No wonder law enforcement imports their GSDs or has gone to Belgian Malinois instead.

In other news of horrible pet people, Falcons officially dropped Vick today. Hopefully the NFL will follow suit or slap a long enough suspension on him, the reality of his 10 buck an hour job will hit him.

My parents took home an almost-free 6 month old Siberian Husky who had outstayed his welcome at our local Docktor Pets many (24) years ago. They’d been eyeing him for months, and it had reached the point where they could barely stuff him in the crate anymore.

K was absolutely gorgeous and had a beautiful temperament, but pretty much everything else was a bust. On his first trip to the vet’s, he was determined to have hip dysplasia so severe the parentals were advised to operate ASAP. (They elected to wait, and he wound up getting by without it… but having minor MVA-related hip issues myself, I think I’d have opted for surgery.) He was pronounced mentally retarded (there were suspicions of birth trauma), suffered from intractable skin allergies, GI problems and derm issues, was horribly neurotic (even by SH standards), and every vet or trainer that saw this dog was positive that he was not a purebred, but a Husky/Malamute X… despite papers from the AKC that said otherwise.

We lost him to cancer at 14.5, but he did not age well. For the last three years of his life, my father carried him (all 80 lbs. of him- definitely not a purebred SH) upstairs to sleep with them every night and downstairs again in the morning. Spent more time at the vet’s his first year than my parents’ two well-bred Malamutes (ages 8.5 and 5.5) have, put together, in their entire lives thus far.

Baffles me how somebody could be actively involved in the fancy while profiting off of milling operations. I had no idea Hunte showed, but I guess it doesn’t surprise me. I worked in a pet shop (we didn’t sell puppies) some years ago, and the trade magazines we’d get were full of his ads. Schmuck surrounded by happy, healthy-looking puppies and religious clip art… as if slapping a few Jesus fish on there somehow makes him trustworthy and negates the fact that that handsome little Lab he’s patting is probably going to have a medical record that reads like a copy of War and Peace by the time he reaches his third birthday (not to mention the conditions his mom is probably languishing in).

Poor Dave. Good riddance, WoC!

I see the GSD today and I’m pretty sure that as a child, I could have outrun these dogs! There’s something very sad about that. . .

The conformation is so horrible in the show-bred dogs (generally not as bad in most puppymill models) that they are predisposed to all sorts of terrible developmental issues if they aren’t managed just so. And if they are.

At least one geneticist says that they all have a hereditary connective-tissue disorder.

Why is it that absolutely everyone — including a five-year-old child — can tell that “that dog has something wrong with it” — except the dumbass who is laxing wyrical about the dog’s “fantastic reach, amazing sidegait, floating trot, look of eagles, gorgeous angulation?”

Did these people not notice yet that they are no longer living in bizzaro-world? Or are they just non-assimilating colonists, in, but not of, the reality-based community?

Oh, and ding dong the witch is dead for wizard of claws.