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Articles from The Masters
- Planned Breeding (by Lloyd C. Brackett)
- Linebreeding (by Jerold S. Bell, D.V.M)
Even though these articles were written by masters with other breed types, the principles remain true and the same for our breed type as well.
Jack
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Great reads... Lots of good info in them. I got one on thorough bred race horse I will have to find to add to this thread.
(trying to explain these things to those who believe your dogs should be non related is impossible most times.)
(FRUSTRATING... LOL!)
Yes, and it is always the people with no breeding records who believe things like this. Here is another article on family breeding, written for Bloodhound breeders, by my friend (and forum member here) TFX. TFX has been involved with bulldogs since the mid-80s and wrote these breeding principles for Bloodhounders to consider, based upon what he has learned breeding bulldogs (for the same principles apply!):
Improving The Bloodhound
By TFX
My long-standing interest and involvement with working dogs has led me recently to a keen interest in the mantrailing bloodhound. I believe the bloodhound who functions well in his task of mantrailing, to be among the most useful of all canines. There are many impressive types of working dogs, herding dogs, catch dogs, and a myriad of various hunting dogs and utility dogs etc. However, my feeling is that a dog which benefits mankind directly; such as guide dogs for the blind, or mantrailing dogs who can find lost people or escaped criminal suspects, are surely among the most elite and noble of all of the various working dogs. Therefore, the prospect of being of service to my fellow man through volunteering the use of well-trained and well-bred bloodhounds appeals to me greatly at this stage of my life.
Having been a fairly serious student of animal husbandry since the early 1980s, when I bred a “strain” of fancy rats, and then later as a breeder of working dogs, I set out to search for a pure strain of bloodhounds from which I could select my initial working stock. After several months of searching, I have come to the conclusion: sadly there are no pure strains of working bloodhounds currently in existence. I wish to give a sort of third party consultant’s view on how I think the bloodhound can and should be improved. First, what do I mean by a strain? The dictionary definition of a “strain” as pertaining to biology or animal husbandry as follows:
STRAIN = “A group of organisms of the same species, having distinctive characteristics but not usually considered a separate breed or variety.”
So, when relating this definition to canines, a strain is essentially a distinct “family” or “bloodline” within a breed, which has its own unique characteristics. Presumably, these characteristics are distinct and superior in nature than the mean average of the breed, thus making a proven animal descended from a “pure strain” or “family” more reliable in his duties. It is also likely that he will be more prepotent as a brood animal. Pure strains are nearly always highly inbred. By this process of breeding individuals within a family, any hidden recessive genes for physical or performance faults manifest themselves, and the dogs that manifest weakness of any kind, or who are at the lower end of the strain in general, are culled. Also, recessive genetic patterns allowing dogs to function well above the average of the breed are manifest, and more easily duplicated through inbreeding. This process is what I call “genetic cleansing”, as we discard the undesirable genetic garbage, and cause the most desirable traits to become dominant through our selectivity. Breeding clean gene pools or strains, and then crossing them amongst each other, is the very process by which the bloodhound evolved and was maintained as a working dog in the centuries that preceded ours. There were many pure strains in the history of the bloodhound. While it is true that some of these early breeders had an emphasis on show dogs, it is also true that they were linebreeding on proven working dogs to produce their show stock. We must remember and never lose sight of the fact that form follows function, not vise-versa. Breeding what we “think” a solid mantrailer looks like will never be as successful a direction to go as breeding good mantrailers, regardless of conformation. If we let successful working dogs become our standard, they will in general also be handsome and athletic dogs by default.
Apparently, the trait of being able to scent and trail is so very dominant in the working bloodhound, that it is not so easily lost through the careless scatterbred mating patterns that we see in large measure today. However, experienced handlers of mantrailing bloodhounds know that not all hounds are created equal. Some are able to “track” instead of “trail,” and there are several accounts of hounds both old and modern wherein the dog would trail with the head held high almost effortlessly, so as to make onlookers think that he wasn’t even on a scent trail. Certainly those “once in a lifetime” types of superior hounds with outstanding success records are what all serious mantrailers would like to see produced with greater regularity. I’m talking about dogs that can run older trails successfully, and have a greater overall intensity for their task. I’m talking about dogs that can detect the freshest scent and successfully trail, when clean and isolated scent articles may not be available. Dogs that have an athletic type of hound body in contrast to the fat, blocky show type bloodhounds we see today. An athletic body will of course allow them to endure and stay on the trail longer as well as to recover from the work quicker. A good strain should also be able to produce a hound with greater longevity, and fewer health concerns, than what we see today. The questions that are raised in pondering such an effort are “why aren’t these elite hounds produced with greater regularity currently,” and “how could one begin to produce top mantrailers with regularity?”
First let us examine why I believe the elite type of working bloodhounds are not produced with greater regularity. I firmly believe we can point to the AKC (as well as other registries) and dog shows as the primary reason that all working dogs decline in quality. I know that such a statement will chagrin some, but I believe it is the truth. If we look back to the people who promoted show dogs early in any breed’s history, they usually had the greatest of intentions in promoting their favorite breeds of working dog in a positive way. However; over time the show gradually becomes the primary focus, and the thought of breeding one’s winning show bitch to a lanky old highly accomplished mantrailer, instead of the latest and greatest show champion becomes very unappealing. After all, who in show circles or the general public would want to buy puppies out of a less than stellar looking working dog with no titles, even if the dog would truly improve the breed? It is much easier to sell the descendants of show champions than some mantrailer whose exploits are largely unknown and unpublicized. I think the very reasons the quality of dogs have declined, and will continue to decline, are “dog shows” and the “puppy business.” “Pet Quality” dogs have value to both the peddler/breeder and puppy purchaser. The selling of puppies simply promotes more selling of puppies, and that is what keeps a registry in business. Seldom do we see bloodhound people keeping entire litters that they have produced, or keeping them in tight circles of friends for stringent scrutiny, and selection, with no thought of selling any. No, the majority of any bloodhound litter today is for sale; in fact most breeders tend to line up the buyers of these dogs prior to making a mating. Yet, these same breeders seem to want to prohibit the buyers of their stock from the same type of peddling which they engage in by registering these dogs with “AKC Limited Registration.” Again, I know that this type of commentary will likely cut to the very center, and enrage some readers, but the truth usually has a way of doing that.
To make matters worse, the American Bloodhound Club is closely aligned with the American Kennel Club, and promotes its agenda, which are primarily shows, and the breeding of more show dogs. The fanciers of bloodhound today are splintered into three principle groups, and variations of the three groups—namely working dog folks, show dog folks and puppy peddlers. The ABC; like any breed organization, is a political organization, and the same type of folks that usually are drawn to the politics of the show dog circles, are also motivated towards the leadership of a breed association. Therefore, the agenda of the ABC is largely the agenda of the show dog people, and the people with no interest in shows but only in working dogs, must sit idly by with little input or representation regarding the declining direction the breed is headed in regard to working qualities. Invariably as either overall breed popularity or show involvement increases, working quality will decrease.
In fact, renowned bloodline breeder Dr. Leon Whitney stated in his book, How to Breed Dogs,“It is almost axiomatic that the more popular a breed is, the sloppier the breeding will be.” He goes on further to elaborate about the separation in the fancy in his early days with the bloodhound between those who bred and use mantrailers, and those who bred show dogs. “Now neither group was antagonistic to the other, but one group developed a hound that could live and was useful and beautiful, while the other developed a type that was fragile and beautiful according the breeders’ type of beauty. The point I am trying to drive home is this: why should the proper type not be that which is the best for the purposes for which the breed is intended?” This great philosophical chasm in the fancy between type and functionality, mingled in with a peaceful coexistence between fanciers is very similar to that we see today in the ABC. Indeed, history repeats itself.
Another real life scenario is that many of the people who are strictly working dog people have no inclination towards breeding dogs. They are happy working with one or two dogs, and when the dog gets older, they buy and train another as a prospective replacement. These people; many of them law enforcement or search-and-rescue personnel, have some of the very proven dogs that could make a big contribution to improving the breed. Yet sadly their dogs seldom or never get used in the brood pen. Other people who are accomplished in mantrailing do breed their mantrailers, yet may have limited knowledge on the subject of genetic management, let alone improvement. Often times they breed in the simple format of “mantrailer to mantrailer,” with no real regard for bloodline. In the bloodhound fancy today, I think most of the better dogs come out of such programs. While “best to best”, or “worker to worker,” is surely a step in the right direction, it is still far from putting the genetic odds into our favor and improving the breed to the fullest extent possible. One other problem that stands in the way of breed improvement is the Bloodhound Rescue movement. Every good home that is willing to take in some undocumented, unproven “rescued bloodhound” is one more home that we eliminate from taking in a dog of excellent breeding and character. If someone is desirous to own a bloodhound, shouldn’t they have the opportunity to own a good one instead of some suspect individual that is not representative of the breed in phenotype, genotype, temperament, or any combination of the aforementioned? I sure think so! The concept of Breed Rescue is, and always will be, in direct opposition to true breed improvement. Again, I am aware that this position is politically incorrect, but those who are truly interested in improving the breed will clearly see the wisdom in this viewpoint. With this short overview of some of the problems I have observed in the fancy, let us consider some possible solutions.
The second question I posed was “how could one produce the elite working bloodhound with greater regularity?” The answer to this is by going back to producing pure strains, just like our forefathers did. It amazes me that while the bloodhound fancy reveres Dr. Leon F. Whitney and his accomplishments as a breeder of bloodhounds, they are completely out of step from the breeding philosophy he employed successfully. Dr. Whitney stated in his book, The Basis for Breeding “Inbreeding is the great means at the disposal of the breeder to originate new breeds or purify old.” Well, isn’t that exactly what we would like to see, the bloodhound purified to the level that he once was as a working dog first and foremost? Producing pure strains is the only way to improve the breed. It only stands to reason that to try and obtain “consistency” out of continued random selection will not work. It can’t work. The very thought defies logic! We must add an element of genetic consistency to attain a greater degree of predictability to our end product. Ironically, linebreeding has largely become taboo in the bloodhound community, usually because someone heard of a bad result somewhere along the way. Invariably, inbreeding gets the bad rap. Christian Wreidt wrote the following in his book Heredity in Livestock:
“Experiments show that inbreeding in itself is not detrimental, but the genetic factors of the animal used in inbreeding alone determine whether the results are good or bad.”
{In other words SELECTION}
Folks, my formula for improving the breed are not new ideas, it is not magic, and it is not a quick fix either. The methods I hereby recommend would take years to come into fruition, and yet ultimately it would all be worthwhile. I believe there should be a three-step approach to such a restorative effort of the bloodhound: First, form a group of fanciers who are united in their effort to create a superior strain (or strains) of bloodhounds. Second, identify the best mantrailers available to the group to use as brood stock, and proceed to make limited selective breedings with those individuals. Third, retain all stock produced for assessment, completely abandon the practice of selling any dogs outside of the group for at least 10 years. Yes, I believe this is an effort that would take at least 10 years to see dependable traits becoming “set” within the family, and to cleanse the genetic garbage that lies behind the scatterbred bloodhounds of our day. Why do I say 10 years? Well, that figure was based on my own experience; moreover, based on Dr. Whitney’s writings, it seems that when others faced this dilemma with the bloodhound in the past, this is the exact same time frame it likewise took them to make progress toward significant improvement.
I again quote from Dr. Whitney’s book How To Breed Dogs: “I grew up and bought some (bloodhounds) of my own. But during the interim a change had come over the breed so that what I got were unlike the dogs I had watched with such awe twenty years before. What I bought were more like the useful dogs before the show people began to tinker with them. They had short lips, they were agile instead of phlegmatic, they were extremely alert instead of depressed. But most important of all, they were mightily better suited to their jobs.” Now how did such a transformation come about in America? It came about by the dogs being used, and selected on the basis of their usefulness. And the men who used them in trailing people and criminals, found that the show type had meagre (sic) vitality, was too slow for the purposes, were no earthly use for hunting game because of their ponderous size, were no good for pets because of their drooling lips, often made people exclaim when they saw the big red patch of skin under their eyes ‘disgusting.' So these men who found the dogs useful bred for utility until within ten years the breed reached the greatest usefulness the world has ever come to know.”
This type of strain-breeding effort I have described would also produce hounds that were free of entropian, dysplasia, bloat, and all of the common problems the breed is faced with today, not to mention the ineffective phenotype that has been mentioned. Dogs that manifest any of these faults later in life, or produce offspring regularly with these faults simply need to be eliminated as future brood dogs. In this way, with intense dedication and devotion, I know a clean linebred bloodhound strain could improve the breed significantly, as compared to the current scatterbred bloodhound of our day. Even if the performance aspects were not improved so dramatically, though I estimate they would be, the cleansing alone from common genetic faults would be a great boon to the breed. As I stated earlier, history repeats itself. Isn’t it time that a group comes along and once again creates a pure strain (or several) to leave a legacy of working stock to the future generations who want a real bloodhound and not the show type which is so far removed from the original scent hound? I believe it is.
( ... Copied with permission from TFX )
Great read.... Thanks for posting it Jack, and very well put together article TFX, very insightful.
Thank you both!
Those are some excellent articles, thanks for posting them! The Brackett GSD one is a classic.
And I am glad to see TFX back, that was a very well written article about Bloodhounds that can apply to any breed of working dog these days.
Look what has happened to the working Border collie since the AKC added the breed to their show registry. Donald McCaig’s book “The Dog Wars” is a good read about how the working Border collie folks fought the AKC. Breeding for "pretty dogs" will ruin a working dog in a short time...
I used to have an interesting link to a museum web site in the UK that showed photos of taxidermy mounted dogs from 100 years ago and most of the breeds looked very different than they do today. Unfortunately that site is gone now.
I would also highly recommend reading the old classic by Dr. Leon Whitney “How to Breed Dogs” which was first written in the 1930s but has much information that is useful today. He writes on inbreeding and linebreeding and if I remember right, he also wrote about some of the famous working Bloodhounds of the time. This book is not expensive and is pretty easy to find, try Amazon for a used copy.
Big thanks to Jack and to TFX for writing that article. Although it is on Bloodhounds, it applies to all dogs and has some great info in it. And old Dr. Leon Whitney had so much knowledge and wrote some excellent books.
Another useful book on dog breeding is Mary Williams’ book “Reaching for the Stars” formerly titled “Advanced Labrador Breeding”, which sadly has gone from being a $15 book to being out of print and costing about $100 these days. Still it is worth reading, maybe it can be requested on Inter Library Loan for those who want to read it and not spend such a high price.
Good reads for sure!
And here is an article about the US Military program for raising working pups, the Bio Sensor Program or Early Stimulation –
http://www.taylordcanines.com/biosensor.html
I am not sure if anyone has tried this with bulldogs but I know other working breeds have benefited from this program.
For the record and as an update to that article written in 2006, I am out of the hounds today. I tried my hand at it for about 5 years and made very little progress. For one, I could not find more than one man in Colorado who was really "on board" with a breed improvement effort. It would have required a consortium of people to really enjoy success. The people in the Bloodhound fancy are absolutely clueless, and have in large measure been infiltrated and brainwashed by the animal rights folks. While I am a big supporter of the work the mantrailing Bloodhound can do, it is nearly hopeless in today's political climate with both law enforcement personnel and the Bloodhound fancy to be truly successful except in the most fortunate of circumstances. My late uncle in South Carolina was one of those who had the right people in place and the right background himself to do some real important work with the dogs, as were the folks in Illinois from which I obtained my stock. In most cases, the cops don't want you to show up their beloved shepherd or Malinois dogs that the breeder sold the police department for way too much money, and as a "can do it all dog" package. The shepherd doing mantrailing work on the cold trail would be about as effective as the border collie being used as a pit dog. The seasoned Bloodhound breeders just want to keep peddling pups and keepeveryone else from obtaining intact animals. Spay and neuter is the mantra...... except for their animals. I was successful in obtaining some really well bred intact dogs. I did work with a Sheriff's department in training the dogs, but with no outlet to work them in real world search and rescue service, and nobody else interested in breed improvement, the endeavor was basically futile. Kenny Rogers said it best, "know when to walk away, and know when to run". I eventually just ran from the nut cases that are the mantrailing fancy, and the cops..... well, I've been running from them my whole life anyhow! Neither of those groups is ready for the kind of free thinking innovation that would truly bless society or the Bloodhound breed.
"The secret is that all linebreedings must be made on a combination of performance, appearance and ancestry. If a Breeder is going to be successful in solidifying a certain trait they must rigorously select breeding specimens which display the desired trait and have similar pedigrees. In so doing Breeders have a chance of making this desired trait homozygous over time. This is the one key to successful linebreeding that is most often missed by unsuccessful Breeders." This is the most important
In the past 5 years ALL my litters look like little clones. They are more and more identical . I am amazed at how high strung they are as well. I couldnt be happier with my stock as it is now.
I know you posted this awhile ago Evo, but I will be posting my entire Chapter "The Art of Breeding Dogs" very soon, and I get into the importance of uniformity there also, which is in alignment with the ideology of pretty much all successful breeders.Quote:
Originally Posted by evolutionkennels
Jack
The Art of Breeding Dogs
This is the last chapter in my book, The Pit Bull Bible. Basically, my book takes the reader from being a total beginner and re-wires them correctly from the ground up ... from setting up the yard right, to feeding their dogs right, to getting their yard maintenance right, getting their meds right, getting their head right, getting their schooling right, getting their testing and evaluation right, getting their keep right, getting their match right, and (finally) to getting their aftercare right. The entire thrust behind my book is the brutal fact that every step of the way along our journey as dogmen, there are countless ways to lose our dogs. Failure at any one aspect of our jobs can mean the loss of a truly great and valuable flagship bulldog, or at least the loss of an honest and rugged animal, which only puts us right back to square one again. In covering every conceivable subject under the sun, we’ve crossed bridge-after-bridge, and we’ve successfully made it across every item up to this point, except one. Because there is still another way to lose our precious dogs, and that is by breeding them wrong and re-mixing the genes in such a way as you breed all of the quality right out of what you came so far to get. Which brings us to the point of my final chapter: “The Art of Breeding Dogs.”
