Poor Hudson
When I arrived home early this afternoon, I passed the neighbors’ yellow lab, Hudson. Hudson is a sweetie, so after parking, I walked over to give him a pet and say “Hi.” Hudson is only three years old, but already he walks like an old dog, and even has trouble getting to his feet to greet me, because he has hip dysplasia, a painful ailment common in large dogs, and especially Labradors. My parents’ dog, Tucker, suffers from the same condition. He typically sleeps with his legs stiff and his paws pressed into a wall or furniture in reaction; it eases the discomfort.
We—humans—bred dysplasia into dogs. Breeders would say we did so accidentally, but this is only partially true; our dogs got this way through excessive inbreeding for desirable traits, without due caution being given to the dangers of inbreeding. We could have avoided it had we not been so eager to get the perfect show dog, and devil take the rest. Now that we are aware of the problem, we could breed it out again, though this will take more work now that some family trees have been weeded out of the population. We don’t—not very aggressively, at least—because we still want the perfect show dog more than we want healthy family pets. It’s no good blaming the breeders; if families interested only in a family pet did their research before buying, and took care to avoid breeders with a record of hip dysplasia, market forces would drive them to better ethics, so it’s the ordinary owners’ fault, too.
We could do something similar with humans, too, breeding out congenital defects, though doing so would require grossly unethical behavior: sterilizing people, dictating who they could or could not mate with, and leaving such decisions in the hands of some board of experts which we could never guarantee to be free of racist bias. Occasionally, I speculate what the world would be like if we could breed ourselves without such ethical prohibitions. Breeding congenital disease out of our dogs presents no such moral dilemma. It saddens me that we continue to let our pets be born crippled so the dog show enthusiasts can pursue a few more ribbons.