Carmine Battaglia:
End of an Era
Jim Engel
For well over three decades I have been a working dog historian, commentator, critic and advocate of establishing a viable American based working dog culture in place of European subservience. But there needs to be balance, a firm hand on the tiller, acknowledgement and commendation of the positive and good as well as advocating change, and to that end I try to make a point of honoring transformative individual effort and accomplishment. This past fall the success of Frank Phillips in the FCI IPO championships, with a remarkable German Shepherd out of the ongoing American breeding of T Floyd, has provided a particularly worthy occasion to put the spot light on the positive, something of enormous long term significance, an important mile stone in our American working dog quest. See here
But there has been a bit of a back story lurking in the shadows, one with roots going back to the late 1970s when I first took up training our young German Shepherd in AKC obedience. This was not about anything more than an evening diversion from my day job as a communications research engineer, something to get me more physically active and out of the house. Neither Schutzhund nor any sort of serious higher level involvement or competition was on my radar screen and my knowledge of or interest in the more arcane and esoteric aspects of canine history or politics was less than minimal.
But fate intervened. Linda Franklin, a name many of my older readers will surely recall, did a Schutzhund demo at our obedience club with one of her de la Corps Tervuerens. This was the really old style Schutzhund, with the vertical scaling wall prior the advent of the A frame, a first step in the long devolution into IPO. We were fascinated, and soon had located the Northern Illinois Schutzhund Club and were off to see what evil was lurking, to see what this business of dogs biting people was all about.
Schutzhund was very new and very foreign, was in the haughty eyes of the canine establishment suspect, with more than a tinge of evil; the idea of encouraging canine aggression in any form or context being anathema in our AKC culture with its deep British roots. In the more open world of today it can be hard to recall or imagine, but forty years ago the American Kennel Club was right up there with church, national patriotism and the Boy Scouts as an institution of supreme respect and righteousness, of unquestioned moral authority and power. It was robust and overwhelmingly dominant, at its peak in terms of size, influence and prestige. As one would imagine, those high in the AKC hierarchy tended to become haughty, arrogant and overbearing, supremely confident of their importance and rectitude.
But when the high and the mighty fall they quite often do so without warning, collapse precipitously, as in the fall of Rome or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. In spite of the monolithic AKC predominance, it was even then fragile, unexpectedly vulnerable. Transformative change was just over the horizon, and it would materialize in unexpected ways. One manifestation of incipient decline was the evolution of our nascent working dog movement from an annoyance to a serious factor in the 1980s. This was from a higher perspective only a side show, but one of many diversionary trends.
The wild card, the unpredictable, totally transformative agent of change was to be the emergence of the internet in the 90s, shattering the foundation of the AKC establishment, striking down its monopoly on the dissemination of self-serving propaganda, its ability to perpetuate its elitist and perverse mythology as unquestionable god given truth. The numbers are stark: AKC annual registrations were to fall from a high of 1,527,392 in 1992 to 563,611 in 2010; that is down to a third of the high water mark.
But all of this was far in the future, and as time moved on and our involvement gradually became more focused and serious the intricacies of canine culture and history became more pertinent. As we gained experience disturbing discrepancies in the AKC facade emerged. It became quite apparent that obedience and performance activities, the sort of thing making dogs actually useful, were but a very minor side show to the greater glory of the almighty conformation ring. Certainly breeding selection based on conformation according to working effectiveness is fundamental; sound structure, conducive to the diverse functions of the various breeds, is a valid and necessary part of the process.
But what actually emerged is an abomination, a transparent sham, a shameless fraud. Far from being a process for the improvement of aggregate breed quality in terms of form adapted according to function, it became little more than a freak show, where distinctive breed features such as the more narrow Collie head, slightly foreshortened Boxer muzzle or smooth, ground covering German Shepherd stride were caricatured, glorified, carried to ever more grotesque extremes. It was all about personal aggrandizement, about money; had nothing at all to do with quality canine breeding. All of this was deeply disillusioning; there had to be a better way.
