Episode 13: Breeding healthy & behaviorally sound dogs

About Dr. Jessica Hekman: Dr. Hekman is a veterinarian who studies the genetics of dog behavior. She founded the Functional Dog Collaborative to give support to those who are responsibly breeding dogs.

The Functional Dog Collaborative defines what they mean by responsible breeding (which is informed mostly by what sort of dogs you’re trying to produce). Dr. Hekman describes why they decided to include behavioral health as part of that definition, and why it’s so important to responsible breeding.

For her day job, Dr. Hekman looks at canine genetics and how it relates to behavioral health. She wants the Functional Dog Collaborative to be able to support that research, to help both breeders and puppy buyers.

Transcription:

INTRO

Welcome to the Good Dog Pod! I’m your host, Laura Reeves. Here at the Good Dog Pod, we are all about supporting dog breeders and responsible dog ownership. Join our mission and help change the conversation—because we are all stronger together! Good Dog is on a mission to build a better world for our dogs and the people who love them, through education and advocacy. The Good Dog Pod provides dog lovers with the latest updates in canine health and veterinary care, animal legislation and legal advocacy, canine training and behavior science, and dog breeding practices. Subscribe, and join our mission to help give our dogs the world they deserve.

Laura Reeves [0:52] Welcome to the Good Dog Pod! I am your host, Laura Reeves, and we have a really exciting guest with us today, Dr. Jessica Hekman is a veterinarian, and she is the founder of the Functional Dog Collaborative. This is a really, really interesting project and an interesting idea that Jessica has pulled together and so we really thought you, our listening audience, would enjoy visiting with her and hearing more about the collaborative. So welcome, Jessica! How’re you doing?

Jessica Hekman [1:22] Great! Thanks so much for having me! 

Laura Reeves [1:24] Excellent. So, in my other podcast, we call it the 411. Here we’re going to call it the bio. Tell us about how and, I think maybe more importantly, why you started the Functional Dog Collaborative. 

Jessica Hekman [1:37] Yeah. Well, it’s definitely my pandemic passion project, so we all have all this free time now with the pandemic. I’ve saved nine hours a week on not commuting, so it sort of got started partly because it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and I stopped being able to say no to it during the pandemic. But also because I kept thinking who am I to start a group that’s about how we breed dogs? I’m not a dog breeder. Surely I need to find a dog breeder to do this with me! And a friend of mine finally sat me down and said, “Jessica, you are never going to find a dog breeder to do this with you. The dog breeding community is too fractured. It would be too hard for any one dog breeder to try to pull things together in this way. It’s too much to ask of them. It needs to be a non-dog-breeder.” And I was like, “Oh. I guess I’m doing it then.” 

Laura Reeves [2:19] Okay, well there you go! Serendipity. We talk a lot about serendipity, man. 

Jessica Hekman [2:24] Yeah, so it was the right time and I finally was like alright, I guess I’m the person to do it. So the Functional Dog Collaborative. Basically, I was seeing that there are a bunch of different ways of breeding dogs and a bunch of different goals that people can have when they breed dogs. And there were some groups of people who I felt were breeding dogs really responsibly but who didn’t have really good support. And I wanted to give them support. And I’m talking about people who are doing things like breeding dogs specifically for sports, like flyball, where there isn’t a good breed to fit a particular size, a particular—I was about to say personality—particular athleticism that is required for flyball. And so they were crossing dogs, crossing breeds, to do that. There’s also a lot of demand for these particular types of dogs for pets. And there are a lot of actually responsible breeders; there’s also a lot of irresponsible breeders. But there’s a lot of actually responsible breeders trying to fill that demand for people who want a dog with that goofy Retriever personality but want the low-shedding coat of a Poodle. We know those as Doodles, obviously. Then there’s the people who are looking at groups of dogs that have low genetic diversity and maybe some health issues and are trying to take one path out of some number of paths that could be chosen to try to address that in their outcrossing. So all these different groups of people. There were just a lot of them scattered around, and I felt they needed to be brought together to have a place to help each other, to have a place where they could have some social support, and to provide some education. So one of the things that we know—I just mentioned Doodle breeding—again, there are a fair number of highly responsible Doodle breeders. I think we all know quite well there’s also a large number of extremely irresponsible Doodle breeders and having that opportunity to sort of start pulling some of those people up into the realm of knowing what they’re doing, educating them, and getting them to a place where they’re doing a better job with those dogs—

Laura Reeves [4:24] And I think that’s one of the things that Good Dog has done. I think this is why this is a great conversation for our audience here at Good Dog, because of that very thing: that raising the bar. Helping people learn and giving people information and resources that they may not have. So I love this as a concept, absolutely. 

