A Ghanaian friend visited this blog and told me "I like your pictures, but the dogs are nothing extraordinary, though". He is perfectly right. His untrained eye identified immediately the typical local dog.
Here, local dogs are largely ignored, because they are the ordinary. They roam the streets, although most are loosely attached to a compound or a family. Imported Western breeds are highly prized, praised and priced. They are kept behind walls, and seldom seen outside, certainly not romping freely in the streets. They are status dogs, and their owners believe they are the best dogs in terms of ability to protect their possessions, behaviour, character, aesthetics, etc. People are baffled when they discover that our little African dogs attract attention and interest in other parts of the world. On other continents, they are deemed exotic, and indeed, they are. Consciously or not, people who are interested to own one of these African dogs want to own a living testimony of what they picture as a largely unknown, mysterious, ancient and wild continent.
Those who know a bit about how Western breeds were obtained are interested to know more about how dogs were before this normative frenzy took hold of the dog fancy. In the Western way (or is it just human?), "knowing" goes hand in hand with possessing. I've observed this with a group of dog fanciers, who took great pains to travel to Africa, select local dogs (based on their own criteria, which I'm not sure they realised was already the first step to creating a new standard) to bring back to the US and breed.
Sadly, what led to the degeneration of Western breeds, as we know them now, and to the eradication of Western landraces is what is being done again now with "primitive" dogs: import a tiny group of a specific type, breed and inbreed them, discard (put to sleep or neuter) all those which don't fit the desired appearance, and in 3 generations, declare a new "breed" has been discovered --or, rather, an ancient breed has been re-discovered-- and/or register for trademark protection. Somewhere in the process, one or several of the fanciers will have pronounced the "breed" in danger of becoming extinct and/or terminally mongrelised in its natural habitat, justifying the extraction of specimens from their land and the setting up of a "reasoned" breeding programme.
It may be gratifying and romantic to believe one is saving an endangered species by shipping an African dog to another continent, but at the risk of appearing shockingly pedestrian, let's state some basic truths: Avuvis (and other sub-Saharan landraces) are by no means in danger of extinction. They are everywhere, and thriving. They don't seem to be in danger of mongrelisation either. Western breeds are not very numerous here, Western dogs are kept behind bars and walls, and are only found in big towns and cities.
A land-race is adapted to its environment. Uprooting it is denying it its very raison d'être. Starting a new line elsewhere and selecting dogs according to (non-African) normative criteria is tantamount to destructing everything that makes admirable this testimony to adequation between environment and living beings.
Dog fanciers may want to create new and original breeds. The market wants novelty, and this line of reasoning makes sense from a business perspective. What the breeders shouldn't do is luring people into believing they (breeders first, but also buyers of their products) are doing African dogs a favour. They are not. They are offering their own interpretation of an idealised image of the wild and unknown Africa, after domestication and trimming to a rigid standard.