The system was clearly broken, placing the burden of balanced breeding, strong character embodied in physically strong, agile, handsome appearance, on the individual breeders and trainers. The second great disillusionment, that things were no better in Europe, especially in the motherland of the German Shepherd Dog, was to come later.
As for the practical aspects of the breeding of truly functional, balanced dogs my thinking was guided by my professional experience as a systems engineer: things do not just happen, there are causes and consequences, often difficult to discern and quantify but ignored at great peril. This AKC perspective— that working character, the propensity to be effective at a particular task — was somehow, perhaps magic, inherent in a breed came into sharp focus as profoundly absurd. This AKC mythology was directly contradictory to the Schutzhund doctrine that working character was of necessity created and maintained by direct, generation by generation human intervention, by breeding selection according to proficiency in breed specific tasks.
This European paradigm struck me as much more rational and pragmatic, but letting go of the AKC conventional wisdom, so deeply ingrained, was neither easy nor automatic, took time and struggle. Ultimately the key to clarity and comprehension was by my side, was the young German Shepherd I was taking off to obedience class each week. For this dog called Buck, purchased from an American breeder as a simple family companion, turned out to be a son of one of Paul Hombach's hard core German working line imports and on the other side out of one of the better American lines, back in an era when they were much closer to credible German breeding.
As training commenced we became quite successful in AKC novice obedience trials, primarily at GSD specialties, in one instance as high as third overall, taking home a huge trophy. It became apparent that this dog was inherently superior to most of the "pet quality" show line cast offs so many German Shepherd obedience hobbyists were struggling with. This was perplexing, for I was clearly an ordinary beginner with no discernable magic training gift. Gradually the obvious began to penetrate my novice mind: breeding really does matter, not only does working effectiveness require an athletic, agile physique, the character of the dog, the working desire, the willingness to become a true partner, are fundamental. By an accident of fate I had come to possess a strong, credible German Shepherd of inherently sound working character. Buck died suddenly shortly thereafter of the parvovirus, we were blindsided by something nobody had yet heard of. He was just gone in a moment and there was an empty place, but he had transformed my life.
And in a more general way it became apparent that this was systemic, that these moral and cognitive attributes had been systematically bred out of the AKC show lines because they were not evaluated, understood or even valued. Indeed, dumbing down the breed, creating more passive and compliant dogs, made them easier to maintain and manage in the kennel and place indiscriminately in "pet" homes. The AKC show system was emasculating the working breeds, indeed, all purebred dogs.
The 1980s were prelude, would set the stage for the internet revolution of the 90s. In the beginning the Schutzhund people flew far below the establishment radar, but were nevertheless emerging, like a gathering storm on the horizon. The publications of USCA and the DVG were beginning to offer serious opposing views to the establishment canine press. Mike McKown, dynamic editor of Schutzhund USCA, broke off to establish the influential Dog Sports magazine with specific appeal to the police dog community, providing free subscriptions to hundreds of departments. Good writing was in demand, and once again I was at the right place at the right time, contributed extensively to these publications and became contributing editor at Dog Sports, putting me firmly on the national scene right on up into the internet revolution. Beyond the working dog press I became a regular contributor to Dog World, the predominant American canine magazine of the era, then under guidance of editor Enid Bergstrom, who for several years had been gradually evolving a much more open magazine, increasingly willing to question the AKC establishment. The big boys were taking very little notice, but the unseen cracks in the foundation were emerging and widening.
Just as the Romans and Russians were caught unaware and unprepared, the establishment was lethargic and self-assured, slow to respond, to take any of this seriously. The prominent people, while adamantly opposed to any sort of aggression work or comprehensive trials involving a protection phase, to the extent they payed any attention at all, more or less assumed that these were just the usual low class, marginal people playing around with biting dogs, nothing more than a transient annoyance. But the German Shepherd establishment was a bit more aware, and gradually began to push back.