Jessica Hekman [4:49] The first thing: I threw together a website, which didn’t have much on it at the time. This was probably in March. And then we have a Facebook group, which is about 2,000 people now. Very active. I had to discover I needed moderators for that. We try to make that group be really inclusive. It was founded to support people who are breeding in ways where they didn’t have support. Think of people who are breeding purebred dogs as having their breed clubs. But we certainly welcome people who are breeding dogs in a variety of different ways and the mod team I think does a really fantastic job of trying to help everybody get along. And that’s been challenging, but I think we are coming to a place where people understand that I’m coming from one way of breeding dogs, you’re coming from another way of breeding dogs, and we can both come together and talk about what’s the best way to interview an ER vet to determine if this is someone I would trust to perform a C-section on my bitch if there was an emergency. We can have that conversation, and it doesn’t really matter whether you’re breeding two Goldens and I’m breeding a Golden and a Poodle. 

Laura Reeves [5:52] Right. One of the things we were talking about earlier, and I think is one of the primary focuses of Good Dog, is the idea that everyone should have the opportunity to breed the dogs of their choice responsibly. 

Jessica Hekman [6:10] Yes, a hundred percent! I entirely agree with that. So then one of the questions is what does “responsibly” mean? Sometimes it comes down to people having different definitions of “responsible.” I mean, there’s some level that I think we all agree, that having hundreds of dogs stacked in cages, dripping feces on each other—there’s a line below which I think we all agree is just not responsible. But then when you start getting into the gray areas, I wanted to define what we mean by “responsible,” so that was one of the first big projects that we took on. So if you go to our website, functionalbreeding.org, you’ll see we have pretty detailed descriptions of what we mean by “responsible breeding,” which we define along the lines, more of what kinds of dogs you’re trying to produce, rather than trying to go down into the nitty gritty of how many dogs do you have and how do you manage your kennels? I mean, that is just a rat hole we do not want to go down. 

Laura Reeves [7:04] Right. 

Jessica Hekman [7:05] So we talk about things like breeding dogs that are healthy, and we describe that as basically being about as healthy, on average, as the general population of dogs—so not having any particular diseases that stand out. And the one thing that we really wrestled with was behavioral health, which is so important today! 

Laura Reeves [7:24] Which I think is fascinating, and I’d love to kind of drill down on the behavioral health piece of it for a couple of reasons. Number one: we know that behavior is what sends dogs to animal shelters. And number two: the work that the breeder does—the accountable breeder—in those first eight weeks has so much bearing. I mean, there’s a genetic component, but there’s the environmental component. So I would love to hear specifically about the genetic component and what your goals are for this focus on behavioral health. 

Jessica Hekman [8:04] Yeah. It’s a really big interest of mine in my day job. I work as a canine genetics researcher. So we’re studying the genetic portion of what goes into a dog’s personality, but we very much recognize that there’s a large portion of environmental influences that goes into a dog’s personality. 

Laura Reeves [8:22] Speak to me about this, on the genetics! Because, anecdotally, I can tell you from here till kingdom come, but I would love to hear what the research is showing and what you guys are looking at right now. 

Jessica Hekman [8:35] Again, I do want to emphasize that what my job is about is looking at the biological portions and the genetic portions and so forth. For us, the environment (in my day job) is just sort of this pesky thing, which we’re like, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all the puppies had the same environment so that we could test the genetics much more easily?” There’s some very cool projects going on in the laboratory where I work. I’m unfortunately not closely involved with this puppy project that’s happening, although I did get to go assist when we were behaviorally testing and taking urine samples from some little—I think they were eight weeks old at the time—Corgi puppies. So urine samples from Corgi puppies—kind of challenging. They’re like little caterpillars at that point. You can’t tell—

Laura Reeves [9:20] They’re really close to the ground!

Jessica Hekman [9:21] The body’s on the ground at all times, and I have to say, at one point, one of the graduate students with us was like, “Put them on the tarp! Let them pee on the tarp! Use the syringe to get it up!” And we all were like oh, yes. That’s better!

Laura Reeves [9:35] Genius.

Jessica Hekman [9:36] Because we were like chasing after them with spoons! Is it pee? 

