Meet The New Breed

This past weekend, I visited friends who happened to be dog-sitting for a few days. They were watching two dogs, Cody, a yellow lab, and Hugo, an English bulldog. Seeing as how the three of us, the two dogs and I, equally shared rights to the couch, I got to know the canines somewhat intimately. Cody was a sweetheart, though she shed something terrible, and Hugo...well, Hugo got me thinking.

I won't deny there was something fascinating about the bulldog, something endearing. You might say he was lovable, though, if pressed for specifics, you'd have trouble explaining why. The fact was, Hugo was a bit of a lump. An ugly lump at that.

Now I don't mean to pick on poor Hugo here, and as I said, there was something undeniably likable about him. But I couldn't tell you just what that was. He was entertaining, but mostly in the way a freak-show is entertaining. For freakish he was: he had a pronounced underbite, and his jowls hung down about his chops in flaps and folds. Slobber would occasionally fleck his jaws, and when he drank, water and drool would drip from his mouth and trail across the carpet. His eyes were rheumy and bloodshot, leaking gunk from the corners. His hindquarters seemed to be some impediment to his locomotion; he stumbled about and dragged himself onto and across the couch. He panted like an overweight asthmatic. When he slept, he snored, and when he wasn't sleeping, he might as well have been, so lethargic was he. He futilely humped the grill cover (well, that was amusing). And though he had little trouble finding his food dish, poor Hugo just didn't seem too bright.

Hugo was not an exceptional bulldog nor was he below average; if anything, he was fairly indicative of his whole race. For centuries the bulldog has been bred into the sideshow attraction it now is. The jawline has been contorted into the underslung scowl we now see. The head has been enlarged compared to body size, to the point that most bulldog litters must now be delivered by caesarean section, the puppies too malformed to be born naturally. The hindquarters are bowlegged, and the stubby tail and facial folds must be cleaned often to avoid bacterial infection. And that dull look in the bulldog's eyes may be because its cranial capacity has been curtailed in pursuit of a short muzzle and archetypal profile. The bulldog has been twisted into this form for one reason and one reason only: to suit the whim of man.

The bulldog should not exist. As a creature, is is the antithesis of evolutionary fitness, surviving only because people delight in the bulldog's a-typical appearance. People love a freak, and so they breed bulldogs (and many other breeds) to maximize that freakishness. Now, what we have is a type of dog that can't reproduce on its own, has a short expected lifespan, and is prone to an inordinate amount of ailments during that life. The bulldog, for his part, hasn't asked for this lot. As an animal, he is a victim of human hubris.

It's difficult to remember when looking into the sad, baleful eyes of a bulldog that once those eyes belonged to the wolf. Once, millennia ago, the bulldog's distant ancestors stalked the forests with a grim nobility. They were hunters, intelligent social creatures, honed by Darwinian forces into some of the most successful survivors ever. Domestication was in many ways just another form of that survival: wolves are around us still, in the guise of Canis familiaris. But what a disguise it is. Who could mistake the bumbling ugliness of the bulldog for the sleek and predatory grace of the wolf?

Don't get me wrong; I liked Hugo, sort of. I was vaguely disgusted by his drooling, by his slobbishness, but more than anything I felt sorry for him. We laughed at him when he tried to climb onto the couch, we laughed when he snored in the corner, we laughed when his bowlegged haunches humped wistfully on the grill cover. He just looked at us, with those mournful eyes of his. He was bred to be the butt of our jokes. Poor little guy.

Canis lupus

Canis lupus familiaris (English bulldog)