In the early 1980s Carmen Battaglia emerged as the quintessential establishment man, as the defender of the mythology, a persistent and outspoken advocate of this opposition to the legitimate historical work of the German Shepherd Dog. He and elements of the Doberman establishment began to sound the alarm, to speak vigorously of the need for repression through AKC dictate and national German Shepherd club push back. They openly enlisted support of the civil authorities to put the rogue element back in its place as a subservient component of the lower classes. It was a moral crusade, and his opposition has been ongoing; nearly four decades later Battaglia is still fighting a rear guard action in the trenches.
My original commentary on the Phillips and Floyd saga had been propagated through the EMail list which had gradually evolved from casual use of entries in my personal EMail account. Over the years more and more entries, all from personal request or openly available on the internet, have expanded the list to well over 6000 entries, including most Americans or Europeans who have held club office or served as a judge. As time marched on I began to cast a wider net to include those not historically supportive of the emerging American working dog culture.
More recently, with a bit of trepidation, members of the German Shepherd Dog Club of America (GSDCA) with publically available EMail addresses began to be included. Based on historical attitudes there was an expectation of a certain amount of pushback; but this did not materialize, and there was on the whole a positive reception. The commentary on Phillips and Floyd was particularly favorably received, so much so that there was a request from several former or current GSDCA officers to more formally organize the material and include appropriate photos for inclusion in the Review, the club magazine. This then went on with a short discussion of content and timing.
But then the order came down from on high, from desk of our old friend GSDCA President Carmen Battaglia, squelching plans for the article. The proffered reason was offence taken to a proposal within USCA to reinstate the previous ban on GSDCA members, the so called Grewe amendment. Since this was nothing more than a proposed topic of discussion at the annual USCA meeting, which can be initiated by any member, not likely to be taken seriously, it was obviously only a plausible excuse; neither Battaglia nor his ilk were about to allow such an article under any circumstances. (The proposed revival of the Grewe amendment was in fact heavily defeated that November.)
As we have seen, thirty or forty years ago, prior to the advent of the internet, the elite cabal of the AKC world could indeed tightly censor information propagated to the broader community; control of the various club magazines meant virtually complete control of the dissemination of information and seriously limited commentary contrary to establishment mythology.
But today the world has been transformed, information flows freely on the internet, outside of any real control, rendering club magazines more or less irrelevant, relics of a bygone era. But men such as Battaglia are oblivious, do not quite grasp that they have been emasculated, have been stripped of the power to censor that had been a foundation of their former predominance.
The GSDCA Review, once the primary and authoritative face of the strongly predominant AKC oriented German Shepherd establishment, is now just another magazine put out by an increasingly marginal and irrelevant dog club. Being banned from the Review was a more or less meaningless gesture, for most of the 2000 odd subscribers were likely aware of these events via the internet exposure. As evidenced by the generally positive response by the rank and file of the GSDCA, the group as a whole is evolving and becoming more aware of and open to the historical protective heritage; it is only the entrenched establishment that is blind to the evolving world around them. An opportunity for a gesture of reconciliation in the deeply divided American GSD community has been aborted by Carmen Battaglia, a petulant, spoiled bureaucrat.
The era of Battaglia and the rest of the elite AKC establishment is over. The AKC as a registry will no doubt persist at a greatly reduced level, being at perhaps 200,000 current yearly registrations, or perhaps even much less, as projected from the last released numbers in 2011. But their influence and prestige has evaporated, they have been reduced to a pathetic shell cultivating and supporting the puppy mills in a vain effort to prop up registration numbers.
It is human nature to take satisfaction at the spectacle of evil people suffering the consequences of their own hubris. But the demise of the AKC as it has existed for over a century should not be an occasion for celebration in the working dog movement; for this community is by and large composed of people of good will, now left increasingly adrift. These people are still the foundation, the vast majority, of the American canine world. The working movement is still small, fragile, increasingly in conflict with European entities. If we do not respond to this crisis with clear thinking and wisdom rather than benefiting from the demise of the AKC we will find ourselves drawn into the morass. We have much to lose.