004. Online Breed Resources
Description
This article is from the Selecting a Dog Breed FAQ, posted to rec.pets.dogs newsgroup. Maintained by Amy Hendrix, with numerous contributions by others.
004. Online Breed Resources
There are some very good resources on the net, as well as some pretty poor ones. Unfortunately, the best will only help you when you've already narrowed down your list considerably: The Breed FAQs are all written by people who know the breed in question and have written about it honestly. They can go into much more detail than the one page per breed in any of the all-breed dog books. And they generally point you toward good sources of breed-specific information.
Even better are the breed e-mail lists. There are lists devoted to an amazing number of breeds, and every one I've been on includes breeders, exhibitors, and knowledgeable pet owners who are more than willing to talk all day about their dogs -- in fact, that's the biggest problem with them. Some of them can be very high-volume. For that reason, I don't recommend subscribing to dozens of different lists in order to choose a breed, although you may find them helpful when you've narrowed your choice down to two or three breeds.
There are also a growing number of breed-search databases online. When I find one that I can honestly recommend, I'll be happy to link to it. But I've tried out every one that I've heard about, and as of now they all have major problems: one of them recommended a toy poodle when I asked for a medium-sized dog to compete in herding trials; another seems to be largely based on the premise that active dogs should live outside 24 hours a day, which is a very good way to get a bored, destructive active dog who learns how to climb fences. Some of these machines ask as few as 5 questions, others seem to choose among as few as 25 breeds (although they never make it clear up-front how many dogs are contained in the database). So here's a challenge to pet-page developers: set up a database with hundreds of dog breeds, with accurate profiles, and create a search form which asks a large number of truly relevant questions, and if it passes my tests, I'll put a link to it at the top of this page in big bold letters. Until that link is up there, assume that online search forms are a fun toy to play with but don't ever buy a dog based on their recommendation until you've done a lot more research.
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