Laura Reeves [9:41] Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Jessica Hekman [9:42] So as breeders probably know, before people bring puppies home from the breeders (so somewhere between five and seven or eight weeks of age) is the first time when puppies start showing this behaviorally fearful reaction to novelty. And it’s been discovered in the last couple of decades that that differs by breed. And so the breeds that are more goofy and happy-go-lucky tend to have that fearfulness appear later on, which makes them a bit easier to socialize, right? Because you have that extra two weeks. And the ones that are more aloof and sensitive tend to have the fear response turn on earlier. So the laboratory where I work is trying to find the genes that are associated with that. So that’s something that I just would love to see the Functional Dog Collaborative find a way of supporting, find a way of keeping the puppy owners really in touch with the breeder after they go home, having a way for the breeder to report when the onset of fear first shows up and be able to stay in touch with the puppy owners and say, “What happens when the dog is a year? Two years? Three years old?” Do we actually see differences in the adult personality, based on what differences we saw in the puppies? That’s down the road, right? Like, we’re still at the stage of building out databases and things like that.

Laura Reeves [10:55] Right. So, this is a very, very new group that you’ve put together—this Functional Dog Collaborative. And you have very ambitious goals. We were talking about the behavioral stuff, so I’m going to read from your goals, because I think these are just really well-said. “Behavioral health. While it is impossible to guarantee behavioral health in individual dogs, breeders should select dogs for breeding with the following in mind: So, the dogs that they’re selecting have to have minimal fear of novel or unknown humans, minimal fear of novel/unknown dogs, maximal ability to cope with reasonable new environments, minimal behavioral pathologies (behavioral conditions, separation anxiety, compulsive disorder, etc.), and minimal unchanneled aggression.” I just think those are, for me, baseline as a breeder. And I love the emphasis on that to make people think about that as a genetic and also epigenetic! Because there it’s involved in the whelping box, particularly with the dam. If you have a dam that features any of these things, it’s coming through in the environment as well as the genetics. 

Jessica Hekman [12:13] Yeah, and we struggled with those a lot. We didn’t want to say things like, “You can only breed a dog with no fear!” Because that’s unreasonable, unrealistic. We wanted to be realistic. Breeders have a balancing act, right? It’s like well, this dog is really healthy, but it has a little bit of shyness and so how much shyness is okay for me to breed? It’s hard to know. So that’s why we tried to say “reasonable,” “minimal.” And then the unchanneled aggression we really struggled with. Because there are some dogs for which some breeds (and some jobs) for which it’s appropriate to have some aggression and so one thing that was brought up was livestock guardian dogs. Totally appropriate for them to have some aggression, right? You want them to chase away predators. A predator may be another strange dog. 

Laura Reeves [12:56] Any of your hunting dogs are going to have prey drive. For example, my breed is German Wirehaired Pointers and their job in Germany was to dispatch small predators, up to and including a fox. And, in many cases, in the testing system in Germany, they’re still dispatching feral cats. So I cannot say that I won’t breed a German Wirehaired Pointer that has aggression towards cats. That’s what it’s been bred to do. 

Jessica Hekman [13:28] Right, totally! So we didn’t want to exclude people by saying if you have a particular job that you want your dog to do and you want to breed the dog to be able to do the job—we wanted to be supportive of that. But we also wanted to make two things clear. One is that if you are breeding the dog to dispatch predators but you expect the dog to be able to come into the house with you, we don’t want it dispatching your child. 

Laura Reeves [13:53] This is actually a very, very serious issue with a lot of breeds, because they need to be sensible enough to know when to use which behaviors. And so we have seen this in some of our breeds that were designed to be very, if you will, tough. That stand-up dog that they needed in Germany, in the forests, at the turn of the century—the 20th century, not the 21st. That dog doesn’t fit well in a 21st century home. And so then as breeders, there were decisions made about how to better fit those dogs into the current environment. You can see the good breeding choices and the poor breeding choices. Because if you make it soft but leave it without that sensibility, you turn into fear-biters. That is a very real consideration in many of the continental, versatile hunting breeds—just as an example of places where breeders are making decisions like this all the time. 

Jessica Hekman [15:00] Yeah, that’s so hard when two different traits interact like that. And you might discover that that’s the case. And then I think what we would say is it’s understandable if you didn’t know that was what you were going to get, because we started talking about goals but then if you got that, we would expect you to take a step back and say, “Is this what I want to produce? Then I need to think through this carefully.” So having a goal—it’s important to me to not produce dogs that are fear-biters. 

Laura Reeves [15:24] That’s a good goal. That’s a pretty solid goal. 

