What’s so bad about brindle and black-and-tan Italian Greyhounds?
According the to AKC breed standard for Italian Greyhounds, the only two disqualifying faults for the breed are as follows:
A dog with brindle markings. A dog with the tan markings normally found on black-and-tan dogs of other breeds.
I have known this for several years and always wondered what the reasoning was behind it, as it seemed to me that there must be a particular reason for banning these two very specific color patterns from the breed.
I had no luck in turning up research on the topic for a while, but just yesterday discovered an anthology of old dog breeding/showing texts which shed light on the answer.
So why are brindle and black-and-tan IGs banned from the conformation ring? Here are the reasons:
The Whippet and the Toy Black-and-Tan Terrier (now split into the English Toy Terrier and Manchester Terrier breeds).
Around the time that dog showing was becoming established and the idea of registered “purebreds” was becoming culturally significant in Victorian England, Whippets were still considered a relatively new crossbreed. In 1888 John Walsh described the Whippet as
a cross between the Italian and the English greyhound, or between the latter and the smooth English terrier.
The same texts also notes how the breed was mostly limited to the “mining and artisan districts,” which indicates that these dogs were seen as accessories of the working class, used for sporting as the “poor man’s greyhound” and also for poaching.
The Italian Greyhound, on the other hand, was seen as an old and “pure” breed which was favored by the social elite and featured prominently in Italian fine art as well as portraits of royalty. In 1904, Herbert Compton wrote of the breed:
Ancient and aristocratic is the ancestry of the dainty little dog Italy has given us. Its sensitive veins seem to throb with the bluest blood, and imagination domiciles it in palaces and noble mansions, lapped in luxury, not merely metaphorical, and fondled with jewelled fingers.
This difference in the social perception of the two breeds did not stop people from crossbreeding between them fairly regularly at the time, however. These crosses were not only working dogs but also exhibited in dog shows, much to the dismay of dog fanciers who wanted to limit the show ring to purebreds only. Even worse, crossbreeds often proved to be successful in the show ring when shown against “pure” Italian Greyhounds! One author laments:
There is no breed which shows more quality in conformation and movement than [the Italian Greyhound], when you get the genuine article, and you cannot blame the few who have bred and kept these dogs pure, for withdrawing from competition when their efforts are set at naught by half-bred terriers or whippets getting the prizes. We have seen at more than one show, dogs that looked like litter brothers to the whippets at the same show and these were the sort that won.
There is evidence that these IG x Whippet crossbreeds continued to be bred and shown successfully for some time into the 1900′s. My own dogs descend from the German Champion Schelm Almaska, a Whippet x IG cross born in 1919.
In the end, it appears that the breed clubs decided the best way to eliminate IG x Whippet crosses and IGs of Whippet blood from the show ring was to make brindle, a pattern very commonly found in Whippets which is dominant over the preferred fawn of “pure” IGs, a disqualifying fault. Thus ended the reign of terror of the poor man’s racehorse over the gentleman’s lapdog in the conformation world.
Two Whippets, smooth and rough-coated, c. 1897.
As previously mentioned, IGs, Greyhounds, and terriers were all used as part of the blend of types to create the dog we now know as the Whippet. Sighthound x terrier crosses, called lurchers, are still commonly produced today as hunting dogs, combining the speed of the gazehound with the versatility and high drive of terriers. In the early days of the Kennel Club, IGs were also commonly crossed with terrier breeds, namely the the Black-and-Tan Terrier, albeit for much different reasons than the practical lurcher crosses.