If you really want to keep what you love “alive” for the long haul, then you need to learn how to breed them right so you don’t lose what you love in the next generation. You see, that is exactly what most people do when they breed their dogs: they throw everything they loved about their dog away, and this is because most people have exactly the wrong idea as to why we should breed these dogs. Most people think breeding dogs is some kind of “genetic crapshoot,” where they’re trying to “cross this to that,” thinking that somehow they will hit the jackpot and get the biggest freak of nature possible. Wrong! What they’ll do nearly every single time is breed all of the consistency and quality right out of their dogs.
What people who know what they’re doing strive for in their breedings is to get consistent and dependable results, not to crapshoot or play guessing games. I mean, just stop for a minute and think about the different breeds of dog in general. We all know that the basic fundamental of breeding true to "type" is that (for example) if we want to get pit bulls then we need to breed pit bulls to pit bulls. If we want to get German shepherds then we need to breed German shepherds to German shepherds. If we want to get Jack Russells, then we need to breed Jack Russells to Jack Russells. Now this may seem obvious, but I’ve got a curve ball coming, so pay attention here.
You see, out of all the possible “breed types” there are to breed to in this world, any serious breeder is going to ignore all of the other breed types except the one that applies to him. Because the fact is, if a breeder starts breeding his purebred dogs to other breeds of dogs, meaning any old breed type with a wanton disregard for keeping the breed pure, well then he’s going to have no idea what the hell is going to happen in the produced offspring. If you breed German shepherds to bulldogs, what the hell are you going to get? If you breed Jack Russells to Dobermans, what the hell are you going to get? If any purebred breeder of dogs tries to do something like this with one purebred breed type, and tries to mix it with another purebred breed type, he will have essentially taken all of those years of genetic dove-tailing and isolation (that created the purebred breed to begin with) and he will have thrown all of these isolated genes away by scrambling them up again in breeding to an totally different breed type. This is why such mix-bred dogs are called MUTTS, and this is why mutts have no value—precisely because they no longer have any particular specialization—and precisely because they are now so genetically-scrambled that they won’t be able to reproduce “whatever they are” consistently and dependably. Folks, this is exactly why purebred breeds cost money while mix-bred mutts are given away for free: only the purebred dogs can produce consistently-dependable results when they’re interbred.
It takes years and years of selective breeding just to create a “breed type” to begin with—and so to dump some new and unrelated breed’s genetics into the gene pool is like dropping a turd into a bowl of punch—it ruins all of the previous work and creativity and it pollutes the purity and excellence of the sacred mix with “unwanted matter.” Well, guess what folks, it works the exact same way with bloodlines within a breed type too. You see, bloodlines within a breed type are nothing but the next step in the process of genetic refinement. Just as you want to get the same breed 'type' every time when you mate your dogs, well so too do you want to get the same traits (when you begin to get serious about your breedings) every time within that breed type when you mate your dogs. You see, even within the same breed type, there are still a vast disparity of "traits, tendencies, and styles" that express themselves! We all know that just because you have two pit bulls doesn’t mean they carry anywhere near the exact same traits!
Dogs even of the same breed type don’t all have the same temper, they don’t have the same looks, nor do they all have same abilities and attributes in any way whatsoever. There are tens of thousands of different looks, personalities, sizes, strengths, weakness, performance capabilities, etc., even within the same breed 'type' of the pit bull terrier breed. Therefore, when people just breed any old pit bull to any old pit bull, what they do is basically create mutts within the breed type. That is what 99% of all people who have these dogs simply don’t understand when they breed their dogs, is that breeding dogs even within a “breed type” takes still more genetic refinement and specialization—which can only happen through a dedicated linebreeding program. You see, by “mixing bloodlines” instead, more often than not what most people produce are nothing but undependable mutts as opposed to the “hybrid vigor” they think they’re going to get with their “crosses.” (Yes, I understand that some crosses do produce well, which I will get into later, but most of them do not.)
You see, just as you must breed the same breed to the same breed—in order to continue to be able to get the same breed of dog on a dependable basis—so too must you breed the same bloodline to the same bloodline in order to get the same specific characteristics within that breed type on a dependable basis. Breeding top quality dogs is all about consistently preserving unique, excellent traits through the genetic dove-tailing of linebreeding, it is not about “crapshooting for excellent traits” with a bunch of senseless gene-scrambling outcrosses. Now, again, this doesn’t mean an occasional outcross doesn’t have its place, it can and it does; but what this means is that any outcrosses considered need to be made intelligently and sparingly, not as a matter of routine. Linebreeding is always any serious breeder’s mainstay, and outcrossing is always the exception, not the other way around.
RevelationWith this in mind, when you have raised, schooled, evaluated, tested, and won (or lost game) with your own personal best dog, if you want to keep those qualities he has alive for the next generation what sense does it make to “outcross” this dog’s genes away? Realize that by introducing new genes you decrease the chances of ever having another dog “like him” again. Now if you don’t think much of your dog to begin with, and are trying to breed him to something you think more of, then why breed the dog at all and make more of what you “don’t think much” of? Too many people breed dogs just to breed dogs, but the only reason a good breeder breeds a pair of dogs is to make more of what he likes. Therefore, when you set out to “make more of what you like,” the best way to accomplish this is with a goal and a logical plan, not by taking chances or by playing guessing games. Well, the “perfect fighting dog” is your goal and a linebreeding program around him is your game-plan to preserve that goal. This strategy is the only way a person will succeed as a breeder over the long haul. Flash-in-the-pan crosses come and go, but only through a linebreeding program will a breeding enterprise stand the test of time.
Okay, so you have decided to build a linebreeding program around your favorite dog, and your next decision involves which supporting player to use. If your dog is already linebred then you pretty much should know what to do, and that is breed him to more like-bred individuals who carry his specific traits. However, if your dog is himself somewhat mix-bred, then he is unlikely to be a consistent producer. Yet this is not always the case. Cheer-up though, because even if your dog is not a truly prepotent animal himself, you can still create a consistent line by forming a linebreeding program around him.
Note: One of the key things to pay close attention to as a breeder is the overall quality of the litter that any good dog comes from. Even if a dog is himself a great individual, if his overall litter was lousy then unfortunately that dog will therefore tend to produce lousy overall. Why? Because you get what the average of your dog’s gene pool is when you breed him. You don’t get what the “best” or the “worst” individuals are, on average—what you get are the average dogs in his gene pool turn out like, on average. Aces won’t consistently produce aces, and bums won’t consistently produce bums, they will produce what most of what’s behind them is actually like.
What all dogs will produce “on average” is going to be what the average of their gene pool is like. By definition. This is why it is so important to know what most of the dogs in your dog’s whole litter were like, and also to know what all of the dogs in his parents’ litters were like, so that you may get an overall “whole average profile” in your mind’s eye as to what your own dog is genetically, and therefore should produce genetically. This basic principle is why a lousy bum dog (who happens to come from an otherwise excellent litter, bred off excellent parents, who likewise were out of excellent litters) will invariably out-produce a Grand Champion (who happens to come from a lousy litter, bred off mediocre parents, who likewise were out of lousy/mediocre litters). You see, the lousy bum is the exception, where most of his gene pool is excellent—while the Grand Champion is the exception, where most of his gene pool is lousy. Therefore, since each dog is “the exception” for his own particular line, he will simply go back to producing what “the average” of his gene pool is. This is why the above bum will produce excellence “on average” while the Grand Champion will produce poorly “on average.”
You see, the careful evaluation of breeding potential is exactly the opposite of the careful evaluation of match potential. With a match dog, all that matters is the answer to the question, “Is this particular dog good enough to win?” What his parents were like doesn’t matter, and what his litter was like doesn’t matter. The only question that matters to a match dog is does this dog have what it takes to win? His parents can’t help him, his pedigree can’t help him, and his littermates can’t help him.
By contrast, when you breed dogs, the irony is it is exactly the opposite which holds true. How “that particular” dog is as an individual doesn’t matter anywhere near as much toward “how he produces pups” compared to how consistently-good is his overall gene pool. If you know everything about a dog’s littermates, as well as his parents, as well as his parents’ littermates, you can tell a lot more about how that particular dog will produce than if you only know about “just him.” Therefore, before you decide to base your yard around any dog, or before you start loading-up on any new dog introduced into your program, it pays to get to know as much as you can about all of the strengths, weaknesses, and consistent propensities of that dog’s entire genetic profile (brothers, sisters, parents, parents’ siblings) before you commence.
Whatever it is that you like about your dog (or dogs) is simply what you want to produce consistently in your forthcoming pups and litters, to duplicate more of these quality animals for the next time around, and possibly to improve on their weak points. Therefore, choosing dogs to breed that not only have these traits themselves, but whose littermates and parents carried these traits also, simply increases your odds of getting more dogs like this in your breedings. Conversely, if your dog doesn’t have those traits at all, and nothing in his background carried those traits either, then your odds of getting the traits you desire using such a dog in your program is virtually non-existent. I mean really, breeding dogs is just about basic logic.
In fact, it can help visually if you look at your dog’s entire gene pool as a massive deck of cards: the more aces you put in your “genetic deck,” the more likely you will be able to draw an ace back out of that deck. However, the more twos and threes you put in your deck, why then the more twos and threes you’re likely to pull back out. It’s really about that simple. And, yes, you can pull both an ace and a two out of the same deck, as well as a joker or two for that matter :D
Just because you happen to pull a joker or a two out of your deck doesn’t mean the whole deck is bad (every deck has them!), it just means there are random variables to be found in any “genetic deck” of cards (genes). The key to getting consistency is to decrease your variables. Again this is basic logic. You want to pull your twos and threes out of your deck, when you see them, and you want to put your aces, kings and queens back in when you see them. With this kind of genetic management and vigilance repeated over time, you can eventually get virtually a “whole deck” of dog genes that can be reliably-depended upon to throw aces, kings, and queens (or at least “high cards”) every time you breed them. You simply have to learn to play your cards right ;)
With that visual in mind, the more dogs you put into your breedings that have “the perfect style” and live up to your ideals, the more of those kind of dogs you’re likely to get back out when you make your breedings. The only additional factor you must use to your advantage in breeding dogs is making sure those dogs you do use are of the same basic bloodline and then linebreed on the star(s) of that line. If the dog you just won with (or even lost game with) is the ideal dog to you then you can build a yard around him. If he is just a decent or average dog, then you may (or may not) want to breed him. But beware of what you call average.
Another thing to keep in mind that some “average” dogs may have certain outstanding abilities! For instance, a particular dog might have average air, average mouth, and not much of a style—but he may have an incredible amount of body strength and tenacity. If he’s from a lot of dogs like this, you can linebreed around this dog so you can keep pockets of specific traits on your yard as well. For instance, my Coca Cola bitch was just an average dog in intelligence, she had below average air, and she was one-dimensional. Because she had some glaring flaws, her original owner sold her for cheap because (to him) she didn’t have “match ability.” Well, I realized that Coca Cola wasn’t a complete match dog, but I also saw that she was only 26 lb and was able to spot a sister to a Champion 4 lb of weight and drive her all over the pit! So to me, while Coca Cola was never able to get in there and do anything, I did see that her body strength and vicious tenacity were absolutely outstanding. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and Coca Cola proved to be a tremendous producer for me, and is behind more Grand Champions, Champions, and winners than any dog her prior owner decided to keep.
I merely linebred Coca Cola to individuals of her family that had the traits she was missing (air, brains, defense), and I got some complete and absolutely tremendous dogs off of Coca Cola. So pay attention to your “average” dogs too in order that you don’t miss some truly great traits they may have! In fact, when you start to form your own family around a key individual dog, you will notice that certain breeding combinations carry certain strengths/weaknesses, while other combinations carry exactly the opposite strengths/weaknesses. For example, again within my own bloodline, my Poncho/Screamer dogs consistently throw tremendous stamina and staying power, but not much in the way of mouth, while my Poncho/Coca Cola dogs produce unbelievable body strength and good mouth, but not much air or staying power. Therefore, breeding these two sub-families together, within the family, would be a third step I would have to make to get “the perfect dog” again. (As you progress along in your own program, you will notice the same kinds of thing happen with your own particular breeding combinations.)
What I am trying to get at is you cannot realistically believe you will get 100% complete and flawless animals “every time you breed” at any point in your breeding career. One sub-family may carry x, y, and z strengths ... but a, b, and c weaknesses ... while another sub-family may carry a, b, and c strengths ... but x, y, and z weaknesses. So don’t necessarily throw dogs out of your program that aren’t perfect, if they still have a few solid and wonderful traits (especially if two related dogs have certain traits that will bridge the other's weaknesses), you can very often mix them together and once achieve “the whole package” again. You can’t always get aces in your hand when you play cards, but as long as you get mostly “high cards” you’re doing all right. For instance, you may produce a dog that wins (or even loses) in 2:20 but can’t be brought out again. Just because he wasn’t able to become a 9xW doesn’t mean he isn’t a damned good dog. You may not funnel all of your future breedings through this dog, but if you have a monster-mouth bitch in heat, who’s short on air, you might get a litter of 100% complete animals by breeding her to your 2:20 stud—especially if they are closely-related.
What I am trying to get at is, your career as a breeder is a life-long pursuit, it can never be defined by a single breeding. Each breeding you make is a step, hopefully a step in the right direction toward your goal, which again is your ideal of the perfect performance dog. Like driving a car though, just because you are initially pointed in the right direction doesn’t mean you can take your hands off the wheel and stop steering. If you want to get to where you’re going, you will always have to steer your vehicle to the left a little bit, to the right a little bit, and sometimes you might make a wrong turn and have to double-back and try a different route. You don’t just take your hands off the wheel and floor the throttle or you’ll wind up a wreck, and by this same token your dogs will wind up a “genetic wreck” too if you don’t continuously evaluate each generation carefully and completely. However, again as with driving, the more you do it the more it becomes second nature to you. Well, the more generations into your breeding program you get, and the more you really truly know about each dog in the litter (as well as the whole overall average of that litter), the more you will just “know” and automatically be able to compute in your mind which direction to take each dog in the next step of your program.
Again, by keeping “what you like best” in a performance dog as your Guiding Light, and by line- and inbreeding off of a small group of family-bred dogs that carry these traits (or at least essential key components of these traits), the more and more consistently you will start seeing your results become as you blend and re-blend your dogs together in your matings, in each successive generation. In fact, as stated by renowned German shorthair pointer breeder, Gary Hutchison (of WestWind GSP), who paraphrased Dr. Jerold S. Bell in a tremendous article featured in Gundog Magazine, “Inbreeding significantly increases homozygosity, and therefore uniformity within a litter. One of the best methods of evaluating how successful a linebreeding has been is to gauge the similarity of the littermates as compared with pups of other litters with similar pedigrees. Considerable similarity among littermates tells the breeder the genes have “nicked” or paired together as anticipated. The resulting pups will likely be able to pass these genes to the next generation.”
Homozygosity = sameness. Heterozygosity = differentness.
When you linebreed your dogs, you are trying to get “sameness” in your results (homozygosity). You don’t want mixed results when you breed, you want consistent results. You also want to harness and capture the traits that the dog being linebred-on is renowned for! For instance, the people who linebreed Zebo dogs are trying to get hellafide mouth and power, consistently and dependably, in their linebreeding efforts, because the Flagship Animal (Zebo) was known for these traits. In linebreeding on Zebo dogs, what the intelligent breeder is paying attention to is trying to dovetail his results to get “the same thing every time” in his breedings: badass chest dogs with heavy mouth. The important thing to remember is this goal! If you get a litter of "all black dogs that look like Zebo," color-wise, but not a single one can bust a grape, ability-wise, do you really have “Zebo dogs?” By contrast, if all the dogs come out looking like Zebo ... and performing like Zebo ... then you have made a successful linebreeding and have now harnessed genetic prepotency! Remember, there will always be particular dogs with any bloodline that will simply be prepotent (meaning exceptionally high-percentage producers), and there will always be dogs within that line that will not be prepotent (meaning their produced offspring will be less consistent). This truth applies with any line. Well, clearly what you want to do is continuously funnel your future breedings only through the most consistent, dependable producers, because if you fail to adhere to this standard you will quickly breed yourself into a yardful of inconsistent junk.
If you are linebreeding your dogs and are getting mixed results, then one (or both) individuals are simply not prepotent animals in their ability to throw the desired end. For instance, when I bred dogs for a living I used to breed my Poncho dogs to be lightning-fast, highly-intelligent athletes that figure you out and break you down over time. If I came up with a slow, dopey dog—or if I had a good dog that (for whatever reason) was throwing slow, dopey dogs—I don’t care how that dog looked “on paper”—or what he was himself—if that dog couldn’t consistently reproduce the defining characteristics of my bloodline, then he had no place in my program. Doesn’t mean I abused the dog or mistreated him, it means I simply had to take him off of my breeding list.
However, when I saw an individual dog (or, even better, a particular genetic combination) that consistently and dependably threw the traits that I enjoyed and desired to see in several individual animals they produced, then I would be sure to make it my business to funnel all of my (or most of my) future breeding efforts through this individual, or especially through basic genetic combinations that would consistently and dependably reproduce such individuals. In breeding dogs, this is called “The Funnel Effect,” where a man takes the entire breeding direction of his bloodline down and funnels it through certain particular animals (or breeding combinations) that prepotently throw those certain traits that said man strives for. This is when bloodline breeding becomes interesting!
