In depth — extreme breeds in pets
Let’s be very clear. There is no justification for knowingly breeding animals that suffer health or welfare problems.
Genetically exaggerated traits can lead to serious health and welfare problems. Thankfully, the reptile community is leading the way in addressing these issues, but we all have a part to play.
Responsible Reptile Keeping (RRK) has collaborated with ZZF in Germany on a media campaign to address 'extreme breeding'.
RRK has also worked with REPTA in the UK to establish new guidelines advising members not to breed or sell certain reptile morphs associated with health and welfare problems.
Some of the species include:
brachycephalic dogs
spider ball pythons
silk back bearded dragons
Scottish fold cats
To protect our animals and prevent overreaching government regulation, it's crucial that we, as pet keepers, adopt and promote responsible practices. These initiatives aim to ensure all pets can live, breathe, and behave normally.
How you can help:
Support breeders and shops that follow the ZZF and REPTA guidelines.
Don’t breed lines with known welfare issues.
Share this video and help spread the word.
Let’s unite to protect our pets and ensure a healthy future for all animals.
For more information, visit the Responsible Reptile Keeping, REPTA, and ZZF websites.
SCRIPT
Always make sure that you really understand what you are doing. And this is also meaning that you have to do a lot of research before you buy a pet.
I am Dr. Stefan Hetz. I'm a biologist, specialised in zoology. I work for the ZZF. The ZZF is the voice of pet shops and the pet industry in Germany. And I work on every topic which is associated with the welfare of pets and of animals in our homes.
It started with domestication. For example, the domestication of dogs maybe is about 10,000 years ago. It started, and it's still going on. The dog breeds that we already have are still developing into different forms. So when someone breeds an animal or breeds a specific trait of an animal, he looks at the desired characteristics that he wants to have in the future.
That's totally different to that what occurs in nature. In nature, as Darwin pointed out, every breeding from the animals is subjected to influences from outside. So in the end, the fittest animal will survive.
That's evolution. That's called evolution. So when man takes over evolution, this is called breeding. So the breeding characteristics of the animal are controlled by man. If you think about cattle, they were domesticated. Cattle are not very aggressive at the moment. They give a lot of milk. They give a lot of meat. But this is also in animals that we like as companion animals.
If you look at the wolf as the ancestor of a modern dog, and if you look at some small chihuahuas, if you look at some poodles, if you look at different dog breeds, they don't look like a wolf looked in the past.
During domestication, the breeder selects some interesting traits, that he's interested in, to do some dogs or some reptiles or some fish or some amphibian to breed them according to what he thinks he likes.
So there are some traits, that the animal should have longer fins, the animal should look like a nice puppy with big eyes, should have a short head, should have a nice pattern on the skin and so on. Which is okay.
But the problem that can occur when domestication can switch over or could turn into extreme breeding is when some of these characteristics you are pushing in your breeding will be combined genetically with characteristics that are not very good for the animal's health.
So there are basically two types of extreme breeding. The one type is extreme breeding by accident. When you have a nice trait that you want to breed, on the other hand you have a gene and on this gene there may be some character which is not good for the animal. So if you breed the desired trait you get the bad character bred with the animal with the desired trait which can be accidentally.
The second kind of extreme breeding occurs when you breed some characteristics on purpose. If the characteristic you are breeding in the animal becomes too extreme, in Germany it's called übertuppesir, that means overdeveloped characteristics, and then it's really probable that these animals suffer from these characteristics and this is really extreme breeding.
So if you look at the extreme breeds there are two different kinds of characteristics. The one characteristic is a binary characteristic that means whether these special trait is present or absent and the other one which is a little bit more complicated to judge in the light of extreme breeds, is when it's on a continuum, when it's a continuous characteristics.
This could be for example explained with snout length in dogs. So, extremely short-snouted dogs have a problem with respiration, with panting and so on and dogs with very long snouts don't have it. So the problem is you have a full spectrum of snout length. Where is the limit, where is the red line when a shortest snout and a longest snout make the difference between an extreme breed or not which is very hard to judge.
There is a paragraph in the German Animal Welfare Act, it's called the paragraph 11b. In 11b it is laid down that it's not allowed to breed animals when you expect that these animals suffer or have pain or there is damage on these animals.
If you take a symptom like changes in skeleton, so how does it work? So if you look at changes in skeleton, what kind of for example dog breed do you compare with with what? Do you compare a poodle or a dachshund with a wolf? When every dog breed has changes in skeleton and so you cannot say that every dog breed is an extreme breeding because it has changes in skeleton.
So therefore it would be good to have an idea, to have a paper or have a list or have an idea of how to judge these animals. That would be advantageous for the competent authorities because they have to judge whether an animal is an extreme breed or not. It would also be good for a breeder and it would be good for the keeper because the keeper can say "ah this dog is probably an extreme breed".
So I think there is a lot of future investigation necessary to figure out where the limits are crossed, where the limits from normal breed, normal domestication are crossed into extreme breeding.
The ZZF has a very strict position on extreme breeds.
It's laid down in the Heidelberg Büchlüße which is a code of conduct, or some kind of code of conduct, where the members of the ZZF say what they would offer in the pet shops, what they would breed and what they would not do and there is a position also on extreme breeding.
Okay if it comes to extreme breeding some people may say "as long as there is no legal basis on saying that this is an extreme breed, we don't care about this", but ZZF very much cares about it. Also if there is, and we check this by scientific papers, if there is an indication that this animal would be an extreme breed then we don't trade this animal.
The members of the ZZF say it's always the animal first and so everyone is happy when your animal is happy and when your animal does not suffer from from extreme breed characteristics or something like that.
So the animals that we do not sell, they are on a list. So we keep a big database which is based on the taxonomy of all animals and sometimes a little bit plants when it comes to invasive species. In this database we can check the animals and we don't only have the normal animals taxonomy but we have also breeding forms.
For example cats which lack fur and some people argue that are the ideal cats for people that suffer from from allergy against hair but this is this is not true because it's a protein in the saliva of some animals that causes the the allergenic reaction. So it's not good to breed extreme breeds just by saying they are hypoallergenic for man.
If we go down the ladder of a taxonomy a little bit to reptiles may include the lemon frost gecko, a gecko which has a nice colouration, but as we heard in some talks from veterinarians and we could read in grey literature but also in scientific literature. This kind of breed has very often special kinds of cancer, and therefore, well it's it's an extreme breed in our vision.
Another example would be the royal python. There is a spider gene, and the spider gene probably accounts for two special traits. One is the nice colouration which has a lot of variety inside and it's looking really cool but the other is a bad thing because it's causing neurological disorders. So the animals cannot orientate quite well in the room or something and this is causing really really big problems for the animal.
So the problem is that these two genes are passed to the next generation. So yeah, that's a quite a big problem so therefore it's also an extreme breed and ZZF members don't sell this.
A future pet keeper who is thinking of buying a pet which can be from a group of pets which may show extreme breed characteristics, he should go to a pet shop which is member of a ZZF.
And here is why, because this pet shop it relies on a self-regulation that says we don't sell these animals that are probably extreme breeds. The other story is that this shop is also controlled by the competent authorities and the competent authorities have put down or have laid down some regulations, which animals the pet shop is allowed to sell.
If you don't want to go to a pet shop, so for you, for the future keeper it's important to do a lot of research and don't over overreact and don't buy an animal just on an occasion.
Always make sure that you really understand what you are doing and this is also meaning that you have to do a lot of research before you buy a pet.
