Tracy Anderson artificially inseminated her poodle.
The practice is more common than you think.
Hi everyone. Thanks for your patience during this brief hiatus. I moved out of LA and back home to the Bay Area last week for a much-needed fresh start, so I’m just now finding some quiet time to sit down and actually think about things other than selling furniture on Facebook and packing up my entire life into a car.1
Biggest perk of the move so far is living right across from a dog-friendly public park, which has made walks and training so much more convenient. (My favorite dog park in LA was a 20 minute drive from my house.) New daily routine includes having Gemma and Carrie, my mom’s dog, practice their down stays as they’re surrounded by distractions: pickleball games, kids on tricycles zooming past, other small leashed dogs. I’m hopeful the proximity to this park and added training sessions will do wonders for Pippa when we’re reunited next month, since we’re still working on building her confidence and keeping calm around other people and dogs.
I’ve been catching up on some reading, including the U.S. release of The Book Your Dog Wishes You Would Read by U.K. dog behaviorist Louise Glazebrook. I appreciated the early chapters that take an honest approach to what a potential dog parent needs to know before bringing a pup home—including being realistic about what they want in a dog and acknowledging whether they’re drawn to a breed purely for aesthetics. I’ll come back with more fleshed out thoughts when I’ve had a chance to finish the book.
I also finally read The Atlantic’s profile of celebrity fitness trainer (sorry, “self-made scholar”) Tracy Anderson, whose regulars include J. Lo, Madonna, and Ms. Goop herself, Gwyneth Paltrow. I’ll let you check out Xochitl Gonzalez’s piece to learn more about her $10,000 studio memberships and the impressive fitness empire Anderson has built, but I simply have not stopped thinking about this one passage:
Anderson greeted me at the door of her house in Brentwood, California, followed by a pack of beautiful dogs, including a cavapoo, standard poodles, and another breed I couldn’t place. It turned out to be the product of the male cavapoo and a female poodle that had fallen “madly in love,” according to Anderson. When they “anatomically could not express themselves to their fullest ability,” Anderson asked science to step in. “They deserve to be helped because they were trying so hard to procreate that his, like, his male parts were bleeding.” The poodle was artificially inseminated, and they went on to have eight puppies.
Her way of speaking—warm and Midwest-earnest—makes even something as outrageous as doggy IVF seem like a gesture of compassion. In that moment, all I felt was happiness for those dogs. Shouldn’t we all be able to express our love?
I’m not going to get into the ethics of artificial insemination or IVF for dogs, as readers here will know I’m a huge advocate for spay/neuter and rescue, but I did go down a rabbit hole on the procedures.
Researchers at Cornell University bred the first IVF puppies in 2015 using embryos from beagle and cocker spaniel parents that were implanted in a surrogate hound mother. At the time, one of the lead researchers said this breakthrough would allow humans to help preserve endangered dog species and potentially “identify certain genes that cause disease and then fix those.”
Artificial insemination, which Anderson did for her cavapoo and poodle, is a much more common practice among breeders for a multitude of reasons: breeding from a champion line where distance is prohibitive; males and females (referred to as “studs” and “bitches” in the breeding world) who might hurt each other when they’re, for lack of a better word, fucking.
There’s no exact record of how many dogs have been bred via AI, but the practice has effectively become mainstream. The American Kennel Club accepts litters bred using this method, and hundreds2 of canine fertility clinics operate around the world, leading some watchdog groups and advocates to raise the alarm about the practice’s impact on animal welfare and genetic diversity.
In fact, artificial insemination is how most brachycephalic dogs like French bulldogs and English bulldogs are bred, as these breeds typically can’t reproduce or give birth on their own due to physical attributes that have been exaggerated over years of selective breeding to satisfy humans’ aesthetic tastes. When it comes time to giving birth, many of these artificially inseminated dogs must then go through one more traumatizing surgery: emergency C-sections. Bulldog puppies’ heads, for example, are too large to naturally pass through a mother’s pelvic canal without the procedure.
Personally, I have a hard time seeing any of this as an expression of love.
In other news…
BARK is not having a good year. The subscription dog toy company’s stock price has fallen so low that the New York Stock Exchange issued a notice of non-compliance last week. Bark will have six months to raise the stock price or risk getting delisted. Let’s see how company execs address it next month when they announce Q1 earnings.
Have you seen the new Superman movie? The James Gunn movie is drawing praise for its more realistic depiction of dog ownership (minus the super powers) thanks to Krypto, the Man of Steel’s super cute but super misbehaved pup. While the movie dog was digitally created, he looks like a schnauzer/terrier mix based on the director’s own rescue dog.
Modern Animal launched a podcast with its top veterinarian, Dr. Christie Long.
A shelter dog at an adoption event alerted a man who was about to have a seizure. The three-year-old lab and pit bull mix wasn’t previously trained to detect seizures but went right up to the man, put her paw on his leg, and refused to leave his side at an adoption event. “This is the kind of magic that shelter dogs carry inside them—unspoken wisdom, deep empathy, and an unfailing ability to connect with us in our most vulnerable moments. Sienna wasn’t trained to do this. She simply felt it,” the shelter wrote in a Facebook post. Excuse me while I dry my eyes!
Some Tennessee school libraries are banning copies of The Complete Book of Cats and The Complete Book of Dogs. Animal reference books were some of my favorite to pore over at libraries as a kid, but apparently knowledge is now inappropriate for children? Good grief.
A New York design studio sold shirts with a “missing cat” poster design but accidentally used a real person’s phone number. The woman, who’s been fielding dozens of calls, also has a cat, who is very much safe at home. Big oops!
I’m honestly impressed I was able to do this without a UHaul.
The British animal advocacy group Naturewatch Foundation estimated there were some “412 canine fertility businesses advertising services across the U.K.,” according to a letter the group sent to government officials.