This is also why two people who have two groups of dogs down from what looks like the same bloodline “on paper” can actually have dramatically-different dogs in caliber and quality in the pit. I may have bred my Poncho dogs for extreme speed, athleticism, intelligence, and a head style—yet I know of other people in the past who have bought some my dogs, who started looking for (and breeding for!) entirely different traits than what I sought when creating my bloodline. Suppose these other fellows do not have my eye, nor my standards ... or even suppose one or two may have even better standards! Still, in either case, within a few short generations down the down “the genetic road” we all might (and in all probability will) have completely different dogs (in looks and in abilities) than what we all started with.
This kind of disparity in standards, and selection methods, is how two different breeders of the same bloodline, down from the same Flagship Dog, can eventually produce completely different results in their respective breeding efforts, over time. In another example, two people can buy two littermate Frisco bitches ... but make different breeding choices with them ... and one guy can wind-up with Frisco dogs that can’t bust a grape, while the other man can have bone-crushing pit artists more in line with the original ideal that formulated the effort to breed the Frisco bloodline to begin with. Same thing with Zebo dogs, or my dogs, or any other bloodline that you choose to get. Your own unique, individual likes and dislikes, talents and shortcomings in your judgement, will eventually become the “stamp” of your own bloodline, good or bad. That is the fun of breeding and that is also why there is the responsibility of breeding dogs well, carefully, and thoughtfully. The following article, written by my friend TFX, shall serve to illustrate how an entire breed can be taken in the wrong direction, by genetic mismanagement, when it had previously been taken to unprecedented heights through impeccable genetic management. The subject of this piece is the bloodhound, but this man is also a 20-year bulldog man with his own bloodline also: Improving The Bloodhound (Up top on this Thread in Post #3).
What TFX writes about concerning the fall (and potential resurrection) of the bloodhound rings true for any working breed: (1) form follows function, (2) linebreeding is the only way to harness consistent genetic excellence, and (3) scatter-breeding and/or not utilizing true working representatives of any breed type is the way to drive any breed’s unique qualities into extinction. And yet 9,999 out of any 10,000 people who breed dogs do not follow a bloodline, they do not linebreed off of the best individuals within their line, and they do not even breed for the defining working characteristics of their preferred breed type. It is sad but it is true. One of the reasons people don’t line- and inbreed off of great dogs is because of the myth that inbreeding is “bad.” They lament all of the horror stories they have heard about health problems, or temperament problems, and yet they don’t realize the tremendous potential of in- and linebreeding. When faults are produced, you can't blame the inbreeding, you can only blame your poor selection of which dogs you inbred on! (Speaking of faults when family breeding, how do we deal with them?)
When Flaws Pop UpRegardless of how carefully you try to be when you line- and inbreed your dogs, eventually flaws will pop up. These flaws can be either mental or physical, or they can be health-related, or any combination of such flaws, but flaws can and will pop up any time when you family-breed any group of dogs for awhile. Many people incorrectly believe that this is the time to “outcross,” and while in some cases it can be, in other cases the dogs can still be genetically salvaged through a principle I coined called “Genetic Redirection.” In fact, dealing with faults is how a good breeder has the chance to show his real talents. Again, I quote the previous breeder: “When an undesirable trait is ‘unmasked’ the breeder who does his breed a real service is the one that stays with his line long enough to rid it of the undesirable trait. By controlling which specimens within their line are used for breeding in succeeding generations they can eliminate the undesirable trait. Once the recessive gene is removed it can never again affect the breeder’s line. Inbreeding doesn’t ‘cause’ good genes to mutate into bad genes, it merely increases the likelihood that (bad genes) will be displayed.”
Inbreeding simply dovetails and concentrates genetics. This dovetailing and concentrating is done for no other reason than to increase likelihoods. This means that you have increased the likelihood of getting both the good aspects as well as the bad aspects of the line you are working with (or the Flagship Dog you have just begun to work with). Do not lose heart when bad traits pop up, this is normal. And do not listen to the many immature and foolish dogmen out there who like to talk trash if they happen to get a pup from a breeder that has a few bad traits—this is just a part of life and part of line- and inbreeding.
Sometimes when you breed closely, you dovetail and concentrate all of the “bad” genetics into an individual; yet sometimes you dovetail and concentrate all of the desired genetics into an individual as well. When all the bad traits come out in an individual, just get rid of it. If all the dogs in the litter come out lousy, this doesn't mean “the tool of inbreeding” is bad, it means the dogs you used were bad. By contrast, when you inbreed and you get exceptional quality animals across the board, you know that (quite literally) you are now dealing with “genetic gold,” and it is here where you should drop anchor and build your bloodline! If you get some individuals that are exceptional, with a few bad eggs, you merely funnel your future efforts through the good individual while ceasing any future breeding efforts through the flawed individuals. However, you also have to be able to intelligently discern what is truly good from what is truly bad. If you breed-up a 9xW ace that had “the flaw” of a little demodectic mange as a puppy, and you bypass breeding him because of this nothing-flaw, and choose instead to breed to his game bum brother who couldn’t whip a puppy, “because he had no mange,” then you have simply lost your way.
As Dr. Bell said in his own writings: “Every breeder is fighting ‘the drag of the breed,’ which is the tendency for all animals to breed back toward mediocrity. Unsuccessful breeders overlook an animal that has a great trait because it also has a minor fault in favor of an animal that has no faults but no great traits. Successful breeders use specimens within their line that have at least one truly great trait and breed them with specimens that in turn are great where the other dog is weak. In so doing it is possible to linebreed offspring that are better than both the sire and the dame. The resulting specimens in turn can pass the great traits on to the next generation, unlike the F1 hybrid (outcross) animal that results from outcrossing to get the same traits.”
To show an example of how foolish people let true greatness slip through their hands, due to a retarded understanding of what they're supposed to be doing, let us consider the genetic foolishness of what happened with the great CH Robert T Jr. Here was a a 4xW Champion (who beat four 4xWs), and yet he never got bred by his ignorant owner because Robert T “had mange on his feet.” Here was a dog that won over $100,000 in purse money for his owner, who stopped four 4xWs from making Grand Champion, but yet who had an owner who lacked the sense as a breeder to “make more dogs like that” ... so he could win more money like that! This man had a great eye for a match dog, but yet was an utter fool when it came to breeding dogs ... literally, he bought (but never actually bred) every great dog he had. And it was precisely through his utter ignorance of breeding dogs (placing more value on Robert T's “mangy feet” than on his incredible and unbeatable head style) that this man let that kind of unbelievable genetic ability slip through his fingers ... all over a little hair loss. I am sorry, but this is simply retarded. Keep in mind that this was over 20 years ago ... and that same man who campaigned CH Robert T Jr. still has never had a dog like him since. Why is that? Well, it is simply because he had no sense as a breeder. He would select away from using any super dog, just over a minor irrelevant flaw, and would instead choose to breed to “flawless” dogs, in other words dogs with “no faults” but who really weren’t much good at their jobs.
Folks, you need to keep your eye on the ball when you continue to breed your family of dogs. “Flawless” mediocre dogs are not what you’re trying to breed for—truly excellent pit dogs is what you’re trying to breed for. For example, if we draw a parallel of not breeding to Robert T. Jr. over mangy feet, if I were breeding for intelligence in human beings, that would be tantamount to my overlooking breeding to Albert Einstein ... and instead breeding to his idiot brother ... only because the brother had “better hair” and “better skin“ than Albert. The smart man who is breeding for human intelligence will be ignoring Einstein’s “hair” and breeding to him because of his intelligence. Well, it works the same way with these dogs: if you want to keep great traits alive, then you need to breed for those great traits. You breed for great traits by using individuals who came from them, who have these traits themselves, and who repeatedly prove to produce these traits in their pups.
“Not breeding to Albert Einstein” is exactly how foolish this man was in not breeding to CH Robert T Jr., but instead choosing to breed to dogs that couldn’t whip one side of Robert T, all because these other dogs didn’t have the flaw of “mangy feet.” This is an utterly clueless way to breed dogs, yet you will see many people do this time and again. To give you an idea of what this man threw away, genetically, over the condition of mangy feet, CH Robert T Jr. (4xW) not only was an absolutely ace head dog, but he was also sired by the original GR CH Robert T (9xW, 1xL), who was considered the best head dog that ever lived. The original Robert T. beat two Grand Champions and three Champions. Had this man obtained for himself a few bitches similar to Robert T, and who possessed a head style like both Robert Ts ... and then interbred them together ... that man could have built himself a monument of excellence. Hell, if the mange bothered this man, he could have worked on removing those genes in the forthcoming generations, while still giving himself the opportunity to keep the incredible abilities of these two dogs alive on his yard. But that is not what he did; instead be bred the original Robert T to unrelated bitches, and he didn't breed Robert T. Jr. at all. And such “breeding stupidity” is how many great dogs and great bloodlines go by the wayside, is precisely when fools who didn’t have the skill to breed these great dogs in the first place get their hands on them ... and either breed all of the quality right out of what they get ... or (worse) make decisions not to breed to their great dogs over trivial faults, while completely overlooking their truly outstanding abilities. Don’t let this happen to you!
Remember this: A significant fault is only one which impairs a dog to be able to do his job. Anything lessis a “trivial” fault. Keep your eye on the ball, and that ball is remembering the ability to win with a flawless performance is the most important genetic strength to have.
It is not a bulldog’s job to be “mange free” it is a bulldog’s job to win. Yes, of course you do want to weed-out genetic faults from your dogs when they pop up, but you never want to do it at the expense of true excellence. So yeah, if you some mediocre nothing mutt with mange, I agree don’t bother breeding that dog. But the reason isn't the mange, it's because he has nothing compelling about him as an athlete to make you overlook his faults. But if you really do have an ace, or a truly excellent dog with “a minor fault,” who cares? Breed your excellent dogs and your yard will remain excellent for the next generation. You can worry about and weed-out the trivial faults in the subsequent generations, or if they're minor enough don't worry about them at all. But if you overlook true pit excellence in favor of breeding mediocre dogs “with no faults,” I promise that you will wind up with a bunch of mediocre shit on your yard ... that may do well in “conformation shows” ... but you’d better believe they will get run over out there in top competition.
On the other hand, every now and then you will get ALL of the excellent genetics funneled into a particular individual. From his nose to his toes conformationally, to his ability to win, every now and then you will produce a dog that is simply perfecto. If that ever happens to you, treasure this individual, because he will mark a New Era on your yard and in your bloodline. From that point on, you will now be moving forward and breeding everything you got based on this individual, especially if his is closely-bred. And if you keep this up, and continuously build and re-direct your program around such a dogs, you will simply be able to breed great dogs for as long as you live. So watch for such individuals (and whole litters) as you continue forward as a breeder. You might just happen to do a particular linebreeding one day, where all of the good genetics obtain across the board throughout the whole litter—and when this happens you know in your bones that you are dealing with GENETIC GOLD and not just a mere fluke in “an individual.” If you ever see true uniform genetic excellence obtain throughout an entire litter, then you literally have yourself a goldmine of opportunity with across-the-board harnessed genetic excellence. So whatever you do, don’t louse it up by “crossing” something like this out. Instead, preserve it by again building a linebreeding program around this new combination. You see, while your average “unsuccessful” breeder is worrying about getting “a” good dog, you should be forever worrying and striving to create good whole litters. While you will hear and see dozens of fools online discuss the trivialities “percentage blood” on paper pedigrees, what you as an intelligent breeder should forever be striving for is uniform excellence across the board in your litters. Again, as this other breeder confirmed: “The percent blood of immediate ancestors is relatively easy to estimate but not that important. Homozygosity (uniform excellence in a litter) is far more important in determining (litter quality).”
This is the difference between “talking paper” and talking dogs. You see, most people talk about “percentage Bolio,” or “percentage Chinaman,” or “percentage whatever” in the pedigrees of their breedings, but this really means nothing. Homozygosity (or its lack) is what means the world to your linebreeding program. Again homozygosity = sameness. The question you need to ask yourself as a breeder is, do you really have “sameness” in your breedings, as in do you have a high-percentage of pups that turned out exactly like what your goal was to begin with, producing across-the-board genetic excellence? Or do you in fact have heterozygosity (differentness) in your litter, which means some good dogs and some lousy dogs? Or, do you in fact have (what we all hope never to get in our breedings and that is) an entire litterful of garbage?
Most people breeding dogs get entire littersful of garbage, which is why you will always see them having to give their pups away for $200-$300. Only the former goal (namely across-the-board genetic excellence) is what a true bloodline breeder should strive for ... but a man has got to know how to achieve this, because YES it involves skill and technique! I was blessed that Mr. Hollingsworth taught me this skill many years ago, to breed for good whole litters, and not just good individual dogs. A truly good breeder starts with his perfect dog, he buys a few like-bred, like-performing key supporting brood bitches (or males, if the “perfect dog” happens to be a bitch), and then the intelligent breeder forms his linebreeding program around these animals. No matter how many years go by, the breeding goal remains the same: trying to harness and cultivate those great traits that make these dogs perfect in his eyes. Yes, this takes years of dedication, but it is also what separates the truly long-term, dedicated breeder from the multitude of “casual fanciers” who really aren’t all that committed to the breed.
The truly dedicated bloodline breeder attempting to set his own standard is very rare, while “casual fanciers” who have no true core values are found literally everywhere. And you can see truth this in the hundreds of litters of mix-bred, hodge-podge, unrelated crap that most people offer for sale in the community. On the other end of the spectrum, you have “paper breeders,” who breed everything they do to be “tight,” but yet they are not maintaining any kind of physical performance excellence to go along with it. Neither method is used by the serious breeder; these are simply the polar-opposite breeding blunders made by the common dogman who doesn't know how to breed dogs. But that is not why you bought this book (or joined this online community), to be a common dogman, is it? You bought this book or joined this community to rise above the common level. Well, in order to rise above and stand out as a breeder, you first have to have a good eye for a dog, and then you have to have a true sense of purpose in what you're breeding your dogs for. That “purpose” should be nothing but the perpetual goal of getting all-uniform genetic excellence in your breedings, where the dogs produced repeatedly and consistently perform at the level (and employ the style) that you want and hope they do.
It is a simple fact that no one who makes a bunch of senseless crosses can reasonably expect to get consistent “sameness” from “differentness”; this is just logically absurd. Yet most people don't think of it that way. The simple truth is, you can only reasonably expect to get sameness from sameness, which is why if you stick to using dogs of the same style, bred off the same basic genes and genetic combinations, and then if you forever evaluate your produced offspring ... funneling and interbreeding your future generations through its best individuals .... continuously directing the results toward your envisioned goal and/or highest-percentage litters ... you will eventually get a bloodline of dogs that can consistently and reliably be depended on to produce your goal for you every time. It’s really that simple.
I will now conclude this article with a quote from Mr. Hutchison followed by a sample of a few key breeding patterns you can use to good effect: “Successful linebreeding is a long and arduous task; one that requires a lifetime’s commitment to a particular line of dogs. We have great respect for the few breeders of German shorthairs who successfully developed and perpetuated their particular line of GSPs in the past. Even if we don’t have a single dog from their line in our pedigrees we have studied their breeding patterns and, over the years, developed a deep appreciation for their work.”
Breeding PatternsBefore we go, we you will notice that this man spoke of “breeding patterns,” and indeed if you know how to read a pedigree you will, time and again, see the same breeding patterns replicated over and over again by every successful breeder who has ever bred dogs. Breeding patterns can be seen in “paper pedigrees” but to a person who understands what he’s looking at, the information goes much deeper, because the dogs in the pedigrees should also be upholding the performance standards the intensive program is trying to set. The best way to describe a breeding pattern in a pedigree would be to say that the key dogs of the bloodline are placed in the same slots in the pedigree, so that they influence the results in a deliberate and consistent way. But this can only happen if the dogs being stuck in these “slots” are worthy of the effort!
Well, what does that mean? It really boils down to probability and mathematics. Each slot in the pedigree has a “percentage chance” of influencing the produced pups. Each parent, for example, influences the pups by a 50% probability (at least on paper). Each grandparent influences by 25% (again, on paper). But in reality, a truly prepotent brood dog will (for whatever reason) carry a greater percentage influence factor, while a dog that is not prepotent will fail to carry any influence (again, for whatever reason).
Well, when you discover that you have a truly prepotent animal, when you stick him in a “slot” on the pedigree tree he puts a prepotent “spin” on things. While in theory any sire has only a 50% chance to influence the pups, the truth is certain studs throw “themselves” into their offspring, 60-, 70-, 80% of the time. When you see a dog who produces like this, he is showing himself to be prepotent. (It works the same way with a prepotent brood bitch.) Therefore, the more you load your pedigree up with these prepotent individuals, especially when you interbreed them with other prepotent individuals of the same family, the more control you have over what you are going to get. The power of linebreeding will begin to show itself when you move further into each successive generation of your program, because you will be able to repeatedly load-up on more-and-more prepotent dogs, thus minimizing the effect of any unwanted dogs. So let’s take a look at a common breeding pattern, the double-grandsire breeding, to show how this works. A double-grandsire breeding is one where you pair a half-sister to a half brother, who thereby share either the same mother or the same father, thus doubling-up on that key dog or bitch. Below is an example of a double-granddaughter breeding I did back in 1999. What makes this breeding interesting is that I doubled-up on my key stud dog Poncho by breeding a son of his to a daughter of his, yet on the right side you can also see that not only did this breeding double-up on Poncho, but it quadrupled-up on the Hollingsworth blood behind all 4 grandparents, leaving the genetic influence of both elemental components at 50%.
