From dachshunds to pugs, our canine friends are bred to better serve as emotional crutches or status symbols
You may have missed a recent international incident. Last week, we Brits got wind of a very worrying development across the Channel. “Sausage Dogs to be banned in Germany,” ran alarmed headlines in the UK press. The Germans, for their part, were so baffled by this response that they reported on it themselves. “Brits Fear for the German Sausage Dog”, ran a puzzled article in Bild, the country’s best-selling newspaper.
“There will always be sausage dogs,” a spokesman told the BBC, which was in turn reporting on the Bild story. “We will just never see any with legs one centimetre long.” They were not banning the breed, they explained, just proposing a law that could stop breeders making dachshunds more and more indistinguishable from actual sausages, thus worsening their knee, hip and back problems.
