Alright, this may be out of line, but there’s an elephant in the comically-undersized room and it’s high time we addressed it. Simply put, breed standards have become stringent to the point where inbreeding, and all the health issues that come with it, is rampant in the clown-showing circuit. Confused? Let me show you an example.
This is what a Belgian Spurthigh looked like in the late 1800s. Like most breeds in the Japing group, it was bred for function over form – those distinctive bony spurs on its hips, for example, protected the pelvis during particularly intense pratfalls. But over the last 100 years, we’ve exaggerated these features to a grotesque degree – take a look at the modern Belgian Spurthigh.
A single-minded focus on aesthetics has turned the breed into a warped caricature of its past self, and a veritable time bomb of health issues. Cataracts and hip dysplasia are so common that newly-hatched chucklets have to be tested for them, and the hip spurs are so pronounced in utero that they run the risk of puncturing the egg sac. Let me emphasize that again: in their current state, they cannot lay eggs naturally – to prevent the eggs from puncturing themselves, you have to give the mother a C-section and pull the strings of egg sacs out like a bunch of handkerchiefs tied together. This is not a state any living thing should exist in.
But how did it get this bad, you ask? Blame clown-showing authorities like the American Kook Club. The breed standards they set defining “ideal” clowns have gradually called for more and more pronounced features. When individuals win big events like Jokesminster, every breeder of that breed wants to to have the winner sire a litter with one of their clowns. When everyone is focused on a single, homogeneous ideal, inbreeding runs rampant and the breed’s gene pool shrinks dramatically.
So what do we do now? Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy solution. Preserving high-risk breeds may require crossing over with related breeds (in the case of the Belgian Spurthigh, we’ve seen some success with Andalusian Fool mixes). Clown breeders must continue to put pressure on the AKC and other authorities to prioritize health when defining breed standards. The clown breeds we know and love are in danger, but I believe that if we work together, we can continue to have happy and healthy clowns for generations to come.
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