This breeding above represents some of my own initial efforts as a breeder. If you take a look at the indivdual parents, Thunder and Rosey, the green lettering of the “Poncho” may make it seem like my initial goal when I bred them, as individuals, was to concentrate on on Poncho, but the truth is I was trying to preserve the Hollingsworth bloodline by this effort, because the two dogs I used in this breeding carried the Hollingsworth influence! This is where you can't just follow the “paper,” you have to follow the physical reality (traits) that the dogs you're using carry! In this case, the genetic dominance of the wall of Hollingsworth dogs behind Poncho, (Red Sonja and Little Bootie) was so heavy it would not be denied in this breeding—and the fact that both Thunder and Rosey were so strongly influenced by their Hollingsworth blood themselves made it a cinch. This is why every single dog in the breeding (including Sassy herself) came out as quintessential “Hollingsworth dogs,” even though “on paper” this breeding was “double-Poncho” too.
Key Point: On paper, Sassy was as much “50% Poncho” as she was “50% Hollingsworth,” but in the real world Sassy was for all intent and purposes a full-blooded Hollingsworth dog—from her long beautiful ears to her beautiful body and placid temper. Sassy proved to be a great, game old brood bitch, but she was “a Hollingsworth dog” genetically, and not a Poncho dog in the least. This is exactly why a person should not pay attention to paperwork as much as they should pay attention to their living dogs. There are probably a thousand people who would look at Sassy‘s “papers” and call her “a double-Poncho dog,” but I look at Sassy, as her breeder, and call her a quadruple-Hollingsworth dog. She is absolutely nothing like Poncho, and has nowhere near his speed or intelligence. What Sassy is is an absolutely gorgeous animal, a rock-solid bitch in her own right, and I consider her to be an extremely valuable dog. But the points I am making here are two: 1) You can’t just look at your paperwork, because the fact is the produced dogs you are trying to make can “pull” from sides of the pedigrees you weren’t planning on; and 2) even though a pup may not come out from the side of the pedigree you had planned, it can still be a valuable and important animal to your program, and can still be genetically-redirected further still. Sassy was simply 50% Hollingsworth too and that is what she “pulled” from. But the story isn’t over yet ...
Genetic Re-DirectionWhile on the subject of the various breeding patterns and genetic combinations that have proven time and again to be successful, it is important to keep the concept of “Genetic Re-Direction” in mind. Genetic re-direction is a term I coined several years ago to describe the “steering” effect we must always do when we breed dogs. You might remember the analogy to driving I gave previously, where I said that even if you are driving a car and are pointed in the right direction, you still have to steer the car as you continue driving forward, otherwise you will quickly go off course. So too, even if you have a Flagship Dog who embodies your ideals as the perfect animal, you will still have to continuously breed this dog, and the dogs you get off him, in the right direction—toward your original goals—otherwise you will likewise quickly go off course. The “right direction” is either their basic genetic composition, physical performance, or (preferably) both.
All right, so let’s consider the art of genetic re-direction as it applies to Sassy’s pedigree on the previous page and how it can be manipulated. When I created Sassy, I had already set into motion a course of “direction” so heavy in the direction of the Hollingsworth blood (which is itself tremendously prepotent) that just one double-breeding on Poncho was not enough of a genetic influence to totally change course and “make more Poncho dogs,” when I had twice as much Hollingsworth influence behind her. What I did was make another litter of Hollingsworth dogs (and it was a good litter too!). But I wanted Poncho dogs, so I made another breeding, using Sassy later in her life, to once again try to re-direct my bloodline back in the direction of where I wanted it to go: towards Poncho.
By using the principle of Genetic Re-Direction, both on paper and in physical traits, I bred the heavy-Hollingsworth Sassy to the heavy-CH Hammer-bred Silverback. Not only was I triple-breeding on Poncho (via his sister Missy), but the topside of Silverback is also purebred CH Hammer (where Sassy was purebred Hollingsworth), which in essence re-created the original Hammer/Hollingsworth combo that produced Poncho’s litter to begin with. In re-directing the heavy-Hollingsworth influence of Sassy back to a heavy-Hammer dog like Silverback, I not only “refreshed” my original Hammer/Hollingsworth foundational breeding “on paper,” but I likewise triple-bred on the littermates of that breeding by using a direct son of Poncho’s sister Missy over a double-bred Poncho bitch in Sassy. This time, the genetic spin I was looking for obtained, and I was successfully able to turn my genetic course around from continuing in the Hollingsworth direction, and instead was able to re-direct it back toward my preferred course, which is linebreeding on Poncho and Missy. I had loaded-up on the Hammer side of my genetic components in Silverback on one side of my yard, and I had loaded-up on the Hollingsworth side of my genetic components on the other side of my yard in Sassy, and so I once again was able to “reinvent the wheel” by blending them together, and I got one little pup out of the 10-year-old Sassy that turned out to be a spittin’ image of Poncho. He has same exact coloration and markings as Poncho, the same intense eyes, and the same full-drop ears. Hence the name PonchoBack—I got Poncho “back” again—who proved his greatness in overcoming a devastating littermate to Gr Ch Rose Red, stopping him in a truly great fight in 2:36 :D In fact, this exact same level of success came from another “triple-bred Poncho” breeding when it produced Ch Miagi (4xW) out of Sassy's sister Razor being bred to a direct son of Poncho in Hero:
The point of this discussion is that many things had the potential of happening genetically with this blood in my hands, but by directing it, and then re-directing it, toward what I like most (Poncho dogs), I was able first to steer it in one direction (toward the Hollingsworth dogs) and then when re-directed it back towards the Hammer dogs, a new pair of World Class Head dogs were created (which is what I like most). Thus is the power of paying attention to everything that is happening at the same time in your breedings, and directing things to where you want them to go. You likewise should not worry if your own breeding plans don’t work out the way you want in your first step—as it may work out to perfection in the next step. You see, different breeders may have done different things from what I did. One breeder may have continued to breed in the Hollingsworth direction. Another breeder might not have had any idea what direction he was headed, and just decided to breed Sassy to some different blood to “see what happens.” Whereas with me, I decided the best overall dogs were a combination of the two elements, the Hammer blood and the Hollingsworth blood, put together, and so that is what I set out to do, which was re-balance everything once again.
This brings us to another element of breeding dogs, which is keeping pockets of purebred representatives of your original components around to re-blend back together again down the road. Not only do you want to linebreed on your top dog by using him to mix with other like-bred bitches (or a key bitch to mix with like-bred studs), but you also want to keep elements on your yard bred like your key dog’s father, as well as elements bred like your key dog’s mother—by breeding your key dog to both sides of his own pedigree, so that down the road you can re-blend these produced dogs with each other again. This will enable you to “re-invent the wheel” on two different levels: 1) you will be “refreshing” the same basic genetic pattern that created your dog to begin with, by breeding a dog linebred on his topside to a bitch linebred on his bottom side, and 2) you will also be doing this while linebreeding on him.
This is called “genetic management” which is making sure you keep your available options alive to maintain your precious gene pool on many levels. You need to do this because some combinations you try aren’t going to work right, while others will, and you may also have to “go back to the beginning” again, every so often, to “refresh” your basic genetic combinations that got you started. This is what I did to produce PonchoBack, and if you check the pedigrees of Fletcher Chavis, Ronald Boyles, E.J. Hollingsworth, Floyd Boudreaux, Tom Garner, and many other top breeders you will see them doing this many times over in their family breedings too.
When Fletcher Chavis hit the jackpot by creating his famous Redboy/Jocko “battle-cross,” he didn’t keep crossing those dogs. And he didn’t just keep breeding his new dogs together only. What he did was he dropped anchor right there on the spot and set to build an army of like-bred dogs on his yard, as well as purebred pockets of both sides of this pedigree as key elements to tap into when “refreshment” was needed. He would load up on some old Redboy dogs here, and some old Jocko dogs there, while at the same time he was going forward with his newly-created Redboy/Jocko cross-dogs. Yet there were times when he would occasionally re-blend his new dogs back again with elements of one side of their original composition, or to the other side too, when needed. Check Chavis’ pedigrees and you will see this happen over and over again. All good breeders do this, and if you want to be a good breeder you will too.
In getting back to genetic breeding patterns, while keeping in mind the concept of genetic re-direction, there are 7 basic breeding patterns upon which you may make an infinite number of possible breeding decisions. They are: 1) brother/sister; 2) father/daughter; 3) mother/son; 4) double-bred; 5) triple-bred; 6) triple-cross; 7) 50/75. The key to forming a bloodline around your best and most favorite-style dogs consists of 3 basic factors:
- Keeping your original goal clearly in mind as you evaluate each new generation;
- Making use of time-proven genetic breeding patterns in your program; and
- Using only prepotent individuals to fill-in the key slots of those genetic breeding patterns.
Again, you will remember what I said previously: “The power of linebreeding will begin to show itself when you move further into each generation of your program, because you will be able to repeatedly load-up on your prepotent dogs, more and more, thus minimizing the effect of the unwanted dogs.” You do NOT put ordinary dogs in the key slots in your peds, you put truly prepotent dogs in those key slots, if you expect to develop a truly prepotent bloodline. Why would you double-breed on a stud that throws inconsistent traits? Only a fool would do this, and yet you see fools do this all the time. Instead, you double-breed on a stud that is (and consistently-throws) a much higher-than-average percentage of what you’re looking for than your other studs. When you keep sticking the prepotent dogs in the proper “pedigree slots,” what you do is you begin to diminish the myriad of other genetic influences that might possibly be back there, and instead you begin to hyper-focus on the prepotency of that special individual you keep repetitively breeding on.
When I bred Sassy for instance, there was a big clash in genetics between my loading up on Poncho versus my loading-up on the Hollingsworth dogs behind him and all the others. The Hollingsworth dogs dominated because there was more of them back there, on top of which I used two Poncho offspring that themselves happened to pull off of the Hollingsworth side of their pedigree more too, so I got an all-Hollingsworth-like litter, including Sassy.
As I progressed further and introduced Silverback to the genetic mix, I pushed-back the Hollingsworth dogs a bit, and then I triple-bred on the dogs I decided I liked better, Poncho and Missy, and whollah! I got “PonchoBack.” There was nothing wrong with Sassy, nor was there anything wrong with the Hollingsworth dogs either. They were all beautiful, stunning, rock-solid dogs. But none of them had that nearly-human intelligence and just the uncanny ability to figure anything out and turn it against an opponent. But Silverback did have this intelligence, and so did his mama Missy, and thus I used both him as an individual, as well as what was behind him genetically in Missy, to re-direct the next step in my program back to where I wanted it, and I got exactly that. With that said, let me show you now the 7 linebreeding patterns that you can use to a lifetime of good effect:
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These are the seven basic breeding combinations you will be using. This is not to suggest there aren’t more and different combinations than these, but these are the most common breeding patterns used to manage a bloodline. In my own program, Poncho was the Flagship Animal, and so he was generally the dog I wanted to “influence” my program. Of the breeding patterns you see here, the brother-sister breeding (pattern 1) and the triple-cross (pattern 6) are the least-used. For some reason, brother-sister breedings tend not to produce with the same consistency as other inbreeding/linebreeding techniques. There have been a few great dogs produced like this (e.g., CH 357), but for the most part they don’t amount to much. Even Maurice Carver himself said, “Brother-sister breedings will put you two steps forward and 3 steps back.” I am not saying don’t use them, but I would only use them very, very sparingly. In fact, I have only made one brother/sister breeding in my life.
In my personal opinion, the father/daughter breeding combo and the mother/son breeding combo (patterns 2 and 3) are the very best breeding patterns to produce prepotent broodstock animals, and if a dog from a breeding like this has match ability also it will be the best producer you ever had. Also called, “¾-¼ breedings,” these breedings will usually serve as the acid test to determine whether your stud dog (or brood bitch) is truly prepotent. You can make the ¼ element of the same basic bloodline as yours, or you can have the ¼ element be an “out,” which has time and again proven to produce blockbuster performance dogs and brood dogs. In both breeding patterns 2 and 3, the ¼ element was of the same general bloodline, and the produced dogs were tremendously prepotent animals. But I also have made such a breeding with a ¼ “out” and the resulting breeding produce Sudden Death’s CH Honeybunch. I even bred two ¾-¼ Poncho dogs together (a sister to CH Honeybunch to Duke Nukem represented by pattern 2), and I got PrettyBoy, who won in 2:42 and lost game to CH BigBoy in 1:10. So you can stack these linebreeding patterns on top of each other also and still get good dogs.
In fact, the breeding I made to produce PonchoBack is nothing but combining a triple-breeding of CH Hammer on top (pattern 5) bred to a double-breeding of Poncho on bottom (pattern 4). Not only was this a combination of these two breedings that I used, but further it was itself a triple-breeding on Poncho and Missy too. As also mentioned, a very similar triple-breeding on Poncho like this (represented on pattern 5) was Sassy’s sister Razor (double-Poncho) bred to Hero (right off of Poncho), which produced both CH Miagi and CH Pierce, bred almost identical to PonchoBack. The only real ¼ difference genetically would be Ouch vs. Kitana. But with any triple-breeding (pattern 5), you must first build it on a pattern 1 or 4 dog, as Ouch was brother/sister (pattern 1) while Razor and Sassy were pattern 4. With pattern 4, you can make the stud your double-bred focus as I did with Poncho, or you can make it with your bitch. You can have the bottom of one side “pure,” the bottom of both sides “pure”—or one side “pure” with the other ¼ being an “out”—or you could even have both ¼s be “outs” and then double-up on the key dog again, with two “outs,” which has also been done time and again. However, I personally would only want a ¼ “out” at most in a double-breeding, for another way to achieve a ¾-¼ effect.
Very few people get to the point in their programs that they do pattern #6, which is taking a father/daughter-bred gyp (pattern 2) back to that key stud dog again. But I think that the performance/production record of Chavis’ CH YellowJohn, whose pedigree was used in this example, proves that this combination can be extraordinarily successful, in both the ability to win as well as to produce winners. The key wasn’t the just the breeding pattern only, however. It was the fact Redboy was such a prepotent animal too that was the truly deciding factor. These breeding patterns are only useful if the dog you are sticking in those slots fits the definition of a prepotent animal. Sticking a mediocre nothing dog in these slots will not create a prepotent bloodline, just a lot of useless “close-bred” garbage.
Finally, breeding pattern #7 is just a pattern 2 and pattern 4 fused together: a ¾ (75%) dog mated to a 50% dog. And there have been many, many great dogs produced from this combination. From my own bloodline, CH Mr. Serious comes to mind, and perhaps one of the most famous dogs of all time, GR CH Buck, was nothing but a 50% Bolio-bred dog on top (Little Tater) bred to a 75% Bolio bred dog on bottom (Red). The only difference in Buck’s pedigree from the one shown was the fact his sire Little Tater was not a direct son of Bolio, but instead a double-bred grandson (which is breeding pattern #4).
ConclusionThese breeding patterns I have shown you are by no means the only way you can breed your dogs, but they are simply the best way to breed your dogs on average—and that includes blending various combinations of these patterns together at some point down the road too.
But here again, these breeding patterns will not work on just their own. They require an intelligent and knowledgeable selection of the right dogs to stick into these slots on your part. Again, using a mediocre dog who can’t produce as the foundational animal to build these structures around won’t get you what you’re after. However, when you are blessed with a truly great animal, that defines your ideals and goals, and that also is blessed with the legitimately prepotent ability to produce your ideal, dependably and consistently, then if you build a breeding framework around these patterns and structures, using this dog as the star—and supported by like-bred, like performing individuals—you will eventually build a monument of genetic dependability for yourself—provided you continuously go through each successive generation of dogs produced and select only those individuals who accurately-represent your ideals to put back into your program.
One more thing: as you continuously move forward, every 2-3 generations you should get another ace or super dog. You can’t reasonably expect every litter to be full of aces, but you can expect every litter to be full of good, solid bulldogs who epitomize at least some aspect of your perfect ideal. One group may have average mouth but great air, another group may have average air but great mouth, and then you simply re-blend these dogs back together again. Etc., etc., etc.
Anyway, take some time and really study the patterns of the great breeders of the past. Study the breeding patterns of the great breeders of today. You will see these same patterns played-out time and again, all from bloodline breeders. You will never see a single long-term-successful breeder who does not use these patterns, either. You will never see a long-term successful “blood mixer” or “scatter-bred” breeder. The only breeders who have ever, or who will ever, stand the test of time are bloodline breeders. Even when a breeder bases his yard off of an original cross, the first thing he will do is get elements of both sides of that cross together, and then constantly re-shuffle these decks again and again, blending and re-blending these two lines—until, eventually, what that breeder makes is his own bloodline.
Such is the path Fletcher Chavis took, and such is the path Victor Aycart took. These men started with a great original cross, that really nicked, and they had a great Flagship Animal to represent their cross. From there, all these men did was interbreed supporting members of these same basic cross with their Flagship Dog, as well as go back to one side or the other of their original crosses at times, only to move forward again with their same basic breeding combination. You never saw these men jump around from bloodline-to-bloodline. You saw them receive a genetic gift in a dog, you saw them recognize that gift for what it was, and then you saw these men stick with that decision and work with that combination for the rest of their entire dog careers. That is what all great breeders have done, that is what all great breeders still do, and that is what anyone who hopes to be able to breed great dogs themselves, consistently, must do as well.
It is my hope that you become blessed with such a foundational animal for yourself, and that you also recognize and respect this dog for what he is, and that you recognize his potential as a brood animal as well. If you do so, and if you are right in your judgment, then following these breeding patterns will guarantee your success at preserving his traits, just as surely as following the other sections of this book will help you in these regards as well.