Jessica Hekman [15:28] And then the other thing we wanted to say was: so, aggression as part of the job is acceptable. Must be channeled as part of the job—you know, not bleeding into the rest of life. And then we also just did want to make the point. We said ethical job. And that was just because we didn’t want people coming to us saying, “We’re going to breed dogs for dog fighting in fighting Pits, and that’s the dog’s job so we’re breeding aggressive dogs for that reason.” We don’t consider dog fighting to be ethical. And again, we weren’t super specific about it, but I think it’s good to sort of talk through. 

Laura Reeves [15:58] It’s important that that be put out there and made clear. And I wanted to touch lightly over the top of one of the things that I think is interesting and where it might cause some people pause. I want you specifically to have the opportunity to speak to this. Your mission statement notes that these goals—we’re talking about breeding functional, healthy dogs, etc.—and I’m quoting: “These goals will sometimes be in conflict with a strict breed standard or closed stud books. In that case, these functional goals are considered more important.” So, we had a conversation off-air, and I just really want you to offer people the opportunity to hear your observations and thought process on function versus phenotype—in other words, what the dog looks like. 

Jessica Hekman [16:48] Yeah, so definitely function is what we focus on. You can look at the goals. There’s no rules about what the dog needs to look like. People who are breeding “our way” (and I’m saying in quotation marks because, again, there’s lots of different ways and lots of different goals)—but people who want to embrace this goal—we want them to say, “What’s the dog’s job and can the dog do the job? And, aside from that, is the dog happy, comfortable, able to move through his life comfortably without pain or discomfort?” And so we don’t really care what the dog looks like if the dog is able to do those things. Now there are, as you said, some cases where—like, if you’re breeding with the goal of having a dog with a super-ultra-flat face, it can be challenging to also be producing dogs who can breathe. And it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to do—just that those are two goals that it can be difficult to balance and achieve both of them. And so what we’re saying is if you’re balancing those two goals and they’re equally important to you—that you really don’t want to give up on the ultra-flat face—that’s fine. We’re not going to attack you. We’re not going to try to pass any laws about how you should breed your dogs. We totally support you breeding dogs however you want to breed dogs. Our goals are different from that. Another really big part of the core of this group—I mentioned earlier how I felt that dog breeding and the dog world in general has become really fractured. I mean, I don’t think I’m going to be the one to be able to pull it all together, but what I really don’t want is for us to be a source of more fractures or for us to be a place where people go to attack other people. God, it’s been hard on the Facebook group because this is how Facebook is. 

Laura Reeves [18:30] Social media! 

Jessica Hekman [18:32] Yeah, like people will come and be rude and then Facebook will give them a little rising star symbol because they’ve had a lot of engaging posts. And the moderators and I will be like, “NO! They’re NOT a rising star! We wish they’d talk less!” 

Laura Reeves [18:46] We’re blocking those people. That’s really what I wanted to have you speak to—the concept that too much and too often and in too many places and in too many ways, our fraternity (for lack of a better word)—

Jessica Hekman [19:00] Our sorority. Let’s call it a sorority. 

Laura Reeves [19:02] Sorority—okay!—of dog breeders is so compartmentalized and so judgemental, one against the other. And I have worked for a number of years now on this concept that divided, we fall. You have National Animal Interests Alliance that’s working towards those goals. I think as many of us as possible working towards the goal of unity, I think, is really critical. 

Jessica Hekman [19:35] Coexistence, right? Like, if we can’t quite get to unity yet, coexistence is a great first step. And I think we can help each other, too. So, if there’s one group breeding a population of dogs in one particular way, there’s another group breeding a population of dogs in another particular way—we might start realizing, “Hey, you could give me some breeding stock and that could help me. I could give you some breeding stock and that could help you. The populations can remain separate, but from time to time, we may find it useful to cross-pollinate.” 

Laura Reeves [20:03] Right, and I think that is really useful when we start talking about coefficient of inbreeding and talking about the ways that you can have a sound, healthy dog. Because a sound, healthy dog is going to have an easier time getting up and down off the couch, even if that’s its only job. 

Jessica Hekman [20:21] That is an important job, to be able to get up and off the couch! 

Laura Reeves [20:24] It is! This is no joke. This is real. And my big thing is structurally-sound dogs. So the idea that it doesn’t have to be a Best In Show winner to still be functionally-sound and structurally-sound—

Jessica Hekman [20:43] We like to avoid the hip dysplasia, the elbow dysplasia. 

