability to get out of your own way. And a narrow jaw in a dog bred to hold? Do I have to explain?

Proof in the Pudding

Probably the best example of this was a video of a Cane Corso breaking through the half-open window of a pick-up truck. Let’s put aside the fact that the dog was so out of control it broke through a sheet of glass presumably in order to just follow its handler.

I watched as the dog hit the ground. Instead of pushing off his rear and regaining his composure, he sank, knees kissing the ground, and froze for a second. At first I thought his hocks had collapsed, but, no: They actually held. Instead what seems to have happened was that his extreme rear — with a long second thigh, which is just the opposite of what a Molosser should have — put his rear out too far behind him. As a result, his hocks were too far behind his massive body to be an effective fulcrum and provide the leverage to push himself off. It looked instead like he pushed off his knee, which gave him enough momentum to get upright. Great way to rupture a cruciate, too.

And that’s the thing about unbalanced and conformationally challenged working dogs: They break down. Especially when they have the strong drive — or, in this case, foolish lack of restraint — that prods them to go beyond their physical limitations.

Neapolitan Mastiffs were a favorite — and easy — target among those working-dog folk. On some level, I understand and respect that: The modern Neo, the one bred for the show ring, is too extreme for them. The wrinkling in particular struck them as particularly non-functional, especially in terms of compromising biting ability. While I don’t share their distain — Neos are notoriously difficult to breed, and sliding into hypertype is more of a risk in that breed than perhaps any other — I also think good dog men and women can appreciate functionality in any animal, even if it is one that doesn’t fit into their ideology. Like, for example, the Mastina bitch pictured below. If you can’t admire the soundness and bone, then, well, I’d argue that you’re missing out.

There’s also a bit of chauvinism at work here, too — not in the sense of gender, but in this idea of the superiority of the animals you breed, own or prefer. Not all breeds, including some Working dogs — there’s that capital W again — were bred to protect. In fact, history tells us that the granddaddies of all the Molossers, the ancient mastiffs of Mesopotamia, were mainly status symbols.

There’s nothing wrong with placing a premium on form, just as the opposite is true: There’s absolutely nothing with making function your focus. Ideally, of course, one should inform the other, but we don’t live in an ideal world, and people like their tribes. So be it. But if you are breeding for form and not testing it in the field, then at the minimum you need to ensure that the theoretical functional traits you are breeding for don’t become so hypertypical that you are turning the animal into a caricature, to say nothing of the temperament. And conversely, if you are breeding for function, you need to realize that the physical construction of your dog should help it do its job, or at the very least not hinder it.

The Bigger Picture

Maybe all this has nothing to do with the gulf between bench and field, show and work, and more about the loss of deep knowledge in every aspect of not just dogs, but life in general. When I first started in dogs 30 years ago, there was a guy just down the street who was regularly visited by a stream of working dogs. Marty had old-fashioned wooden treadmills in the back of his shop, and behind the counter he usually had a Patterdale, one of the gamest terriers alive. His shop wall was covered with photos of working dogs of all breeds. He had no compunction about crossing dogs if it served a purpose.

In short, my polar opposite. But I’d stop by every now and then, and we’d talk dogs for hours. He was no fan of AKC, and of the debilitating effect he thought fad-following show breeders had on the functionality of their dogs. But similarly, he had no tolerance for the many morons — I’m paraphrasing, of course — who darkened his door to brag about their dog and its wonderful qualities, or who presented themselves as experts on things they knew nothing about, or who were just out to make a buck.

“The cockroaches were coming out of every nook and cranny,” he told me about the inquiries he would get about Swinford Bandogges, which he worked on after the death of their eponymous creator. “Most were not noble in purpose.”

There it is. There is nobility in wanting the truth, wanting to improve a dog, not for your own ego, but for a specific objective. That’s a goal both performance and show breeders share. These days, when a 15-second Google search is expected to provide every answer, and hard-won experience is dismissed as so much noise, those of us with depth of knowledge — no matter where it was obtained — should stick together.

We’re a dying breed.