Preserving excellence in these dogs is a multi-faceted challenge, on every level, from beginning to end—starting with just keeping these dogs healthy and alive for a lifetime, to schooling them right, to evaluating them fairly and correctly, to calling their weight right, to conditioning them properly, to getting passed another dogman’s experience and charge to get a win, and then to keeping your athlete alive after that. Remember, even if you get your “dream ace,” you can still kill off his quality genetics by breeding him wrong, and thereby lose everything you worked so hard to get.
My goal in this exhaustive article was to help you “keep them alive” in this regard as well, by showing you the time-proven breeding methods that have been used since antiquity to keep genetic consistency alive and well in a bloodline. Bloodline breeding is the only way to go for long-term success, and basing your line on a truly defining, Flagship Animal (with the right supportive breeding partners), and then basing your breedings on time-proven patterns, is the only way to succeed for the long haul. Good luck to you in your goals, and I hope that this entire book (and this website) help you in this regard, from beginning to end, every step of the way.
~ California Jack (Disclaimer)
I ran across this article and thought it was worth posting here –
http://www.damascusroad.ca/Article-M...ire-Effect.htm
The Maternal Grandsire by Cindy Vogels
For years, horsemen have acknowledged a phenomenon called the maternal-grandsire effect, when outstanding males do not immediately reproduce their greatness in the next generation. Instead, they produce daughters who are outstanding dams. An oft-cited example is Secretariat, perhaps the greatest thoroughbred of all time. Secretariat's achievement was not matched by his direct get, who by and large were unremarkable, but rather was passed on through his daughters, many of whom went on to produce great performers. Dog breeders, too, have noted that an extraordinary male, while not producing extraordinary offspring, will often produce daughters who are prolific and exceptional dams. For years, there was absolutely no scientific explanation of this phenomenon in which traits skip a generation and are passed along only by female offspring. Recently, however, an article documenting scientific evidence of the maternal-grandsire effect appeared in issue number 242 of Equus, an outstanding horse publication. I acknowledge that article for providing me with much of the information in this column.
Some Genetics Background
In each cell of a dog's body there are 39 pairs of chromosomes, one set from each parent. Each chromosome pairs off with a corresponding chromosome of the other parent, and in each chromosome there are thousands of genes, which contain the protein codes that determine every physical trait. Within a pair of chromosomes will be pairs of genes from each parent that determine various traits. When the genes are not in conflict with each other - both expressing brown eyes, for example - there is no problem. However, if one chromosome contains the gene for brown eyes but another one contains the genes for green eyes, long-accepted Mendelian theory states that only the genetically dominant chromosome will be expressed. The theory also states that genetic dominance is unrelated to the sex of the gene donor. When both genes are expressed, they are considered to be co-dominant. Coat color, for example, is an area in which both genes can sometimes exert influence. Other times, both genes are recessive, but one is nonetheless more dominant than the other, thus allowing a recessive gene to be expressed. Recessive genes may also be expressed when both contain the same protein code for a trait.
A Startling Study
In 1969, Dr. W.R. Allen startled the world with a study that seemed to indicate certain genes might be gender-related in their expression. Allen bred horses and donkeys, and during pregnancy measured levels of the pregnancy hormone called equine chorionic gonadotrophin (ECG). Normally this level is high in horse-horse crosses and low in donkey-donkey crosses. According to Mendel, it should not have made any difference which species served as sire or dam. The levels should reflect a combination of the two species, and would either be a moderate level (indicating co-dominance), or if one species dominated, the level would be either high or low. Surprisingly, the mares (horse females) bred to donkeys exhibited low levels of ECG, much like a donkey-donkey cross, and the jennies (female donkeys) bred to horses registered high levels of ECG, as in a horse-horse cross. Although no definitive conclusions were reached, it appeared that the sires' genes were the only factor affecting the ECG levels in the females. The females' genes were silent.
It was not until 1986 that the topic reappeared in the literature. A research team headed by Dr. Azim Surani used mice to create embryos in which all the genetic material was received entirely from either one parent or the other. Since the material was transmitted in appropriately matched pairs, Mendelian theory would have predicted that the embryos would develop normally, since it was only the presence of two genes for each trait, and not the sex of the gene donors, that was considered relevant. Again, however, Mendelian expectations were confounded, as the all-female gene pairings resulted in large placentas with little embryonic material. The all-male gene pairings produced the opposite result: small placentas with large embryos. Surani's team concluded that some genes do not follow Mendel's laws. Some are "switched on" before fertilization and are always expressed, while others are "switched off" and never expressed. The sex of the gene donor is the factor that determines which mode a gene will fall into. A theory called "genome imprinting" was created to account for this previously unformulated phenomenon.
For example, say there is a canine gene that is paternally imprinted and, when expressed, produces three-eared dogs. When the gene is not expressed, the dog has two ears. A three-eared male inherits the gene from his mother, but because a gene that is paternally imprinted is switched off when passed on by a male to its offspring, he will have all two-eared offspring. His male two-eared offspring will not produce three-eared dogs, but his daughters will, because a gene that is paternally imprinted will be switched on in females.
Questions and Implications
Many questions still remain, and the literature is vague on why the phenomenon might occur. Researchers point to the significance of gender-related functions. For example, it appears that males strive to produce virulent, robust get, while females, for their own well-being, control the size of their offspring. Imprinted genes are quite possibly involved in traits inherited polygenically. If only some of the genes are switched on, the work of the geneticist tracking inheritance becomes more complicated.
The implications of this finding go far beyond the world of Thoroughbred racers. Already, a number of imprinted human genes have been pinpointed. Ongoing mapping of the canine genome should increase the likelihood of detecting imprinted genes in dogs. The most important contribution would probably be in the realm of canine health, but eventually we might have the tools to track the inheritance of many canine characteristics that seem capricious in their skipping of generations.
Dog breeders should be aware of this possible maternal-grandsire effect. Keep in mind, however, that outstanding males tend to be bred to outstanding females, so even if some of the male's desirable genes are paternally imprinted, the offspring of such matings will probably inherit some excellent traits from their exceptional dams. For example, this year's Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner, Charismatic, was sired by 1990 Preakness winner Summer Squall, who is out of a Secretariat daughter. While Summer Squall's prowess on the track could be traced to the maternal-grandsire effect, he seemed to pass his greatness along directly to Charismatic. However, Secretariat's mother appears another time in Charismatic's pedigree and Secretariat's sire Bold Ruler appears twice. So, the talented colt's lineage points back to many outstanding individuals. A pedigree, whether for dogs or horses, always contains many influences and variables. We dog breeders tend to be impatient and are disappointed when an outstanding male does not immediately reproduce his excellence. Remember the maternal-grandsire effect, and wait a generation.
*Cindy Vogels is breeder-judge from Littleton , Colo.
She has bred Soft Coated Wheaten Terriers, Kerry Blue Terriers, Welsh Terriers and other breeds for almost 30 years, and judges 18 terrier breeds.
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Equus Magazine #242 December 1997
On Saturday afternoon in April 1977 a record crowd of 22,000 spectators converged on Kentucky 's Keeneland Racecourse to, see a chestnut filly named Sexetary contest the day's third race. The filly was an unlikely focal point for such attention. She had never run a race, and her preparatory workouts had been decidedly ordinary. But she was greeted with pomp and circumstance, mobbed and cheered in the saddling enclosure, and bet down to the role of overwhelming favorite for one reason alone: her sire. Sexetary was the first foal of Triple Crown winner Secretariat to race. As the filly was loaded into the staffing gate, the fans had every expectation that through this filly and legions of foals to come, Secretariat would prove himself as impressive as a sire as he had been as a runner.
But Sexetary's fourth-place finish proved to be a harbinger of performances to come. In the succeeding years, Secretariat's offspring would do better than average at the races, and several would excel. Still, though mated to the world's best mares, Secretariat never approached the same greatness as a sire of racehorses that he displayed on the track. In turn, nearly all of his sons would be unexceptional sires. Secretariat died in 1989, and as his last, aging runners go into retirement, the book is closing on a stud career that has often been described, in light of the initial expectations, as a disappointment.
Still, even before Secretariat's death, breeders had begun to notice a trend among his progeny's progeny. Secretariat's daughters, even those who floundered on the track, had become and continue to be some of the greatest broodmares in the world, producing elite runners, including champions A.P. Indy and Summer Squall(both sons of 1992 Broodmare of the Year Weekend Surprise), Chief's Crown, Dehere, Gone West and Storm Cat. Even Sexetary, who never won a race and earned a paltry $1,425 at the track, produced a stakes winner. Secretariat's exceptional athleticism lives on, it seems, in the second-generation offspring produced by his daughters.
Known as the maternal-grandsire effect, this generation-skipping, female-linked phenomenon is far from exclusive to Secretariat. Other racetrack greats, including Buckpasser, Key to the Mint and Graustark, were similarly unspectacular as sires of runners and as sires of sires, but they displayed uncommon brilliance as broodmare sires. For generations, the effect has baffled breeders, and even the most prominent geneticists could come up with no credible theory to account for it. "It made no sense at all," says genetics and reproduction researcher Doug Antczak, VMD, PhD, the Dorothy Havemeyer McConville professor of equine medicine at Cornell University , director of the university's James A. Baker Institute for Animal Health and participant in the Horse Genome Project. "It didn't follow any known rules of genetics." But after 20 years of puzzling over the effect, Antczak, a lifelong horseman, believes recent genetic breakthroughs may finally offer an answer. His theory: Because of a quirk of genetic inheritance, some horses may exhibit their line's high level of athleticism only when the genes for it are contributed by females, while corresponding genes contributed by males always pass down to the offspring in "mute," inactive form. This theory draws on "the cutting edge of genetic investigations," says Antczak, but its effects could be of significance to breeders and buyers of every kind of Performance horse.
Genetic exceptions
Within the nucleus of each equine body cell are 32 pairs of rod-shaped chromosomes. Thousand of genes, which contain the chemical codes to produce every trait and direct the body's every function, are arranged linearly on each chromosome. An offspring receives one complete set of 32 chromosomes, containing genes for every possible trait, from each parent, and those chromosomes connect to create 32 chromosome pairs. (For definitions of genetic terms, turn to page 28.)
In some cases, only one of the two parental genes is expressed outwardly in the offspring, as when horses inherit one coat-color gene from the sire and a different coat-color gene from the dam. Conventional genetic theory, developed through the 1865 pea-breeding experiments of Austrian monk and botanist Gregor Mendel, has held that the gender of the gene's donor-father or mother-is irrelevant in determining which gene is expressed. Instead, Mendel's theory says, genetic dominance is the determiner: Many genes come in either dominant or recessive forms, and dominant genes override recessive ones. Recessive genes may be passed down through many generation but are expressed only when paired with other recessive genes. Other genes are expressed co-dominantly-that is, the effects of both parental copies of such genes are expressed.
For more than a century, Mendel's theory of genetic dominance and the irrelevance of the gender of the donor parent held up with only minor modifications. But in 1969, W.R. Allen-then a young New Zealand veterinarian pursuing a PhD degree at England 's Cambridge University , and now a professor there conduced studies with different equid species that seemed to turn Mendel's work on its ear. Using mares pregnant with mules, which are sired by donkeys, and jenny donkeys pregnant with hinnies, which are sired by horses, Mien measured the levels of equine chorionic gonadotrophin (ECG). This pregnancy hormone is always present in high levels in horse-horse pregnancies and in low levels in donkey pregnancies. The expected result of this experiment was either that the levels of ECG in maternal blood would be a blend of the two parent species' levels (co-dominant) or that one or the other form, either high or low, would be dominant in both types of hybrid pregnancy. According to Mendelian genetics, the horse-donkey pregnancies, regardless of which species was sire and which was dam, should be identical, producing the same ECG levels in the pregnant mares and pregnant jennies.
But that was not what happened. In a complete reversal of expectations, the mares had the low hormone levels seen in donkey-donkey pregnancies, while the jennies had the high levels seen in horse pregnancies. Apparently, the sires' genes were the sole determiners of ECG levels in the pregnant females, whose genes, in this case, were silent. Contrary to Mendel's laws, the gender of the parent contributing the gene for this particular trait appeared to influence the expression of the trait. No one knew what to make of the study. "It was very hard to explain," says Antczak. "The finding languished in the literature for almost 20 years."
Gender effects
Fast forward to 1986, when Dr. Azim Surani and his colleagues at the Agriculture and Food Research Council's Institute of Animal Physiology in Cambridge conducted a series of studies that finally offered some explanation for Allen's unaccountable findings. By micromanipulating mouse sperm and eggs, the researchers created fertilized eggs in which the paired chromosomes were either entirely from the mother (gynogenetic) or entirely from the father (androgenetic). According to Mendelian theory, since each embryo contained the necessary two genes for every trait and since the gender of origin for each gene was considered irrelevant, the resulting pregnancies should have developed normally.
As with Allen's experiments, the unexpected occurred: The androgenetic pregnancies developed large placentas but almost no embryonic tissue, while the gynogenetic pregnancies developed large embryos but very little placental tissue. In each set of embryos, neither of the paired genes for one trait was being expressed. It was as if these genetic instructions had been switched off.
Surani and his colleagues posited a stunning hypothesis to explain the results. Some genes, they argued, don't follow Mendel's law. Instead, they are programmed to be switched on before fertilization of the egg, so that they are always expressed in the offspring, or switched off, so that they are never expressed. Then came the kicker: The factor that determines whether this kind of gene is passed to the offspring in the "on" or "off" mode is the gender of the parent who donates the gene.
In other words, some genes are never expressed in the offspring when donated by the father, because in male parents, these genes are automatically switched off before transmission. The androgenetic mouse embryos failed to develop because some of the genes critical to the development of that trait had been transmitted in mute form by males and lacked the female parents' genes for embryonic development. The gynogenetic mouse embryos were without placental support because some of the genes critical to the development of that trait were switched off in the female transmitters.
The phenomenon, says Antczak, amounts to a reproductive "distribution of labor," with some of the female's genes primarily responsible for particular duties in the offspring's development and some of the male's genes primarily responsible for other duties. Researchers named the phenomenon "genomic imprinting." A "maternally imprinted" gene is switched off when transmitted by the mother, leaving the father's gene to be expressed; a "paternally imprinted" gene is inoperative when donated by the sire, allowing the maternal influence to prevail. Finally, Allen's curious findings of 20 years earlier had an explanation. "The horse was out there trying to tell us something fundamental about genetics," says Antczak. "This is one of the few truly new concepts in genetic inheritance developed since Mendel grew his peas. It is an entirely new paradigm."
Since Surani's studies, a handful of imprinted genes have been identified. Several human diseases have been found to be governed by imprinted genes, including the nervous disorder Huntington's chorea, some developmental behavioral abnormalities, certain facial deformities and some tumors. In each case, the critical gene's activity, and the resulting course of the disease, is determined by the sex of the parent donating it.
In addition, research into an abnormal type of human pregnancy called a trophoblastic mole has revealed a case strikingly similar to Surani’s mouse findings. This type of pregnancy, which occurs when two sperm penetrate an egg and their chromosomes pair to form an embryo lacking female genetic material, results in the development of a partial placenta but no fetus.
Why does genomic imprinting exist?
One hypothesis holds that it offers a mechanism by which males and females can control the most essential traits. In fetal development, for example, the father's reproductive "goal" is to sire the largest, most vigorous offspring possible, but for the mother, delivering an overly large foal could be deadly. Perhaps for this reason, some genes critical to fetal development are switched off by paternal imprinting, allowing the mother's genes complete control over many aspects of fetal size.
Skipping generations
Genomic imprinting creates an inheritance pattern whose expression "skips a generation." Just for illustration, imagine a human gene that, when expressed, produces blue hair. When the gene is not expressed, the offspring's hair color is brown. Because the gene also happens to be paternally imprinted, the trait would be expressed as follows: A man inherits the blue-hair gene in active form from his mother and has blue hair. Because he is a male, the blue-hair gene is "switched off" in transmission, so his children inherit the gene in inactive form and all have brown hair. When the sons reproduce, the gene remains switched off, so their children are all brown-haired. But when his daughters reproduce, the gene, in its active form, causes all of their children-male as well as female to have blue hair. The result: The trait reappears in the third generation, but only in the offspring of the blue-haired man's daughters.
As a reproductive and genetic researcher, Antczak was thrilled with the footnote to Mendel's law and the new research avenues it opened up. What if there was an imprinted gene controlling some critical aspect of equine athletic performance that was switched off when transmitted by males? Its expression, he realized, would produce precisely the same generation-skipping excellence as seen in the production records of Secretariat, Graustark and other sires. Antczak had hit upon the first plausible explanation for the maternal-grandsire effect.
"If you take this theoretical framework and put into it the observations of the matemal-grandsire effect, it fits," says Antczak, who cites Secretariat's lineage as a prime example. "Princequillo was a leading sire of broodmares three decades ago, and he sired Somethingroyal. She inherited this peculiar, imprinted performance gene and transmitted it to Secretariat in active form, contributing to his outstanding athletic performance. But when the father transmits it, the gene is transmitted in the switched-off state. Therefore, Secretariat's offspring don't perform as well as he did. When his sons transmit the gene, it is still in the off state, so his sons likewise are not great sires of performers. But Secretariat's daughters switch the gene around so that it is transmitted in the active state. His daughters are among the best broodmares in the world right now."
Other Influences
Though they were standouts as broodmare sires, all the sires linked to the maternal-grandsire effect were certainly decent or even very good sires of runners. But if genomic imprinting was at work in these sires, how were they able to produce any good performers at all? One contributor is probably the extraordinary mares to which these stallions were bred. Another, says Antczak, may be that many genes contribute to outstanding performance, only some of which are imprinted. Though a stallion with imprinted genes may not be able to pass them on in active form, he still transmits-a potent package of nonimprinted genes that, in combination with the mare's genes, can produce championship performance an4 reproductive excellence in the next generation. But the daughters of sires with imprinted genes still come out with the greatest genetic performance package to pass along in active form to their foals.