Laura Reeves [20:44] Absolutely! But I’m talking as simple as if you build a dog to the standard, that standard is written to describe a functional dog. And so if you are breeding a dog close to its breed standard in terms of where do the shoulders go, what does the rear end look like—those dogs are designed to be able to stand up and in many of the working breeds, sporting breeds, stuff like that, they have a job! And so that was very important, for their front legs to be straight or for their back to be a certain way or their rib cage to be a certain way, whatever. All of those were designed. They were created to describe the best hunting dog, those breed standards. So I think that has got a lot of importance, coming from my perspective as a preservation breeder.

Jessica Hekman [21:36] Yeah, that makes sense. And I think just being able to breed dogs that can do their job, that are healthy and don’t have early arthritis, that’s all such a massively important part of dog breeding, and we need to just keep remembering how central that should be. 

Laura Reeves [21:54] And whether we’re breeding pretty dogs or hunting dogs or couch dogs or whatever we’re breeding—

Jessica Hekman [22:00] Hunting dogs can be pretty, but yeah.

Laura Reeves [22:02] Um, excuse me! I’ve been saying that for a very long time. 

Jessica Hekman [22:08] Yeah, but again, different people have different values for what pretty is. 

Laura Reeves [22:12] Well, I actually think that the Best In Show dog can be a Field Trial Champion. I’ve got one. 

Jessica Hekman [22:18] That’s fabulous when that happens.

Laura Reeves [22:20] Yeah, there are goals that can be set, and everybody has their own goals. My point being that no matter which of those things are your goals, it’s still somebody’s companion. And that has to be first. And that’s why I think that behavior component is so important. 

Jessica Hekman [22:34] It’s critical, and we hear so many stories these days about dogs that are really challenging to live with. And that’s something that—as a larger community—we all need to take very seriously. 

Laura Reeves [22:44] And I think a lot of it, too, is helping new owners. You were talking about staying in touch with your puppy buyers. Helping the new owners understand the best way to train their dog and giving them those resources—that is part of, to me, what an accountable breeder does: make sure they’re available in that 24/7, 365 tech support that I talk about all the time. 

Jessica Hekman [23:06] Yeah and for sure, if there’s any way we can help breeders stay in touch with their puppy buyers—there’s been various conversations on the Facebook group where people will say, “So, how do you try to stay in touch with your puppy buyers?” And the frustration I hear from the breeders, where they’re like, “I reach out! And they don’t answer! And then they go to random Facebook groups and get their bad advice there and then they get mad at me because it didn’t work!”—it’s a problem for all of us. 

Laura Reeves [23:30] It is a problem for all of us, and it’s something I address head-on with my puppy buyers. I just got through placing 13 German Wirehaired Pointed puppies. And every single owner was told very specifically, straight-up, I am not interested in having you contact the drama mamas and keyboard warriors. I am your 24/7 tech support. Call me. I guarantee you, I know the answer.

Jessica Hekman [23:56] Raised a few dogs in the past, have you?

Laura Reeves [23:57] A couple. Yeah. Just a couple. So I think that that is an important piece that we, as breeders, can offer to our puppy buyers that is so valuable. 

Jessica Hekman [24:09] I actually—just before this call—got off a call with someone else, where we’re starting to look at putting into place some of those pieces of having the technology to try to really keep the puppy buyers engaged, and thereby keep them giving information back to the breeders. Because, you know, a part of it is you keep your dog or your bitch that you’re going to breed from a litter and you can see that they turn out great, and you’re happy to breed them. But you’d really like to know how all their brothers and sisters turned out. 

Laura Reeves [24:36] It’s important to know what’s going on. Absolutely. And I think Good Dog is working towards these goals of some of the technology that they can bring to bear specifically that we have available at Good Dog that I think is really useful.

Jessica Hekman [24:53] I think we have very similar goals, so I’m going to be really interested to see how we can dovetail that in the future. 

Laura Reeves [24:58] Absolutely. Excellent. Well, Jessica, thank you so much. I very much appreciate your time, joining us here on the Good Dog Pod.

Jessica Hekman [25:05] It was fun. Thanks for having me. 

Laura Reeves [25:08] Not a problem. I always love talking to people. I love talking to people that don’t even exactly agree with me. It’s shocking, right? 

Jessica Hekman [25:16] It’s a good example for the rest of us. 

Laura Reeves [25:18] Absolutely. Alright, well you have a great day. We look forward to talking to you again soon. 

Jessica Hekman [25:22] Thank you. You too.