Badly shaken by a bad investment, Mark Twain embarked on a one-year tour of the countries of the British Empire in 1895 in order to rehabilitate his finances through lectures. While traveling by train in India, he met a gentleman with a “very remarkable dog” that was “extremely long”. The legs were "shockingly short and curved inwards like brackets placed the wrong way around". Twain speculated that the four-legged friend had been made according to a plan “that aimed at length and depth”. Although he claimed that as a cat lover he did not know anything about dogs, he said he recognized "a few basic weaknesses", "especially with regard to the distance between the front and rear supports". Twain figured that dog's back would inevitably sink in over the years.In his opinion he would be "a better and stronger dog if he had been provided with a few more legs".
He wanted to find out how the animal got this "strange deformation", but did not want to offend its owner. Because he is obviously in love with the award-winning wonder dog, after which people in London turned around on the street. Twain suppressed the remark that "such a long, low, waddling creature" had attracted glances around the world. Nor did he dare to ask about the breed. The illustration in the first edition of Twain's travel notes reveals that it was a dachshund. More than a hundred years later, dog owners are so fond of the deformation of the Dachshund, which is due to a genetic mutation, that breeders, as with other breeds, systematically over-typify the extreme characteristics.With longer and shorter-legged sausage dogs, the breed is responding to the ever-increasing need for cute Instagram dachshund pictures, which is fueled by the dog's popularity with celebrity trendsetters like Kim Kardashian.
The price of cuteness is painful malformations, which, as Twain already suspected, cause, among other things, increased herniated discs. The British Kennel Club now wants to counteract this form of torture breeding with new regulations for body length and ground clearance. Many accuse the oldest umbrella organization of dog breeders' associations with its specifications for the ideal breed characteristics of overbreeding, which can be observed every year at Crufts, the largest dog show in the world. Last year a wire-haired dachshund won first prize. He showed what he thought of all of this by puking into the arena on the winning run.