Antczak does not yet know what performance4elated gene or set of genes might be controlled by genomic imprinting, if imprinting is indeed responsible for the maternal-grandsire effect. Genes related to growth and development are likely possibilities, in part because they are central to athleticism and in part because so many of the genes already identified as genomically imprinted are growth related. Secretariat's case suggests that optimal heart development could be one such critical athletic characteristic passed on in active form only through females: While the average Thoroughbred heart weighs 8 1/2 pounds, Secretariat's heart weighed an astonishing 22 pounds, the largest equine heart ever measured.
Does the performance influence of genomic imprinting extend beyond the world of Thoroughbred runners? Coveted athletic attributes in other disciplines and breeds may be expressed in alternating-generation fashion, but in the absence of detailed, multigenerational record keeping of easily quantifiable performance data, the effect may escape notice. "The maternal-grandsire effect may be manifest in other breeds," says Antczak, "but it may be unnoticed because of the way those horses are bred." And imprinting likely affects far more than horses' athleticism. In people, mice and sheep, as well as in Allen's research equids, imprinted genes have been identified that have significant influence on individuals' development, health and even appearance. The same types of genomic imprinting may well occur in horses.
Reality checks
The first step in verifying the role of genomic imprinting in the maternal-grandsire effect or any other equine characteristic is to locate which genes might be subject to imprinting and test horses who exhibit the effect. It is a tall order: The maternal-grandsire effect, for example, appears to become diluted and disappear very quickly, so observations must be made over just a few generations. Furthermore, locating genes is an intensely painstaking, expensive project. But by embarking on the new Horse Genome Project, which seeks to create a gene map of the horse, Antczak and fellow researchers have already taken a major step in that direction. "If we can identify the genes that determine the maternal-grandsire effect, then we can find out if they are imprinted or not," he says. "If we do, that will close the loop. This is a reason for horsemen to be enthusiastic about the Horse Genome Project. Without the genetic tools we are building, we won't be able to answer that question."
If researchers do identify imprinted genes, the information will take a great deal of guesswork out of breeders' decisions. Poorly performing mares from sire lines featuring maternal-grandsire effects could be kept in breeding programs, when in the past they might have been culled. And, says Antczak, "it might help you identify two kinds of sires: sires who can run and transmit their abilities, and sires who can run but probably wouldn't transmit their abilities to their sons and daughters and instead will skip a generation and transmit the ability through their daughters." Finally, other characteristics controlled by genomic imprinting could be more effectively bred for, or-in the case of undesirable traits-perhaps even be bred out of the gene pool.
As enthusiastic as he is about the possible link between genomic imprinting and the maternal-grandsire effect, Antczak stresses that the connection is still an intriguing theory awaiting more thorough exploration. If the theory holds, however, it will lift the onus from the great performers who never quite live up to expectations in their second careers as sires. Standout athleticism will always be a rare trait in an essentially athletic species, but horse breeders may have the assurance that if they wait just one more generation, a daughter of the great one may produce another world-beater.
EQUUS thanks Secretariat historian Brian Windham for his assistance in the preparation of this article.
This really is an interesting article, thank you for sharing :D
As someone who has bred dogs long enough to have a pretty far-reaching hindsight, I have long seen traits skip a generation in dogs, really innumerable times. Although I do not have technical training in genetics, I do have enough experience breeding my own line of dogs to say with 100% certainty that the most powerful portion of all that reading was contained in the last 3 sentences of paragraph 8:
"A pedigree, whether for dogs or horses, always contains many influences and variables. We dog breeders tend to be impatient and are disappointed when an outstanding male does not immediately reproduce his excellence. Remember the maternal-grandsire effect, and wait a generation."
It would be my opinion that 99% of the people breeding dogs do not have the patience ever to be successful as bloodline breeders, precisely because most people cannot handle the fact that key traits very often skip a generation. I have gotten rid of enough dogs I didn't like, only to realize that those dogs ultimately produced good dogs down the road, to learn the big mistake of making rash decisions on any stud dog "right away." The dead game Truman was an example of the above, where almost all of his offspring *sucked* ... and yet the two times I double-bred on Truman (and Miss Trinx) ... using his sons to his daughters ... or Poncho to his daughter ... I got all-game (or nearly all-game) litters. I have seen things happen like this time-and-time-again, with my dogs as well as with other people's, and so it is nice to see some scientific study that shows us "why" things like this can and do happen.
Everybody (myself included!) always wants "instant results" with the breedings we do ... but sometimes the best results won't happen in "that" generation ... but they will happen in the next generation ... and so the breeder who ultimately learns patience ... and who learns to double-breed on the right dogs/genes ... will always produce a better overall average litters and overall results than the guy who is always doing "experimental crosses" and only looking at the present litter ... and who will (for the most part) always give up and move on to something else if his big "blockbuster" doesn't happen (which it seldom does).
This consistent reality of key traits skipping a generation may not always be because of "The Maternal Grandsire Effect," but very often it is. This particular phenomenon might also explain why so many experienced bloodline breeders believe in father/daughter ... as well as father/granddaughter breedings ... and why dogs of this breeding pattern always seem to be such high-percentage producers, when inbred on the right father/daughter.
Jack
I ran across this web site and they have a lot of articles so I thought I would post the link --
http://breedingbetterdogs.com/articles.php
I have only read a few of the articles and hope the members here find them interesting and useful!
Thanks for the resource SGC. It will only be select few working dog breeders who will appreciate in-depth, intelligently written articles that are featured on such a website.
what is your guys opinion on this bracketts theories for breeding?
http://breedingbetterdogs.com/pdfFil...tts_fomula.pdf
Will have to read it later, when I get back from the Keys :)
But Brackett's main article heads this thread 8)
i really enjoyed (The Art of Breeding Dogs ) great knowledge and you break it down.. barney style. the way i like. easy to read and full detail. thanks for the direction to this thread. i am the guy you talked about that works with two dogs. maybe in the future i will be on the other side of the coin.:idea:
I think this article was called, "This here is a colby dog"? Lemme know if yall know.
I believe it is a must read.
Indian Sonny Had this to say about the Colby dogs.
Mr John P Colby was an active breeder for many years and produced some of the best dogs of his time. Much of his foundation stock was from the Gas House and Burke strains, as were the dogs of many other breeders. The difference in the quality of the dogs Mr Colby produced was the result of breeding principles he employed. Also, Mr Colby in my opinion possessed a very important attribute, which I refer to as a gift.
Mr Colby practiced a simplified version of genetics, Best to Best, selective breeding
Best to Best does not mean performing dogs alone. It entails all aspects of the dogs, from performance to pedigree. The most obvious qualities would be gameness, biting power, talent, stamina and a great bloodline. A bloodline is the result of a breeders influence.
Over the years dogs bred by Mr Colby began to exhibit physical and mental characteristics such as conformation, colour and gameness which distinguished them. These dogs were then referred to as Colby Dogs. Thus we have the Colby Bloodline. People were proud to say, "This here is a pure Colby dog". This sounds simple; and it leads people to ask; why there were not more top breeders? I believe deciding on what is Best to Best is the key.
I'm not sure that every dog Mr Colby bred to was Dead game; and I'm equally sure he did not breed to every Dead game dog he owned. This is where the gift comes in. It seems to be an in-born sense or ability. I believe most outstanding accomplishments have been made by men who were endowed with a gift for their respective fields.
I do not believe that man knows enough about genetics at this time to produce great animals; and he most certainly didn't know enough in the days of Mr Colby. Race horse people spend millions of dollars a year, trying to produce great horses, with only marginal success. Similarly, there is no pattern for producing Great dogs.
Friends
The most essential qualities a breeder may possess are; dedication, a gift, a knowledge of Best to Best, and money might come in handy. If a breeder combines these attributes he is likely to produce, with luck, a great strain of dogs.
It doesn't take too much effort to recall the great Colby dogs of the past. These dogs were bred from the pit and for the pit.
But all of this brings us to a very important question; When a strain of dogs that were once highly regarded, such as Colby's, stops producing consistently good pit dogs, is this strain still to be considered good? I have heard people say, "I know he's a cur, but the blood is there". While this is true in many cases, I wonder how long we can continue to breed to curs and hope to produce game pit dogs.
What is good blood and how long will it remain good if we continue to breed to dogs, who do not possess the qualities of their ancestors? While great breeders can breed to dogs who themselves do not exhibit good qualities; can the average breeder afford to take this gamble?
I have seen strains of dogs that have not produced dogs fitting this description for many years, and people who are active in the sport refer to them as good blood or good brood stock. Many seem to proceed under the assumption, that once a bloodline is good it remains good forever. Many well-meaning people have continued to breed Colby dogs exclusively, thinking all that was necessary to preserve the quality of the strain, was to breed to a dog that had the name Colby on his pedigree.
I believe that we have to continuously strive to improve the strain, in order to keep it as good as it was or is. It's an accepted theory, that in order for an institution to continue, it must change and continuously seek to improve. To preserve a bloodline, there is more required than just breeding to dogs whose pedigree shows a particular name. Change is required in order to prevent change in the quality of dogs produced. The Colby strain was developed by change.
Friends
I have heard people say, that the dogs of yesteryear were gamer than those of today. Could it be, in some cases, because we have tried to play Pat and in doing so have lost ground. The people that have bred Colby dogs exclusively for these many years, thinking they were doing what was best, have perhaps underestimated their own ability to breed good dogs.
Many of them have bred dogs for 40 years or more and could have perhaps contributed much more to their own dogs, by using their own ideas and experience. New ideas are necessary in every field. Sports records are consistently surpassed by those not satisfied with repeating someone else's past performance. Last year's record won't win this year's meet.
Were the dogs of yesteryear really superior? I'm sure many dog men of the past would think we have it too easy, because we don't have to grow secret vegetables and cook our dog's food or boil their water. Penicillin has replaced many old remedies, making better dog care possible. I have read some diets that top dog men used. While some were good, none could compete with any good commercial dog food available in countless supermarkets. The poorest feeder today is able to provide better nutrition than the best feeder of yesteryear. We also have refrigeration and other conveniences.
It is not my intention to criticize old-timers and their methods. How many of us would be feeding as many dogs if we had to cope with the same adverse conditions? I think our mission however, is to pick up where they left off, emulating their objectives rather than their methods. The Colby dogs of the past, fit the description of good blood, as their pit records indicate. The Colby strain was developed on the principle of Best to Best. When that principle is no longer employed there is bound to be a drastic change in quality. In a very short period of time a great strain of dogs can be reduced to a strain that can do no more than refer to their pedigree and say "My great, great, grand-daddy was a pit dog....I think!"
By Indian Sonny
Some ( or none ) of you guys may have heard or know of Dr Mike Davis DVM and / or Dr Arleigh Reynolds DVM , or even care lol ... anyway they both do indepth study and reserch on working / racing dogs in Alaska.. their diet , conditioning , breeding ect ect ... found this little artical a wile back , i hope you might get something out of it , maybe not ... you deside.
Breeding Methods
Breeding methods are commonly grouped into four general types. These are inbreeding, linebreeding, outcrossing (also called outbreeding), and crossbreeding. Each system has its place and its purpose and accomplishes certain results when properly used. A difference of opinion exists as to the exact definition of these terms as well. This is probably due to differences in the breeding methods used on different species. An example would be: inbreeding in wheat is much different than inbreeding in dogs, or even inbreeding in people. This comparison sometimes is confusing to the lay person - why would you breed a grandaughter back to her grandfather? Isn't that "incest"? In people - yes, but in dogs, there is no social taboo or inhibition in this example. *
Dogs only look at themselves as either "alphas" - animals allowed to breed, or "betas" animals that may or may not breed depending on the alpha's wishes. Familial relationships don't enter into their view of things. This can seem upsetting or even creepy to humans, but it just doesn't matter to dogs who think like canines, not primates (us). A dog breeder must make decisions based on the genetic makeup of the dogs, first and foremost. The dogs see it as "alpha" (the breeder) allowing or disallowing breeding just as the alpha dogs and bitches in a wild pack might do. In light of this, this canine trait has allowed humans over hundreds of generations, to alter the physiology and temperament of dogs to domesticate them, and change their appearance and abilities.
Inbreeding is the mating of related individuals (usually not more than two generations removed from one another), where neither individual is an ancestor of the other. The most distant-related individuals included in this definition would be those having only one grandparent in common. It should be noted that this definition excludes such matings as mother to son, granddaughter to grandfather, etc. The reason for this will be explained in the discussion of line-breeding. The maximum inbreeding that can be achieved in a single mating is by breeding brother to sister. Much easier inbreeding can be obtained by breeding brother to sister through several generations. Slight inbreeding for several generations may have a greater effect than close inbreeding for one generation.
Inbreeding brings out recessive genes in the homozygous condition. Genes that are "homozygous" are genes that have no opposing gene in a sense - in other words, the dog will carry this trait and no other version of the trait. If a dog is homozygous for purple fur, it means it ONLY has the gene for purple fur and passes this strong trait on to it's offspring. Since these genes may be either desirable or undesirable, the effects of inbreeding can vary quite a bit. The results obtained from inbreeding depend upon the recessive genes carried by the original animals. Recessive genes are genes that are hidden by obvious visible traits, but the dog still carries another related hidden trait. That hidden trait can be good or bad, but it is still there, overshadowed by the more dominant trait that can be seen.
Inbreeding of itself has no bad effects. This was proven most definitely by Dr. Helen Dean King at the Wister Institute in Philadelphia. She bred rats, brother to sister, for over a hundred generations. The result was that the rats were larger, lived longer and produced larger litters than did the rats with which she began her experiments. The reason for these good results is that careful selection was practiced during the entire experiment. All undesirable animals were not bred. Only the best animals were kept for breeding. If a given line of dogs carries an undesirable gene, it must be eliminated or it will continue to appear in future generations.
Inbreeding accompanied with careful selection is one of the best possible means of breed improvement. Slight inbreeding is practiced by most dog breeders and serves to maintain stock uniformity and keep the children similar to parents and general ancestry.
Linebreeding, a form of inbreeding, unfortunately, has been over-publicized, and depending on who you talk to - is either the answer for all that is wrong with Malamutes, or is blamed for everything from temperament to health problems. It's neither. As with inbreeding, the results obtained depend entirely of the quality of the original stock, the skill with which the breeding program was planned and executed, and on the methods and amount of selection.
Much of the factual information on linebreeding has been camouflaged by breeder's Malamute theories. Literally dozens of linebreeding theories, plans, charts, and schemes have been proposed. Many such plans are represented as a method of recombining the genes that were present in some famous past dog to duplicate its quality. Some plans are touted as a general cure-all for the elimination of faults, while other schemes profess to breed champions from common Malamute stock.
A successful linebreeding program should always be planned to fit the individual case. No plan that is supposed to fit one breed as well as another, or one dog as well as another can be of much value. In other words, a breeder should never go to the "big name" just because he is a big show winner. Sometimes the best dog for a particular bitch can be an unknown dog with specific traits that compliment the bitch. This is what is meant by fitting a breeding to an individual case. Some breeding "theories" have become quite popular. The advocates of these theories are always pointing to this or that great dog was bred according to their theory. However, all breeding methods are used to slowly cull bad genes, in the hopes of retaining the good, and as such, assists in producing healthy, good temperamented dogs. There really is no quick "answer" or stud dog that can fix all breed problems instantly. As for show champions, there is no plan that is guaranteed - there are too many genes to say for sure this dog and that bitch WILL produce a champion - however, if they both carry excellent specimens in their genetic background, it increases the odds of combining the millions of genes in such a way as to produce general overall quality.*
The strongest possible linebreeding effect is obtained by breeding a sire to his own daughters for several generations, but not even this will produce youngsters of the exact genetic composition of the original sire. Linebreeding also brings out recessive genes but in a more orderly manner than general inbreeding. Less variation will appear in linebred dogs than in inbred dogs.
With linebreeding the breeder can choose, to some extent, which recessive gene he wishes to bring out and which ones he wishes to hold back. For example, if youngsters are sired by a dog with the genetic composition AAbb, while the dam is aaBB, (these original parents are known as the P1 generation; capital letters represent dominant genes, small letters recessive genes), all of the young will be of the genetic composition AaBb.
This generation is termed the F1 generation. If these youngsters are bred brother to sister, the resulting puppies (called the F2 generation) may vary all the way from AABB to aabb. The difference between the individual puppies may actually be greater than between the individuals of the P1 generation. If one of the female pups of the F1 generation (AaBb) is bred back to her sire (AAbb) the resulting pups will be either A-bb or A-Bb. They will never show the recessive gene (b) carried by their father. From these simple examples, it can be seen that linebreeding permits a better control of the genes than does general inbreeding. In actual practice, a cross may involve several hundred different genes. Obviously, this number of genes cannot be dealt with in the precise manner used in these examples. The geneticist must work by steps, focusing his attention on a few important genes and traits in each mating. Also, genes are not all dominant and recessive, but may combine in other more complex ways, or a specific trait is governed by a group of genes - so this too must be taken in to consideration when a breeding is planned.
Outcrossing is a mating between individuals that are less closely related than average. A mating should probably be considered outcrossing when the two individuals show no common ancestor in a four generation pedigree. This type of breeding may be used to bring a new trait into an inbred line or to increase the amount of variation for future selections.
Outcrossing is closely related to a phenomenon known as hybred vigor. When a cross is made between two different inbred strains of animals, the crossbreds often prove to be superior to either of the original strains. This explains why many show people feel this is a good method. It can by chance net them a big winner. However, upon continued breeding, the advantages are lost and the pups are often not nearly as good as the parents. The homozygous genes have been "watered down" and there is a tendency for a breeding group's progeny over generations to return to mediocrity. Hybred vigor does not always occur either, and at present there is little chance of predicting when it will or will not occur. Since the best outbred animals seldom pass their superior qualities on to their descendants, the value of this method to dog breeding is dubious. However, excellent Alaskan Malamutes have been produced by outcrossing and it is one method breeding to be considered under certain circumstances.
