Breed standards encourage Connemaras that miss the mark to be treated as waste

In a CBS television show called “Lucky Dog,” dog trainer Brandon McMillan tries to find a new home for shelter dogs by taking in one dog per week, working with it at his Lucky Dog Ranch and placing it in a home where it will do well.

After watching a recent episode, it occurred to me that McMillan’s job is cleaning up the mess of others.

In part, he’s cleaning up after a breeding system that defies logic and is immoral.

Dogs wind up in shelters, and horses wind up in slaughterhouses, because they are the “misses” of breeders trying to produce the perfect animal.

Breeders, including Connemara breeders, try time and again to come up with that “perfect” animal that exactly matches the breed standards of their breed registry so they can put it up for inspection or in a breed class and get a title or an award.

After several breeding attempts, they may produce that animal, but what about all the missed attempts? In some dog breeds, the missed attempts are put down.

In horse and dog breeds, some missed attempts are given away quickly to whatever home will take them and likely don’t stay there for long. Some wind up abandoned. Ultimately, if they survive that part of their lives, they wind up in rescues or on their way to the slaughterhouse.

Like the trash cans of old-time writers that were filled to the brim with discarded prose, shelters are overflowing with horses and dogs that don’t make the cut in their breed.

In the Connemara world, particularly in Ireland, horses are being abandoned on public grazing land by the thousands.

But what if you took away breed standards?

What if every animal was allowed to call itself a premium and equally valued member of a breed?

Then owners wouldn’t need to keep rebreeding to match some arbitrary set of criteria, because each horse would have potential value to grow up to be something great.

It would be similar to human potential, where every child has the ability to grow up to be president. We don’t judge children as 2-year-olds and mark some of them as “premium.”

The others aren’t discarded because they are the wrong height or body type or their ears stick out.

Fair is fair. If horses and dogs are going to continue to be discarded based on looks, then the same fate should be applied to humans. Or the world for dogs and horses should evolve to match that of humans.