Dogs, children, fascism, the future
According to the American Kennel Club's website, "the official term for dog shows is conformation — as in, the act of conforming or producing conformity"1. Already this reads like something that Jonathan Swift would write to satirize eugenics. "To conform" is the language of early-2010's young-adult dystopia, of a poster viewed through the They Live glasses.
Nevertheless, the paragraph gets up, dusts itself off, attempts to justify its thesis:
The official term for dog shows is conformation — as in, the act of conforming or producing conformity. While a dog show may look like a beauty pageant, it’s not. Dogs are not being compared to each other; they’re being measured by how closely they conform to the standard of their particular breed. Why? Because the closer a dog’s appearance is to the breed’s standard, the better that dog’s ability will be to produce puppies that meet the standard. It’s also the reason why mixed breeds and spayed or neutered purebreds are ineligible to compete in conformation.
Why should dogs conform to the standards of their breed? So that in the future, dogs will conform to the standards of their breed. This is circular logic, an expectation that produces and naturalizes the phenomenon it expects (what academics call "performative"). The fact that this argument seems appealing despite being nonsense suggests some more fundamental reason why a conformity cares so deeply about "mixed breeds", and indeed about the act of breeding itself. This reason is deep — an otherwise perfectly "purebred" dog who can't breed can't even be judged by the appropriate standards. So what is it?
When I saw that the American Kennel Club had a "government relations" tab in its footer, I was curious. And that's what led me to watch this video. Before you continue, I absolutely demand that you watch at least the first minute.
No matter how many times I watch this video, I still lose it at the match cut where the dog vanishes. It's all so cartoony, so severe, so nakedly propagandistic. The music is unambiguous, syrupily resolute. You will lose what you love, claims the video. "They" will take them away.
This video lacks stakes less serious than "total annihilation of all dogkind", and it lacks a specific call to action beyond "our message" and "now". So how does it create this sense of urgency? At its core, all the video does is remind us of some basic facts about dogs:
Dogs are cute little guys. Dogs do cute things like snuggle up to their mamas and give the camera puppy dog eyes. There's a cute dog every other frame, and it's what makes the video watchable.
Dogs are property. Their human owners make decisions for them regarding where they live and how they breed. To show that an action or a law is an injustice, we look at whether it infringes upon the owners' rights (not the dogs').
Dogs are dependents. We have basic moral responsibilities toward them, like feeding and walking them. The video offers a few more: we have to "change the conversation" in Washington, "stand up and be counted", and other nebulous fare.
These facts form a logical sequence. To put it another way:
- Since dogs are cute, there are stakes to our relationship with them.
- Since dogs are property, we can act to affect that relationship.
- Since dogs are dependents, there are right and wrong ways to do so.
To put it yet another way: Dogs are children. After all, children would hurt themselves or others if left to their own devices, and depend on the adults in their life to guide them. Like before, (1) there are stakes, and (2) we can act to affect them. It's at (3) where we hit a snag, though. The parent-child power structure inevitably leads to pains. Every former child in existence, even people who have excellent relationships with their parents, remembers being tyrannized by adults in some way or another, on accident or on purpose. Some of those pains were necessary2, and some were not. Indeed, we question the institutions we use to raise children all the time3, rightly demand they justify themselves or die trying.
The owner-dog power structure comes with similar pains. That's just what happens when someone is dependent on you, and it's the sort of thing we'd prevent if we thought we could. All that is to say, the burden of proof is on us to justify that power structure. So how do we do so?
According to the AKC's policy positions at the time of writing:
The American Kennel Club is dedicated to preserving the future of purebred dogs.
The link between the "purebred dogs" people and the "purebred children" people is perhaps at its strongest here. That gesture, a call for "preserving the future" of a dependent, is too close to the Fourteen Words for my own comfort. On the one hand, maybe that's unfair — who doesn't gesture toward the future? The future can't speak; it needs prophets, and those prophets need to self-appoint. But "preserving the future" is almost oxymoronic. Is the future like a jar of delicious jam whose contents we're entitled to, if we can only keep it safe from our housemates? Or is it the unknowable monster we've spent our six thousand years of human existence cowering from?
"Purebred dogs exhibit consistency in size, appearance, temperament and instincts," the AKC continues. "This enables prospective owners to choose a puppy that fits their particular lifestyle and increases the likelihood of a long, successful lifetime in that home." Finally, this is what we're looking for. A purebred dog is one small step toward a future that predicts and maintains itself. It's not just about the dogs; it's about reproducing the objects we know and love, from dogs to households. Each individual purebred dog is an interchangeable part of a grand machine, one that allows us to reason about dogs in a total and simple way. It's the circular logic from earlier: Each dog must conform so that the class of dogs will conform. Preserving the future.
The dog show is an ode to a perpetual motion machine, a dream that supports its weight by leaning on the arrow of time. The dog show cares about breeding because the dog show is about birthright. The dog show celebrates purity as a line from past to present, but also as a line from present to future.
The dog show is, at long last, a justification for the dog-owner relationship. We know dogs, claims the dog show, claims the conformity. Just look at us. We have eliminated the possibility of a dog we cannot care for.
At the time of writing, the American Kennel Club's homepage proclaims to "know and love all dogs". Technologies of making things consistent have always been a sort of knowing, a sort of loving of not just our dependents but of all humanity. The manager whose new calendar promised easier work, the educator whose pupils always aced the pointless test, the auctioneer who sold calm slaves — all three earnestly claimed to know their subject, claimed to love them. Everyone who's introduced technologies of conformity has earnestly believed in a better and more humanistic future. And even if you've seen it a thousand times, this lie is tempting. It's one last circular pure-breed logic. Not because we hope for that knowable future, but because we hope for some knowable future.