Crossbreeding is a mating of one breed to another. This method has little to offer the Malamute breeder but is useful to the research geneticist in learning more about the genetic composition of the different breeds. Only very knowledgeable breeders should consider this option and it's an option generally used for centuries to create new dog breeds or drastically change a breed. In the Alaskan Malamute it is not a viable option as most arctic dogs are probably somewhat related to each other anyway and what purpose would it serve to breed them to non-arctic dogs. The Alaskan Husky is a dog of this genre - whereas it gains speed for races, it loses many of the survival abilities necessary to a true arctic dog. Some feel crossing the Alaskan Malamute with a wolf or wolf-dog can produce a better animal genetically. However, this almost always nets a dog too shy and spooky for sled work, too unreliable in a family situation and it often loses conformational qualities refined for years in arctic dogs such as thicker bone, deeper chests and working attitude.
Consequently, the best option for breeding dogs is generally linebreeding, with occasional instances of outcrossing and inbreeding used to gain or eliminate specific traits. A wise breeder will use all of these methods carefully, reevaluating his breeding program as pups grow up and planning future breedings with these methods in mind to refine and bring out traits he feels are important, and lessen traits he feels are a detriment.
and this site ... http://bowlingsite.mcf.com/Genetics/Genetics.html , some of you guys might dig this ....me , not so much lol
I haven't read all the articles yet, but so far from what I've read by Jerold S. Bell, D.V.M on linebreeding was some of the best literature I've read in awhile.
Great read and thank you for sharing your experience.
This is the last chapter in my book, The Pit Bull Bible. Basically, my book takes the reader from being a total beginner and re-wires them correctly from the ground up ... from setting up the yard right, to feeding their dogs right, to getting their yard maintenance right, getting their meds right, getting their head right, getting their schooling right, getting their testing and evaluation right, getting their keep right, getting their match right, and (finally) to getting their aftercare right. The entire thrust behind my book is the brutal fact that every step of the way along our journey as dogmen, there are countless ways to lose our dogs. Failure at any one aspect of our jobs can mean the loss of a truly great and valuable flagship bulldog, or at least the loss of an honest and rugged animal, which only puts us right back to square one again. In covering every conceivable subject under the sun, we’ve crossed bridge-after-bridge, and we’ve successfully made it across every item up to this point, except one. Because there is still another way to lose our precious dogs, and that is by breeding them wrong and re-mixing the genes in such a way as you breed all of the quality right out of what you came so far to get. Which brings us to the point of my final chapter: “The Art of Breeding Dogs.”Quote:
Originally Posted by CLUTCH
If you really want to keep what you love “alive” for the long haul, then you need to learn how to breed them right so you don’t lose what you love in the next generation. You see, that is exactly what most people do when they breed their dogs: they throw everything they loved about their dog away, and this is because most people have exactly the wrong idea as to why we should breed these dogs. Most people think breeding dogs is some kind of “genetic crapshoot,” where they’re trying to “cross this to that,” thinking that somehow they will hit the jackpot and get the biggest freak of nature possible. Wrong! What they’ll do nearly every single time is breed all of the consistency and quality right out of their dogs.
What people who know what they’re doing strive for in their breedings is to get consistent and dependable results, not to crapshoot or play guessing games. I mean, just stop for a minute and think about the different breeds of dog in general. We all know that the basic fundamental of breeding true to "type" is that (for example) if we want to get pit bulls then we need to breed pit bulls to pit bulls. If we want to get German shepherds then we need to breed German shepherds to German shepherds. If we want to get Jack Russells, then we need to breed Jack Russells to Jack Russells. Now this may seem obvious, but I’ve got a curve ball coming, so pay attention here.
You see, out of all the possible “breed types” there are to breed to in this world, any serious breeder is going to ignore all of the other breed types except the one that applies to him. Because the fact is, if a breeder starts breeding his purebred dogs to other breeds of dogs, meaning any old breed type with a wanton disregard for keeping the breed pure, well then he’s going to have no idea what the hell is going to happen in the produced offspring. If you breed German shepherds to bulldogs, what the hell are you going to get? If you breed Jack Russells to Dobermans, what the hell are you going to get? If any purebred breeder of dogs tries to do something like this with one purebred breed type, and tries to mix it with another purebred breed type, he will have essentially taken all of those years of genetic dove-tailing and isolation (that created the purebred breed to begin with) and he will have thrown all of these isolated genes away by scrambling them up again in breeding to an totally different breed type. This is why such mix-bred dogs are called MUTTS, and this is why mutts have no value—precisely because they no longer have any particular specialization—and precisely because they are now so genetically-scrambled that they won’t be able to reproduce “whatever they are” consistently and dependably. Folks, this is exactly why purebred breeds cost money while mix-bred mutts are given away for free: only the purebred dogs can produce consistently-dependable results when they’re interbred.
It takes years and years of selective breeding just to create a “breed type” to begin with—and so to dump some new and unrelated breed’s genetics into the gene pool is like dropping a turd into a bowl of punch—it ruins all of the previous work and creativity and it pollutes the purity and excellence of the sacred mix with “unwanted matter.” Well, guess what folks, it works the exact same way with bloodlines within a breed type too. You see, bloodlines within a breed type are nothing but the next step in the process of genetic refinement. Just as you want to get the same breed 'type' every time when you mate your dogs, well so too do you want to get the same traits (when you begin to get serious about your breedings) every time within that breed type when you mate your dogs. You see, even within the same breed type, there are still a vast disparity of "traits, tendencies, and styles" that express themselves! We all know that just because you have two pit bulls doesn’t mean they carry anywhere near the exact same traits!
Dogs even of the same breed type don’t all have the same temper, they don’t have the same looks, nor do they all have same abilities and attributes in any way whatsoever. There are tens of thousands of different looks, personalities, sizes, strengths, weakness, performance capabilities, etc., even within the same breed 'type' of the pit bull terrier breed. Therefore, when people just breed any old pit bull to any old pit bull, what they do is basically create mutts within the breed type. That is what 99% of all people who have these dogs simply don’t understand when they breed their dogs, is that breeding dogs even within a “breed type” takes still more genetic refinement and specialization—which can only happen through a dedicated linebreeding program. You see, by “mixing bloodlines” instead, more often than not what most people produce are nothing but undependable mutts as opposed to the “hybrid vigor” they think they’re going to get with their “crosses.” (Yes, I understand that some crosses do produce well, which I will get into later, but most of them do not.)
You see, just as you must breed the same breed to the same breed—in order to continue to be able to get the same breed of dog on a dependable basis—so too must you breed the same bloodline to the same bloodline in order to get the same specific characteristics within that breed type on a dependable basis. Breeding top quality dogs is all about consistently preserving unique, excellent traits through the genetic dove-tailing of linebreeding, it is not about “crapshooting for excellent traits” with a bunch of senseless gene-scrambling outcrosses. Now, again, this doesn’t mean an occasional outcross doesn’t have its place, it can and it does; but what this means is that any outcrosses considered need to be made intelligently and sparingly, not as a matter of routine. Linebreeding is always any serious breeder’s mainstay, and outcrossing is always the exception, not the other way around.
Revelation
With this in mind, when you have raised, schooled, evaluated, tested, and won (or lost game) with your own personal best dog, if you want to keep those qualities he has alive for the next generation what sense does it make to “outcross” this dog’s genes away? Realize that by introducing new genes you decrease the chances of ever having another dog “like him” again. Now if you don’t think much of your dog to begin with, and are trying to breed him to something you think more of, then why breed the dog at all and make more of what you “don’t think much” of? Too many people breed dogs just to breed dogs, but the only reason a good breeder breeds a pair of dogs is to make more of what he likes. Therefore, when you set out to “make more of what you like,” the best way to accomplish this is with a goal and a logical plan, not by taking chances or by playing guessing games. Well, the “perfect fighting dog” is your goal and a linebreeding program around him is your game-plan to preserve that goal. This strategy is the only way a person will succeed as a breeder over the long haul. Flash-in-the-pan crosses come and go, but only through a linebreeding program will a breeding enterprise stand the test of time.
Okay, so you have decided to build a linebreeding program around your favorite dog, and your next decision involves which supporting player to use. If your dog is already linebred then you pretty much should know what to do, and that is breed him to more like-bred individuals who carry his specific traits. However, if your dog is himself somewhat mix-bred, then he is unlikely to be a consistent producer. Yet this is not always the case. Cheer-up though, because even if your dog is not a truly prepotent animal himself, you can still create a consistent line by forming a linebreeding program around him.
Note: One of the key things to pay close attention to as a breeder is the overall quality of the litter that any good dog comes from. Even if a dog is himself a great individual, if his overall litter was lousy then unfortunately that dog will therefore tend to produce lousy overall. Why? Because you get what the average of your dog’s gene pool is when you breed him. You don’t get what the “best” or the “worst” individuals are, on average—what you get are the average dogs in his gene pool turn out like, on average. Aces won’t consistently produce aces, and bums won’t consistently produce bums, they will produce what most of what’s behind them is actually like.
What all dogs will produce “on average” is going to be what the average of their gene pool is like. By definition. This is why it is so important to know what most of the dogs in your dog’s whole litter were like, and also to know what all of the dogs in his parents’ litters were like, so that you may get an overall “whole average profile” in your mind’s eye as to what your own dog is genetically, and therefore should produce genetically. This basic principle is why a lousy bum dog (who happens to come from an otherwise excellent litter, bred off excellent parents, who likewise were out of excellent litters) will invariably out-produce a Grand Champion (who happens to come from a lousy litter, bred off mediocre parents, who likewise were out of lousy/mediocre litters). You see, the lousy bum is the exception, where most of his gene pool is excellent—while the Grand Champion is the exception, where most of his gene pool is lousy. Therefore, since each dog is “the exception” for his own particular line, he will simply go back to producing what “the average” of his gene pool is. This is why the above bum will produce excellence “on average” while the Grand Champion will produce poorly “on average.”
You see, the careful evaluation of breeding potential is exactly the opposite of the careful evaluation of match potential. With a match dog, all that matters is the answer to the question, “Is this particular dog good enough to win?” What his parents were like doesn’t matter, and what his litter was like doesn’t matter. The only question that matters to a match dog is does this dog have what it takes to win? His parents can’t help him, his pedigree can’t help him, and his littermates can’t help him.
By contrast, when you breed dogs, the irony is it is exactly the opposite which holds true. How “that particular” dog is as an individual doesn’t matter anywhere near as much toward “how he produces pups” compared to how consistently-good is his overall gene pool. If you know everything about a dog’s littermates, as well as his parents, as well as his parents’ littermates, you can tell a lot more about how that particular dog will produce than if you only know about “just him.” Therefore, before you decide to base your yard around any dog, or before you start loading-up on any new dog introduced into your program, it pays to get to know as much as you can about all of the strengths, weaknesses, and consistent propensities of that dog’s entire genetic profile (brothers, sisters, parents, parents’ siblings) before you commence.
Whatever it is that you like about your dog (or dogs) is simply what you want to produce consistently in your forthcoming pups and litters, to duplicate more of these quality animals for the next time around, and possibly to improve on their weak points. Therefore, choosing dogs to breed that not only have these traits themselves, but whose littermates and parents carried these traits also, simply increases your odds of getting more dogs like this in your breedings. Conversely, if your dog doesn’t have those traits at all, and nothing in his background carried those traits either, then your odds of getting the traits you desire using such a dog in your program is virtually non-existent. I mean really, breeding dogs is just about basic logic.
In fact, it can help visually if you look at your dog’s entire gene pool as a massive deck of cards: the more aces you put in your “genetic deck,” the more likely you will be able to draw an ace back out of that deck. However, the more twos and threes you put in your deck, why then the more twos and threes you’re likely to pull back out. It’s really about that simple. And, yes, you can pull both an ace and a two out of the same deck, as well as a joker or two for that matter
Just because you happen to pull a joker or a two out of your deck doesn’t mean the whole deck is bad (every deck has them!), it just means there are random variables to be found in any “genetic deck” of cards (genes). The key to getting consistency is to decrease your variables. Again this is basic logic. You want to pull your twos and threes out of your deck, when you see them, and you want to put your aces, kings and queens back in when you see them. With this kind of genetic management and vigilance repeated over time, you can eventually get virtually a “whole deck” of dog genes that can be reliably-depended upon to throw aces, kings, and queens (or at least “high cards”) every time you breed them. You simply have to learn to play your cards right
With that visual in mind, the more dogs you put into your breedings that have “the perfect style” and live up to your ideals, the more of those kind of dogs you’re likely to get back out when you make your breedings. The only additional factor you must use to your advantage in breeding dogs is making sure those dogs you do use are of the same basic bloodline and then linebreed on the star(s) of that line. If the dog you just won with (or even lost game with) is the ideal dog to you then you can build a yard around him. If he is just a decent or average dog, then you may (or may not) want to breed him. But beware of what you call average.
Another thing to keep in mind that some “average” dogs may have certain outstanding abilities! For instance, a particular dog might have average air, average mouth, and not much of a style—but he may have an incredible amount of body strength and tenacity. If he’s from a lot of dogs like this, you can linebreed around this dog so you can keep pockets of specific traits on your yard as well. For instance, my Coca Cola bitch was just an average dog in intelligence, she had below average air, and she was one-dimensional. Because she had some glaring flaws, her original owner sold her for cheap because (to him) she didn’t have “match ability.” Well, I realized that Coca Cola wasn’t a complete match dog, but I also saw that she was only 26 lb and was able to spot a sister to a Champion 4 lb of weight and drive her all over the pit! So to me, while Coca Cola was never able to get in there and do anything, I did see that her body strength and vicious tenacity were absolutely outstanding. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and Coca Cola proved to be a tremendous producer for me, and is behind more Grand Champions, Champions, and winners than any dog her prior owner decided to keep.
I merely linebred Coca Cola to individuals of her family that had the traits she was missing (air, brains, defense), and I got some complete and absolutely tremendous dogs off of Coca Cola. So pay attention to your “average” dogs too in order that you don’t miss some truly great traits they may have! In fact, when you start to form your own family around a key individual dog, you will notice that certain breeding combinations carry certain strengths/weaknesses, while other combinations carry exactly the opposite strengths/weaknesses. For example, again within my own bloodline, my Poncho/Screamer dogs consistently throw tremendous stamina and staying power, but not much in the way of mouth, while my Poncho/Coca Cola dogs produce unbelievable body strength and good mouth, but not much air or staying power. Therefore, breeding these two sub-families together, within the family, would be a third step I would have to make to get “the perfect dog” again. (As you progress along in your own program, you will notice the same kinds of thing happen with your own particular breeding combinations.)
What I am trying to get at is you cannot realistically believe you will get 100% complete and flawless animals “every time you breed” at any point in your breeding career. One sub-family may carry x, y, and z strengths ... but a, b, and c weaknesses ... while another sub-family may carry a, b, and c strengths ... but x, y, and z weaknesses. So don’t necessarily throw dogs out of your program that aren’t perfect, if they still have a few solid and wonderful traits (especially if two related dogs have certain traits that will bridge the other's weaknesses), you can very often mix them together and once achieve “the whole package” again. You can’t always get aces in your hand when you play cards, but as long as you get mostly “high cards” you’re doing all right. For instance, you may produce a dog that wins (or even loses) in 2:20 but can’t be brought out again. Just because he wasn’t able to become a 9xW doesn’t mean he isn’t a damned good dog. You may not funnel all of your future breedings through this dog, but if you have a monster-mouth bitch in heat, who’s short on air, you might get a litter of 100% complete animals by breeding her to your 2:20 stud—especially if they are closely-related.
What I am trying to get at is, your career as a breeder is a life-long pursuit, it can never be defined by a single breeding. Each breeding you make is a step, hopefully a step in the right direction toward your goal, which again is your ideal of the perfect performance dog. Like driving a car though, just because you are initially pointed in the right direction doesn’t mean you can take your hands off the wheel and stop steering. If you want to get to where you’re going, you will always have to steer your vehicle to the left a little bit, to the right a little bit, and sometimes you might make a wrong turn and have to double-back and try a different route. You don’t just take your hands off the wheel and floor the throttle or you’ll wind up a wreck, and by this same token your dogs will wind up a “genetic wreck” too if you don’t continuously evaluate each generation carefully and completely. However, again as with driving, the more you do it the more it becomes second nature to you. Well, the more generations into your breeding program you get, and the more you really truly know about each dog in the litter (as well as the whole overall average of that litter), the more you will just “know” and automatically be able to compute in your mind which direction to take each dog in the next step of your program.
Again, by keeping “what you like best” in a performance dog as your Guiding Light, and by line- and inbreeding off of a small group of family-bred dogs that carry these traits (or at least essential key components of these traits), the more and more consistently you will start seeing your results become as you blend and re-blend your dogs together in your matings, in each successive generation. In fact, as stated by renowned German shorthair pointer breeder, Gary Hutchison (of WestWind GSP), who paraphrased Dr. Jerold S. Bell in a tremendous article featured in Gundog Magazine, “Inbreeding significantly increases homozygosity, and therefore uniformity within a litter. One of the best methods of evaluating how successful a linebreeding has been is to gauge the similarity of the littermates as compared with pups of other litters with similar pedigrees. Considerable similarity among littermates tells the breeder the genes have “nicked” or paired together as anticipated. The resulting pups will likely be able to pass these genes to the next generation.”
Homozygosity = sameness. Heterozygosity = differentness.
