What did Corgis look like?
So I just watched the "Purebreed Dogs Exposed" video that Sam posted awhile back and it got me to thinking: What have our wonderful little corgis looked like? I seem to remember a member here posting something about corgi's having slightly longer legs only about 50 years ago...
Did anyone have links or pictures they might want to share? That and anything that might open up discussion about what kinds of problems are being accidentally bread into the breed are also welcome - but please, this is just out of my own curiosity, I don't want to see any fights. :)
Did anyone have links or pictures they might want to share? That and anything that might open up discussion about what kinds of problems are being accidentally bread into the breed are also welcome - but please, this is just out of my own curiosity, I don't want to see any fights. :)
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Beth on
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Whoops, I just accidentally erased. Let me try again!
I haven't found anything online that shows a pictorial of AKC champion Pems over decades, as I've found with other breeds. I have found some old pictures of the queen's dogs which seem to show a slightly leggier Corgi.
Here's an article with pics of her older Corgis (and one long-legged dog that might be a German Shepherd):
http://thecorgichronicles.blogspot.com/2010/01/alrighty-application...
And here's a story with a pic:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/royals/article2446472.ece
As for problems, so far they seem to be by and large remarkably healthy as a whole, and I hope it stays that way! The breed standard specifies the ideal Pem should be about 40% longer than tall, so my fear of backs getting longer and longer probably won't come true. Honestly my only minor concern is that the bodies might get too deep and the legs too short as styles/ tastes change. If you look at the old pictures, it seems to me they've gotten a bit deeper chested (and correspondingly heavier) over time, and right now they are still incredibly athletic, but I can think of a handful of other breeds that have just continued that trend over decades til they lost a fair amount of their original athleticism (IMO). Hopefully the popularity of Corgis for dog sports like agility will keep that from happening to our little guys!
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Ah, perfect! I pulled out some of my books with some old pics and googled the name "CH Rozavel Red Dragon" and found this page!!
http://www.angelfire.com/id/castellpwc/Oldies.html
You'll notice several with a natural bobtail, from what I can tell. And definitely a bit of a longer-legged appearance in the earlier dogs.
And here's Red Dragon, circa 1932
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Permalink Reply by Rachael & Waffle on
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This guy looks like a hero and for some reason reminds me of a Clydesdale. I... I wish all corgis looked like him. x: He's beautiful.
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One more!
ENG CH Crymmych President, 1929:
For comparison, here's the 2009 BOB winner at the National Specialty:
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Permalink Reply by Jessica on
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Hi Beth, this was exactly what I was kind of afraid to see actually. A CH this year compared to a CH 60 or 70 years ago is much different. I understand the statements below that dogs CAN be breed for certain looks now that we, the middle class (heh), can spend money on things we don't particularly need but want.
That said, I love the way my dog looks! It's the reason I have Killian and not another dog - but I just worry about things like line breeding to keep traits in the dog... The documentary might have been a bit to the left but it does bring up a few very good points. One on line breeding being why the close breedings? Why are moms being breed to sons or fathers to daughters? These are things that are appalling in the human realm but we apply to dog breeding...
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People line breed to cement a certain set of traits. By giving double-doses (or triple or quadruple doses) of certain dogs in the genetic mix, we HOPE (but don't know for sure) that we are sort of weeding out the genetic variability that will cause a dog or bitch to throw out an offspring that does not resemble the parent very much, but looks like a long-distant relative. (I'm using very broad terms to describe it, so I'm not being very technical).
Some individuals are what is known as "prepotent" and for reasons not entirely understood, they do what in the horseman's world is called "stamp their get." So, for example, with some studs you might send a wide variety of females to them, and most of their offspring will carry a certain "look" that makes those who follow closely say "Hey, that looks like a such-and-such". Other individuals are absolutely lovely, but don't pass that on to their offspring. In the horse world, one of the biggest disappointments in decades was the great Secretariat; even though he was a physically perfect specimen and extremely talented, his offspring bore no resemblance to him and generally looked like mom.
We don't really understand prepotency, but in concentrating gene pools, we can (again, hopefully) decrease the genetic variability and increase the likelihood we will get the qualities we want in the offspring.
The problem with in-breeding, though, is the same as it is in people: there are genetic diseases out there that we don't know about, or know about and don't understand, or that exist in such small percentages of population that we don't yet know they are genetic. When you concentrate genes, you are always playing Russian Roulette, to some degree, and never know when you might be creating a time bomb. There are some breeds that are so riddled with genetic health problems that it is literally hard to find an unaffected individual, and I'm quite sure no one set out intentionally to create that situation, but they did unwittingly narrow the gene pool enough to make the situation possible. In some breeds, it's possible that the genetic flaws were there from the very foundation of the breed. In others, a genetic bottleneck may have occurred elsewhere, when a handful of closely related sires got popular and had undo influence.
It can be complicated. For example, with chromosomes girls always pass on an X but boys pass on X or Y, so if a stud's lines survive through his daughters but none through tail-male (sire's sire's sire's) lines, then you may have lost everything he carried exclusively on the Y chromosome, and that can happen quickly in just a few generations if a sire line falls out of fashion.
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Just to clarify, when I say "we", I mean "people in general". The only thing I've ever bred was gerbils, and that didn't go so well!!
To give an example of how breeding for type (or any other desired trait, really) can unwittingly influence other things: Say we have a group of dogs bred for hunting pheasants. Some dogs have a higher tail set, and some have a lower tail set. Unknown to us, the dogs with the lower tail set also happen to carry a dominant gene for healthy hearts, and the dogs with a higher tail set carry a set of recessive genes for a certain heart defect. Maybe over decades both sets of dogs were very popular and interbred freely. But then we decide that the higher tail set makes them, theoretically, easier to see in taller brush and so we start concentrating our breeding on the higher tail set. The lower tail set dogs, even though they had great noses and were easy to hunt behind in practice because not everyone is hunting in tall brush, fall out of favor amongst a set of breeders. They start line-breeding the higher tail-set dogs heavily because those dogs will beat out an equally good-quality dog with a low tail set every single time in the breed ring, under the theory that higher tail set = better hunting dog (even though none of the dogs hunt). That bad heart gene is just along for the ride; it was always there but because it's recessive it would only rarely rear its ugly head. Now you breed heavily for an unrelated trait and within a couple generations, almost all your dogs have double-doses of the bad-heart gene, or are at least carriers, and now you've got a problem on your hands.
Since many traits, both good and bad, are caused by multiple genes (some dominant, some recessive, some which have complete or incomplete expression based on other genes or environmental factors), it's actually much more messy than that.
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Permalink Reply by Lucy & Ricky (Wendy/Jack ) on
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Do you have the link to the documentary about line breeding. I have never seen the documentary but have read many comments about it and am interesting in seeing it. Thanks.
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I think that in general over different breeds, with all but the smallest dogs you tend to see a trend towards larger, heavier dogs with more coat in the show ring as opposed to the working lines. Things can be taken to extremes (show Bassetts, for example, sure don't look like they could keep up with a hare), and I don't mind a slightly leggier, lighter-boned dog myself. That said, mine seem able to go all day and I know several people here hike very long miles with their show-line Corgis. Also, with the show lines sometimes when you get your hands on them they are not what they appear; Maddie's chest appears very deep at first glance but much of it is coat. I've noticed that the working-background dogs tend to have a bit less ruff and leg trappings.
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By the way, yours are lovely and look much like the Corgis in the older pictures.
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