French bulldog Blue… All the things you have to know.
“During the creation, God first created the Man, but as he seemed weak, God gave him a dog”.
Milan Kundera, with these works, wants to pay homage to the best friend of human the dog.
The friendship, or rather the love, between humans and dogs started in the Neolithic.
But we will wait until the 12th century B.C to see for the first time a dog buried with its owner.
The dog will be a trusted ally of the hunters during their hunting trips and of the first farmers.
In the most southern region of North America, a certain type of canines of the forests became bigger,and they started improving their ability to run, and at the end of the Miocene the first species of the genus Canis, the so-called Canis lepophagus, ancestor of wolves, coyotes and dogs, appeared.
In East Africa, the primates get divided, some stayed on the trees, others moved their habitat to the ground. They learned how to walk upright, and they developed a larger brain, and most of all they learned to defend themselves from predators and became predators themselves.They met on the Eurasian continent, initiating the bond that still survives nowadays.
But how did we get to our dogs?
The dog is the most widespread carnivore in the world.
The latest genetic studies lead us to believe that the other five different types of wolves followed and replaced each other, and according to this theory, today's wolf is not the progenitor of our dogs.
The dogs, however, descend from the same animal that generated the wolves, in genetics this is what we call Monophyletic clade.
We still don’t know from which wolf our dogs and modern wolves were born from, the progenitors of wolves and dogs are extinct and, ultimately, dogs and wolves are not separate species.
Indeed, the separation between the two is quite recent, between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago.
The domestication started 20,000 years ago. The evolution of dogs could be divided in two different ways: the first due to nature or separation from wolves and the second due to the creation of dog breeds, by humans.
Man has imposed the evolution of the dog by selecting it and this has caused a genetic mix between ancient and modern breeds.
Some ancient European breeds are totally extinct, and we have never met them.
Let’s simplify, dog breeds are our invention.
We have selected dog breeds for thousands of years sometimes crossing ancestral breeds of the same line or in other times resorting to dogs of different lines. At some point,we needed to regulate dog breeds in way to recognize real known standards.
In 1911 the Fédération Cynologique Internationale was born, an international federation of dog breeders associations, wanted by German, Austrian, Belgian, French and Dutch breeders. Since that year, 88 countries are part of it and it recognizes 399 dog breeds including the French Bulldog.
The FCI (which E.N.C.I belongs to) places the French bulldog in group number 9, the one dedicated to PETS. By the way, our bullies, between the mid and late 1800s, are bred as fighting dogs against rats.
If you were looking for old pictures of a French bulldog and compared it to your bullies, you wouldn’t notice any similarity or only a few. The Father of the French bulldog is the old English bulldog, from which very small specimens were selected, and specimens of Dogue de Bordeaux have been also chosen. Later, they were crossbred with smooth-haired terrier dogs.
In 1880, the first bulldogs arrived in France where the first club was born, in 1885 the first breed registration register was born and in 1898 the first standards were established. The standards of dog breeds aren’t and shouldn’t be considered religious dogmas.
Until a few years ago, the E.N.C.I didn’t recognize those specimens whose color was fawn as French bulldogs. Nature doesn’t follow the logic of the market and not even the human one.
Nowadays, we still attend to controversies about the "purity of the breed" compared to some coats of our four-legged friends.
In recent years, a new type of French bully, the blue coat has spread, the quarrel in the matter is related to whether dogs of this color belong to the breed of French bulldogs.
Someone calls the bulldogs of this color "mestizo", we prefer to call them exotic.
Currently, some national associations are, a little late in updating the lists of colors recognized as meeting current standards, however other entities, such as the Kennel Association Alovensko, recognizes blue-colored bulldogs, and not only, as French bulldogs to all effects.
The Recognition, of Corporations such as KAS means that qualified corporations may issue perfect valid and legal pedigrees. An exotic French bulldog is a French bulldog and has all the characteristics of the breed.
The bulldog has a stubborn, playful, peaceful nature who gets along well with children. Like any bulldog, it may have breathing problems and in the warmer months, it must be kept in cool areas and drink a lot of water. Its skin is delicate and so it must be washed with neutral soaps and detergents.
It is also essential to take care of their nutrition. All over the world, the blue color is getting more and more required and the prices of puppies are, on average, very high!
We believe it is a duty to protect the health of dogs, after all they are by our side, regardless of the breed to which they belong to, the color of our skin, our sex or any other factor, for 27,000 years.
So let’s end this by saying that we totally agree, those standards that protect their health but we believe that the standards should be reviewed more quickly, completely and frequently to ride the wave of evolution.
