Dogs as a whole are not endangered. They still retain the same diversity as their ancestors, the wolf. However the state of affair among individual breeds is disconcerting. Of course, with breeds within closed registry, all it takes to save them is to open the stud-book. Politics do not always allow for this though, so other tactics must be sought out.
The Shikokus, a breed native to Japan, are in grave danger. A few Nihon Ken enthusiasts in the know revealed these dogs need hormones and artificial insemination to produce new litters: a sure sign of severe inbreeding depression is underway. To add cherry to the top, bitches have a volalite irregular heat cycle: some come into season every three months, some have split heats, some skip heats and others have silent heats. To add to that, females are self-defensive to the extreme toward males. If a natural breeding is to be performed, the female must be muzzled and multiple people are required to assist the male to rape the bitch in order to conceive. Such hyper-aggression toward closely related individuals of the opposite sex are signs of inbreeding avoidance. If owners of the Shikokus are not careful, they will find that their bitches will eventually full-stop quit breeding and heat cycles become nil. There is only so much a biological entity can take.
A few days ago, it was released there are about 233 dogs registered with NIPPO in Japan in the year 2011. This is a huge drop from 357 two years prior. Overseas, in Europe and United States, where Shikokus are becoming increasingly more popular fetching astounding price-tags stemming from an incredibly small exported gene-pool, it is probably certain we will see the nastiness of auto-immune disorders arise in those bloodlines much sooner. In the irony of it all, while it is true Shikokus have been steadily decline in popularity in Japan heading toward extinction, which is no surprise considering the hassles, the breed is at the point where Japanese owners are literally giving away pups to new homes. Without knowing the effective population size, which its true number can only be found from deep pedigree analyses, and sampling to measure the effective genome, where the zygosity can be overseen, the situation may be far more dire than one realizes.
When one sees comments like this, it is rather scary:
In a situation when the registration number is so low, and people refuses to outcross, every single dog is of breeding quality. Temperament can be restored through careful selective breeding. Recessives can be controlled with a good understanding of genetic drift and allele frequency and keeping disorders at bay may not be possible if the MHC diversity is already lost. The breed has already lost its reproductive fitness and it is a fast-track to hell if the spay-neuter mantra continue to be regurged. Gradually, polygenetic traits such as auto-immune disorders will be fixed, become a feature of the breed and normalized for the most hardcore gaurdians. It will be impossible to breed away from these disorders within such a narrow gene-pool. This is not the time to gripe about puppy-mills or backyard breeders. Gene losses cannot be recovered.
Now is time to stop the bleeding and to perform a triage. It is irresponsible to eliminate potential candidates by desexing them. Although not every dog should be bred, every dog should be treated as a genetic reserve. In an ideal world, every dog would have its genome sequenced and filed in a database to be matched with the best potential breeding partner. However we are still quite a bit away from this being a reality. In the absence of advanced genomic technology, with every castration and tube-tying, the breed takes a tremendous hit.
Some people are literally brain-washed by society. To be fair, they are not exactly brain-washed. The commenter means well, she believes in what she was told. How could they know better? The amount of information out there is paranormal and mind-bogging in which it is intimidating to absorb all the knowledge out there. To be able to synthesize and apply the knowledge is a daunting task in itself.
Over the last year, a new concept was learned: qualzucht [trans. torture-breeding]. It is a concept coined in Germany during the 1990s when animal husbandry started to rear its ugly head. In fact, in some countries, there are now laws for when breeders or an institute knowingly produce defective animals in the presence of better scientifically-documented alternatives.
When it is known that a genetically-bottlenecked breed is struggling, it is a form of qualzucht to not advocate keeping every dog intact. It is torture-breeding to continue a bloodline when the alternatives are effectively eliminated through ideologies. Considering it is unethical to desex a pet in Europe without medical reasons, it is clear North American believers in the pedigreed world are being spoon-fed what it means to be a responsible breeder or a responsible owner without a clear understanding of population genetics.
Since breeders regard the Shikokus next to primitive and appear to be close to nature, they are believed to be natural and healthy. Due to shrinking population and hyper-selection for type, although people cannot see on the outside, internally, at a genetic molecular level, the dog is just as unnatural as the Bull Terrier, Neopoltian Mastiff, the English Bulldog and other breeds with phenotypical extremes. People interested in the Shikokus owe it to themselves to take agricultural science, quantitative genetics and conservation biology for the welfare of the breed.
There are five options for the Shikokus at this point: let go of the breed; outcross to restore reproductive fitness and open the studbooks to accept any unregistered individuals; treat every individual as sacred; start again from scratch; or bend over and prepare for even further symptoms of inbreeding depression. Time will tell if the dog has chosen a wise ally or not over the few decades or if the contract between the Shikokus and mankind will be revoked. The fallout is coming, and it is rather interesting to watch people patch the leak and to clean up the aftermath. Let this be a lesson for other dog breeds.
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