Beyond Breed Labels
At Fetching Dogs, we believe that visual breed identification is unreliable and unscientific at best. There is no accurate way to distinguish which breeds are in a dog, purely based on looks. Instead, we put emphasis on each individual dog’s personality, traits, and behaviours, to properly promote them for what they are – dogs.
In Rescue, it has always been deemed important to list at least one breed in a mixed breed dog, even though nobody in the world is qualified to visually identify a dog. This is because it looks more appealing than “Mixed Breed” on listings and promotional material. But we have decided that it is far more important for adopters to know about the dog itself, rather than what genetics may or may not make up its look. And we simply cannot condemn Breed Specific Legislation for (wrongly) visually identifying dogs if we are carrying out the same unscientific practice.
The most important thing for us is to be completely honest, with ourselves and with adopters. When we rescue a dog from the pound, there is no possible way for us to know its genetics, unless it has come with papers to prove it is a pure bred. The last thing we want to do is give an adopter wrong information and the wrong impression – people may think they are adopting a Cattle Dog x based on a guess, when in fact the dog may have no Cattle Dog in it. Their research into the breed characteristics has been for nothing and their expectations are immediately crushed. We want people to meet our dogs and judge them solely on their personality and behaviour.