I think that a big contributor to the backyard dog breeding crisis is the refusal of many laypeople to accept that conformation showing has a purpose.
I see this rhetoric online all of the time. That conformation/dog showing is "just a beauty pageant for dogs" and that "they only care about appearance", or that show dogs are "deformed", all of which couldn't be further from the truth.
A standard for a given breed has many different aspects, but some of the most important are physical structure and temperament. "Physical structure" includes everything from coat type to skeletal structure to tail/eye/ear set, which are all extremely important aspects that (for many breeds) have been refined for hundreds of years to fulfill their specific niche. Temperament is another huge part of standards that many people either don't know about or conveniently ignore to make their point; a breed standard will have a temperament listed and any significant deviation is considered a fault or even a complete immediate disqualification. Both of these aspects are VERY important to dog breeds as it results in a dog that can effectively do the job it was bred for, which is the purpose of conformation showing: to evaluate good breeding stock that will produce workable dogs with good temperaments relative to their breed and that breed's history.
This watering down of dog shows to nothing more than an arbitrary beauty competition is directly damaging the efforts of good breeders to improve their breed's health and well-being, and is leading to people buying from backyard breeders who don't health test their stock, don't do any form of titling, don't have strict contracts on their puppies, who use buzzwords and fear mongering as advertising techniques, and who breed for specific colours or out of standard conformation with no care at all for breed specific issues or who flat out lie to their customers about the dog they're paying a lot of money for.
I have seen it time and time again. People are under the assumption that showing means nothing, so they go to the person who puts the most money into fancy advertising, and that means less money going to the dogs.
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And yes, this includes "retro pugs" and "straight-backed German Shepherds". Both of these use fear mongering about showing and purebreds as their main advertising technique as a way to sell dogs that are bred intentionally out of standard. Standards exist for a reason.
I'm going to elaborate on the whole "straight-back German Shepherd" thing before people go into my notes.
Before we look at some comparison images to show how a dog's stack (stance when being examined in a show) can change the conformation, let's take a quick read over the standards for the German Shepherd Dog from a few different kennel clubs.
The Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI), or "International Canine Federation" in English, is generally considered the national authority when it comes to kennel clubs. It was founded in 1911 by kennel clubs from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands to act as an international unified force of purebred dog registries in an attempt to unify breeding.
This is the standard that the original club for the German Shepherd, the Verein für Deutsche Schäferhunde, or "German Shepherd Association" uses. This club was founded in 1899 and is the original club that founded the German Shepherd breed. You can find their website here (in English) or here (in German). In these links, you can see the original breed clubs referencing the FCI standard.
The FCI standard for the German Shepherd can be found here (note that this link opens a PDF). If we look under the section labeled "Body", we find:
"The upper line runs from the base of the neck via the high, long withers and via the straight back towards the slightly sloping croup, without visible interruption. The back is moderately long, firm, strong and well-muscled. The loin is broad, short, strongly developed and well-muscled. The croup should be long and slightly sloping (approx 23° to the horizontal) and the upper line should merge into the base of the tail without interruption."
The FCI standard for the German Shepherd already calls for a straight back. Also to note, the "croup" is the rump. It's the part of the back that appears to "slope" when the dog is in a correct show stack.
A common argument used in advertising for the "straight-backed" GSD is that the original standard did not call for such steep angulation, and that this is a new development among American Show Lines solely caused by changes to the standard. This is incorrect, as the original standard (PDF link here, website source here) in 1899 from the German breed club called for the same angulation:
"The agility he requires as a sheep-herding dog is achieved by the power and angulation of his hindquarters. Loins broad and powerful. Croup long and slightly curved."
In addition to this, modern German Shepherds only appear to have such a steep "curve" because of the stack they are put in, which differs from most other breeds. Most other breeds are put in a "4-point" stack, where all 4 legs are lined up evenly to stand square, while GSDs are put into a "3-point" stack, in which one hind leg is placed behind the rest and the other hind leg is pulled in front to give the "sloped" appearance.
Here's an image to illustrate:
The dog featured in these images is "SG Asclepius vom haus Huro BH TKA IGP-1". He has two Schutzhund (bitework) titles (including a temperament test), a trick dog title, and most importantly for my purposes, a German Conformation title. He also has an OFA hip examination of "Excellent", indicating no signs of hip dysplasia.
As you can see in the image at the top, his "curved back" is significantly less pronounced than the German and American show stacks would make you believe at first glance. He's the spitting image of the standard, with the "slightly sloping croup" mentioned in both the FCI and original breed club standards.
Here's another version including the same images, featuring the same dog:
As you can see, this dog's anatomy looks significantly different between images b/c and e. Image e is an example of a 4-point stack, the same stack most other breeds are placed in for showing. Compare that to the American and German show stacks, and it makes for a much different look.
