CHAPTER L 

 BREEDING AND WHELPING 



THE modern practice of dog-breeding in Great Britain has 

 reached a condition which may be esteemed as an art. At no 

 other time, and in no other country, have the various canine 

 types been kept more rigidly distinct or brought to a higher 

 level of perfection. Formerly dog-owners apart from the 

 keepers of packs of hounds paid scant attention to the 

 differentiation of breeds and the conservation of type, and 

 they considered it no serious breach of duty to ignore the 

 principles of scientific selection, and thus contribute to the 

 multiplication of mongrels. Discriminate breeding was rare, 

 and if a Bulldog should mate himself with a Greyhound, or a 

 Spaniel with a Terrier, the alliance was regarded merely as an 

 inconvenience. So careless were owners in preventing the 

 promiscuous mingling of alien breeds that it is little short 

 of surprising so many of our canine types have been preserved 

 in their integrity. 



The elimination of the nondescript cur is no doubt largely 

 due to the work of the homes for lost dogs that are instituted 

 in most of our great towns. Every year some 26,000 homeless 

 and ownerless canines are picked up by the police in the streets 

 of London, and during the forty-seven years which have elapsed 

 since the Dogs' Home at Battersea was established, upwards 

 of 800,000 dogs have passed through the books, a few to be 

 reclaimed or bought, the great majority to be put to death. 

 A very large proportion of these have been veritable mongrels, 

 not worth the value of their licences diseased and maimed 

 curs, or bitches in whelp, turned ruthlessly adrift to be 



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