22 Mark Perlman
greyhounds for running fast, and pugs seemingly for looking silly and cute and breathing
loudly. (I am still wondering about the Chihuahua.) Surely, for all these dogs, their eyes
have the function of seeing and their hearts have the function of pumping blood. But their
size and shape and certain specifi c characteristics are bred into them for human purposes.
There is a reason a golden retriever will be relentless if it senses even the vaguest possibil-
ity of a game of catch-the-tennis-ball—we bred them to have instincts to chase down
moving objects. Though all dogs have excellent senses of smell (far better than a human’s),
some, like bloodhounds, have this sense far in advance of even other dogs. Why? Because
we bred them for that purpose. Good shepherding ability was responsible for people con-
tinuing to breed shepherd dogs, and for their selecting for reproduction the shepherd dogs
with such good shepherding abilities. Many people today (lacking fl ocks of sheep) like to
keep such dogs as pets, but on the etiological view, the dogs’ function may still be shep-
herding even if they almost never do that job.
The functions of dogs and their parts become even more complicated when we consider
modern breeding for pedigree and shows. Dog varieties are now bred to fi t a specifi c set
of characteristics that have been determined by the dog-show authorities to be ideal for
that breed. Thus the German shepherd show dog is not now bred for good shepherding
ability so much as to look like the stipulated ideal of that breed. This has taken a toll on
them—they now are often victims of hip displacement, no doubt due to the physical shapes
they have been designed to have. Many domestic breeds of animals have physical char-
Figure 2.4
Varieties of dog breeds—various sizes and shapes and talents all designed by human intervention.