Every community goes through various phases of fad and fashion, and the dog fancy is not exempt from this. In Victorian England, it was extreme miniaturization that was all the rage with dog breeders. Numerous breeds were bred down as small as possible, resulting in highly inbred, structurally crippled toy breeds, most of which went extinct by the early 1900′s. Here are several examples:
Unfortunately, the Italian Greyhound was also victim to this craze:
Although Italian imports were typically around 12-16 lbs, to British dog fanciers the ideal weight for a fully grown IG was about 5 lbs. One particularly successful show dog, a bitch named Molly, weighed just under 5 lbs and remained undefeated in the show ring until the day she went to her grave, “literally burdened with honours.” While the original Italian dogs were larger and fit for coursing game, the perfect British IG was seen as a delicate pet and wholly unfit for hunting. In 1903, William Drury wrote of the breed:
The dogs brought from Italy are also rather large and coarse, and it is not under the azure skies of their native home that those dogs have been brought to the greatest perfection, but rather under clouds of dense London smoke, and amongst the raw, chilling mists that surround them in their Scottish homes.
To achieve that “greatest perfection,” those dogs of minuscule size, some breeders chose to crossbreed IGs with the smaller toy-sized Black-and-Tan Terriers.
Though these crosses also introduced undesirable traits such as domed skulls and prick ears, they proved to be popular and successful in the show ring. John Walsh remarked in his 1888 book,
many of these cross-breds have been extremely beautiful, and the practice has enabled breeders to obtain a diminished size without loss of symmetry.
However, not all fanciers approved of these crosses, especially those who wished to maintain the purity of the breed.
Toy Black-and-Tan Terrier c. 1900.
In 1901, Harry Huntington wrote of his distaste for using an “infusion of terrier blood” to achieve the desirable tiny size, which he believed to be
so detrimental to the preserving of type and character, for [the Italian Greyhound] has an individuality all its own and as distinct as in any other breed.
So, what was the acceptable method of achieving small size in IGs? Heavy, repeated inbreeding. In 1904, the honorary secretary of the Italian Greyhound Club wrote:
In its own country the Italian greyhound is not a “toy dog”; I never saw one abroad that weighed under 8 lbs., and there are many ranging to 12 lbs and over. In England it take six years of careful inbreeding from true type to accomplish in size the diminution that can be achieved by a single cross with a toy terrier; but the fatal defects introduced by that cross take years to breed out.
One of the most famous and extreme examples of this kind of inbreeding was a dog named Gowan’s Billy,
whose grandsire, great grandsire, gg grandsire, ggg and gggg grandsire were all the same dog, imported from Italy. At the time he was generally admitted to be the most perfect specimen of his kind in England.
While Billy’s line eventually went extinct, inbreeding to achieve diminutive size while preserving breed purity and type was noted to be common practice in these early years. This tight inbreeding around the founding of the breed has had long-lasting effects on breed health, especially when coupled with the bottlenecks that the breed suffered following both World Wars and the prolific use of popular sires such as Int. Ch. Ulisse di Peltrengo of Winterlea and UK Ch. Noways Matthew in the 1950′s. Low genetic diversity is commonly associated with increased incidence and severity of autoimmune disorders, and Italian Greyhounds suffer from more types of autoimmune disorders than any other known dog breed.
As early as the 1880′s, black-and-tan coloring in IGs was associated with terrier crosses and looked down upon in the show ring. In the 1930′s, black-and-tan coloring officially became a disqualification for the breed. It is interesting to note that theoretically it is entirely possible that the gene for tan points remains in the gene pool of pedigreed IGs, as it is highly recessive, and could possibly still show up through breeding purebred IGs.
A 1934 Italian Greyhound exhibiting throw-back characteristics of the Toy Black-and-Tan Terrier, including black-and-tan coloration and prick ears.
Eventually it went out of style to breed such tiny, fragile IGs as were popular in Victorian England, but broken legs due to small size and poor bone density remain a common concern for the breed even today. And while the average size of IGs today is significantly larger than those of a century ago, the preference for smaller rather than larger dogs remains, as stated in the illustrated breed standard that, “A good small dog is preferable to an equally good large one.”
In summary, the reasons there are no brindle or black-and-tan Italian Greyhounds are the same as those behind most other color bans in breed standards: concerns over breed purity and plain old dog fancy politics.
The Italian Greyhound - A Complete Anthology of the Dog
The New Complete Italian Greyhound by Lilian S. Barber
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