When you linebreed your dogs, you are trying to get “sameness” in your results (homozygosity). You don’t want mixed results when you breed, you want consistent results. You also want to harness and capture the traits that the dog being linebred-on is renowned for! For instance, the people who linebreed Zebo dogs are trying to get hellafide mouth and power, consistently and dependably, in their linebreeding efforts, because the Flagship Animal (Zebo) was known for these traits. In linebreeding on Zebo dogs, what the intelligent breeder is paying attention to is trying to dovetail his results to get “the same thing every time” in his breedings: badass chest dogs with heavy mouth. The important thing to remember is this goal! If you get a litter of "all black dogs that look like Zebo," color-wise, but not a single one can bust a grape, ability-wise, do you really have “Zebo dogs?” By contrast, if all the dogs come out looking like Zebo ... and performing like Zebo ... then you have made a successful linebreeding and have now harnessed genetic prepotency! Remember, there will always be particular dogs with any bloodline that will simply be prepotent (meaning exceptionally high-percentage producers), and there will always be dogs within that line that will not be prepotent (meaning their produced offspring will be less consistent). This truth applies with any line. Well, clearly what you want to do is continuously funnel your future breedings only through the most consistent, dependable producers, because if you fail to adhere to this standard you will quickly breed yourself into a yardful of inconsistent junk.
If you are linebreeding your dogs and are getting mixed results, then one (or both) individuals are simply not prepotent animals in their ability to throw the desired end. For instance, when I bred dogs for a living I used to breed my Poncho dogs to be lightning-fast, highly-intelligent athletes that figure you out and break you down over time. If I came up with a slow, dopey dog—or if I had a good dog that (for whatever reason) was throwing slow, dopey dogs—I don’t care how that dog looked “on paper”—or what he was himself—if that dog couldn’t consistently reproduce the defining characteristics of my bloodline, then he had no place in my program. Doesn’t mean I abused the dog or mistreated him, it means I simply had to take him off of my breeding list.
However, when I saw an individual dog (or, even better, a particular genetic combination) that consistently and dependably threw the traits that I enjoyed and desired to see in several individual animals they produced, then I would be sure to make it my business to funnel all of my (or most of my) future breeding efforts through this individual, or especially through basic genetic combinations that would consistently and dependably reproduce such individuals. In breeding dogs, this is called “The Funnel Effect,” where a man takes the entire breeding direction of his bloodline down and funnels it through certain particular animals (or breeding combinations) that prepotently throw those certain traits that said man strives for. This is when bloodline breeding becomes interesting!
This is also why two people who have two groups of dogs down from what looks like the same bloodline “on paper” can actually have dramatically-different dogs in caliber and quality in the pit. I may have bred my Poncho dogs for extreme speed, athleticism, intelligence, and a head style—yet I know of other people in the past who have bought some my dogs, who started looking for (and breeding for!) entirely different traits than what I sought when creating my bloodline. Suppose these other fellows do not have my eye, nor my standards ... or even suppose one or two may have even better standards! Still, in either case, within a few short generations down the down “the genetic road” we all might (and in all probability will) have completely different dogs (in looks and in abilities) than what we all started with.
This kind of disparity in standards, and selection methods, is how two different breeders of the same bloodline, down from the same Flagship Dog, can eventually produce completely different results in their respective breeding efforts, over time. In another example, two people can buy two littermate Frisco bitches ... but make different breeding choices with them ... and one guy can wind-up with Frisco dogs that can’t bust a grape, while the other man can have bone-crushing pit artists more in line with the original ideal that formulated the effort to breed the Frisco bloodline to begin with. Same thing with Zebo dogs, or my dogs, or any other bloodline that you choose to get. Your own unique, individual likes and dislikes, talents and shortcomings in your judgement, will eventually become the “stamp” of your own bloodline, good or bad. That is the fun of breeding and that is also why there is the responsibility of breeding dogs well, carefully, and thoughtfully. The following article, written by my friend TFX, shall serve to illustrate how an entire breed can be taken in the wrong direction, by genetic mismanagement, when it had previously been taken to unprecedented heights through impeccable genetic management. The subject of this piece is the bloodhound, but this man is also a 20-year bulldog man with his own bloodline also: Improving The Bloodhound (Up top on this Thread in Post #3).
What TFX writes about concerning the fall (and potential resurrection) of the bloodhound rings true for any working breed: (1) form follows function, (2) linebreeding is the only way to harness consistent genetic excellence, and (3) scatter-breeding and/or not utilizing true working representatives of any breed type is the way to drive any breed’s unique qualities into extinction. And yet 9,999 out of any 10,000 people who breed dogs do not follow a bloodline, they do not linebreed off of the best individuals within their line, and they do not even breed for the defining working characteristics of their preferred breed type. It is sad but it is true. One of the reasons people don’t line- and inbreed off of great dogs is because of the myth that inbreeding is “bad.” They lament all of the horror stories they have heard about health problems, or temperament problems, and yet they don’t realize the tremendous potential of in- and linebreeding. When faults are produced, you can't blame the inbreeding, you can only blame your poor selection of which dogs you inbred on! (Speaking of faults when family breeding, how do we deal with them?)
When Flaws Pop Up
Regardless of how carefully you try to be when you line- and inbreed your dogs, eventually flaws will pop up. These flaws can be either mental or physical, or they can be health-related, or any combination of such flaws, but flaws can and will pop up any time when you family-breed any group of dogs for awhile. Many people incorrectly believe that this is the time to “outcross,” and while in some cases it can be, in other cases the dogs can still be genetically salvaged through a principle I coined called “Genetic Redirection.” In fact, dealing with faults is how a good breeder has the chance to show his real talents. Again, I quote the previous breeder: “When an undesirable trait is ‘unmasked’ the breeder who does his breed a real service is the one that stays with his line long enough to rid it of the undesirable trait. By controlling which specimens within their line are used for breeding in succeeding generations they can eliminate the undesirable trait. Once the recessive gene is removed it can never again affect the breeder’s line. Inbreeding doesn’t ‘cause’ good genes to mutate into bad genes, it merely increases the likelihood that (bad genes) will be displayed.”
Inbreeding simply dovetails and concentrates genetics. This dovetailing and concentrating is done for no other reason than to increase likelihoods. This means that you have increased the likelihood of getting both the good aspects as well as the bad aspects of the line you are working with (or the Flagship Dog you have just begun to work with). Do not lose heart when bad traits pop up, this is normal. And do not listen to the many immature and foolish dogmen out there who like to talk trash if they happen to get a pup from a breeder that has a few bad traits—this is just a part of life and part of line- and inbreeding.
Sometimes when you breed closely, you dovetail and concentrate all of the “bad” genetics into an individual; yet sometimes you dovetail and concentrate all of the desired genetics into an individual as well. When all the bad traits come out in an individual, just get rid of it. If all the dogs in the litter come out lousy, this doesn't mean “the tool of inbreeding” is bad, it means the dogs you used were bad. By contrast, when you inbreed and you get exceptional quality animals across the board, you know that (quite literally) you are now dealing with “genetic gold,” and it is here where you should drop anchor and build your bloodline! If you get some individuals that are exceptional, with a few bad eggs, you merely funnel your future efforts through the good individual while ceasing any future breeding efforts through the flawed individuals. However, you also have to be able to intelligently discern what is truly good from what is truly bad. If you breed-up a 9xW ace that had “the flaw” of a little demodectic mange as a puppy, and you bypass breeding him because of this nothing-flaw, and choose instead to breed to his game bum brother who couldn’t whip a puppy, “because he had no mange,” then you have simply lost your way.
As Dr. Bell said in his own writings: “Every breeder is fighting ‘the drag of the breed,’ which is the tendency for all animals to breed back toward mediocrity. Unsuccessful breeders overlook an animal that has a great trait because it also has a minor fault in favor of an animal that has no faults but no great traits. Successful breeders use specimens within their line that have at least one truly great trait and breed them with specimens that in turn are great where the other dog is weak. In so doing it is possible to linebreed offspring that are better than both the sire and the dame. The resulting specimens in turn can pass the great traits on to the next generation, unlike the F1 hybrid (outcross) animal that results from outcrossing to get the same traits.”
To show an example of how foolish people let true greatness slip through their hands, due to a retarded understanding of what they're supposed to be doing, let us consider the genetic foolishness of what happened with the great CH Robert T Jr. Here was a a 4xW Champion (who beat four 4xWs), and yet he never got bred by his ignorant owner because Robert T “had mange on his feet.” Here was a dog that won over $100,000 in purse money for his owner, who stopped four 4xWs from making Grand Champion, but yet who had an owner who lacked the sense as a breeder to “make more dogs like that” ... so he could win more money like that! This man had a great eye for a match dog, but yet was an utter fool when it came to breeding dogs ... literally, he bought (but never actually bred) every great dog he had. And it was precisely through his utter ignorance of breeding dogs (placing more value on Robert T's “mangy feet” than on his incredible and unbeatable head style) that this man let that kind of unbelievable genetic ability slip through his fingers ... all over a little hair loss. I am sorry, but this is simply retarded. Keep in mind that this was over 20 years ago ... and that same man who campaigned CH Robert T Jr. still has never had a dog like him since. Why is that? Well, it is simply because he had no sense as a breeder. He would select away from using any super dog, just over a minor irrelevant flaw, and would instead choose to breed to “flawless” dogs, in other words dogs with “no faults” but who really weren’t much good at their jobs.
Folks, you need to keep your eye on the ball when you continue to breed your family of dogs. “Flawless” mediocre dogs are not what you’re trying to breed for—truly excellent pit dogs is what you’re trying to breed for. For example, if we draw a parallel of not breeding to Robert T. Jr. over mangy feet, if I were breeding for intelligence in human beings, that would be tantamount to my overlooking breeding to Albert Einstein ... and instead breeding to his idiot brother ... only because the brother had “better hair” and “better skin“ than Albert. The smart man who is breeding for human intelligence will be ignoring Einstein’s “hair” and breeding to him because of his intelligence. Well, it works the same way with these dogs: if you want to keep great traits alive, then you need to breed for those great traits. You breed for great traits by using individuals who came from them, who have these traits themselves, and who repeatedly prove to produce these traits in their pups.
“Not breeding to Albert Einstein” is exactly how foolish this man was in not breeding to CH Robert T Jr., but instead choosing to breed to dogs that couldn’t whip one side of Robert T, all because these other dogs didn’t have the flaw of “mangy feet.” This is an utterly clueless way to breed dogs, yet you will see many people do this time and again. To give you an idea of what this man threw away, genetically, over the condition of mangy feet, CH Robert T Jr. (4xW) not only was an absolutely ace head dog, but he was also sired by the original GR CH Robert T (9xW, 1xL), who was considered the best head dog that ever lived. The original Robert T. beat two Grand Champions and three Champions. Had this man obtained for himself a few bitches similar to Robert T, and who possessed a head style like both Robert Ts ... and then interbred them together ... that man could have built himself a monument of excellence. Hell, if the mange bothered this man, he could have worked on removing those genes in the forthcoming generations, while still giving himself the opportunity to keep the incredible abilities of these two dogs alive on his yard. But that is not what he did; instead be bred the original Robert T to unrelated bitches, and he didn't breed Robert T. Jr. at all. And such “breeding stupidity” is how many great dogs and great bloodlines go by the wayside, is precisely when fools who didn’t have the skill to breed these great dogs in the first place get their hands on them ... and either breed all of the quality right out of what they get ... or (worse) make decisions not to breed to their great dogs over trivial faults, while completely overlooking their truly outstanding abilities. Don’t let this happen to you!
Remember this: A significant fault is only one which impairs a dog to be able to do his job. Anything lessis a “trivial” fault. Keep your eye on the ball, and that ball is remembering the ability to win with a flawless performance is the most important genetic strength to have.
It is not a bulldog’s job to be “mange free” it is a bulldog’s job to win. Yes, of course you do want to weed-out genetic faults from your dogs when they pop up, but you never want to do it at the expense of true excellence. So yeah, if you some mediocre nothing mutt with mange, I agree don’t bother breeding that dog. But the reason isn't the mange, it's because he has nothing compelling about him as an athlete to make you overlook his faults. But if you really do have an ace, or a truly excellent dog with “a minor fault,” who cares? Breed your excellent dogs and your yard will remain excellent for the next generation. You can worry about and weed-out the trivial faults in the subsequent generations, or if they're minor enough don't worry about them at all. But if you overlook true pit excellence in favor of breeding mediocre dogs “with no faults,” I promise that you will wind up with a bunch of mediocre shit on your yard ... that may do well in “conformation shows” ... but you’d better believe they will get run over out there in top competition.
On the other hand, every now and then you will get ALL of the excellent genetics funneled into a particular individual. From his nose to his toes conformationally, to his ability to win, every now and then you will produce a dog that is simply perfecto. If that ever happens to you, treasure this individual, because he will mark a New Era on your yard and in your bloodline. From that point on, you will now be moving forward and breeding everything you got based on this individual, especially if his is closely-bred. And if you keep this up, and continuously build and re-direct your program around such a dogs, you will simply be able to breed great dogs for as long as you live. So watch for such individuals (and whole litters) as you continue forward as a breeder. You might just happen to do a particular linebreeding one day, where all of the good genetics obtain across the board throughout the whole litter—and when this happens you know in your bones that you are dealing with GENETIC GOLD and not just a mere fluke in “an individual.” If you ever see true uniform genetic excellence obtain throughout an entire litter, then you literally have yourself a goldmine of opportunity with across-the-board harnessed genetic excellence. So whatever you do, don’t louse it up by “crossing” something like this out. Instead, preserve it by again building a linebreeding program around this new combination. You see, while your average “unsuccessful” breeder is worrying about getting “a” good dog, you should be forever worrying and striving to create good whole litters. While you will hear and see dozens of fools online discuss the trivialities “percentage blood” on paper pedigrees, what you as an intelligent breeder should forever be striving for is uniform excellence across the board in your litters. Again, as this other breeder confirmed: “The percent blood of immediate ancestors is relatively easy to estimate but not that important. Homozygosity (uniform excellence in a litter) is far more important in determining (litter quality).”
This is the difference between “talking paper” and talking dogs. You see, most people talk about “percentage Bolio,” or “percentage Chinaman,” or “percentage whatever” in the pedigrees of their breedings, but this really means nothing. Homozygosity (or its lack) is what means the world to your linebreeding program. Again homozygosity = sameness. The question you need to ask yourself as a breeder is, do you really have “sameness” in your breedings, as in do you have a high-percentage of pups that turned out exactly like what your goal was to begin with, producing across-the-board genetic excellence? Or do you in fact have heterozygosity (differentness) in your litter, which means some good dogs and some lousy dogs? Or, do you in fact have (what we all hope never to get in our breedings and that is) an entire litterful of garbage?
Most people breeding dogs get entire littersful of garbage, which is why you will always see them having to give their pups away for $200-$300. Only the former goal (namely across-the-board genetic excellence) is what a true bloodline breeder should strive for ... but a man has got to know how to achieve this, because YES it involves skill and technique! I was blessed that Mr. Hollingsworth taught me this skill many years ago, to breed for good whole litters, and not just good individual dogs. A truly good breeder starts with his perfect dog, he buys a few like-bred, like-performing key supporting brood bitches (or males, if the “perfect dog” happens to be a bitch), and then the intelligent breeder forms his linebreeding program around these animals. No matter how many years go by, the breeding goal remains the same: trying to harness and cultivate those great traits that make these dogs perfect in his eyes. Yes, this takes years of dedication, but it is also what separates the truly long-term, dedicated breeder from the multitude of “casual fanciers” who really aren’t all that committed to the breed.
The truly dedicated bloodline breeder attempting to set his own standard is very rare, while “casual fanciers” who have no true core values are found literally everywhere. And you can see truth this in the hundreds of litters of mix-bred, hodge-podge, unrelated crap that most people offer for sale in the community. On the other end of the spectrum, you have “paper breeders,” who breed everything they do to be “tight,” but yet they are not maintaining any kind of physical performance excellence to go along with it. Neither method is used by the serious breeder; these are simply the polar-opposite breeding blunders made by the common dogman who doesn't know how to breed dogs. But that is not why you bought this book (or joined this online community), to be a common dogman, is it? You bought this book or joined this community to rise above the common level. Well, in order to rise above and stand out as a breeder, you first have to have a good eye for a dog, and then you have to have a true sense of purpose in what you're breeding your dogs for. That “purpose” should be nothing but the perpetual goal of getting all-uniform genetic excellence in your breedings, where the dogs produced repeatedly and consistently perform at the level (and employ the style) that you want and hope they do.
It is a simple fact that no one who makes a bunch of senseless crosses can reasonably expect to get consistent “sameness” from “differentness”; this is just logically absurd. Yet most people don't think of it that way. The simple truth is, you can only reasonably expect to get sameness from sameness, which is why if you stick to using dogs of the same style, bred off the same basic genes and genetic combinations, and then if you forever evaluate your produced offspring ... funneling and interbreeding your future generations through its best individuals .... continuously directing the results toward your envisioned goal and/or highest-percentage litters ... you will eventually get a bloodline of dogs that can consistently and reliably be depended on to produce your goal for you every time. It’s really that simple.
I will now conclude this article with a quote from Mr. Hutchison followed by a sample of a few key breeding patterns you can use to good effect: “Successful linebreeding is a long and arduous task; one that requires a lifetime’s commitment to a particular line of dogs. We have great respect for the few breeders of German shorthairs who successfully developed and perpetuated their particular line of GSPs in the past. Even if we don’t have a single dog from their line in our pedigrees we have studied their breeding patterns and, over the years, developed a deep appreciation for their work.”
Breeding Patterns
Before we go, we you will notice that this man spoke of “breeding patterns,” and indeed if you know how to read a pedigree you will, time and again, see the same breeding patterns replicated over and over again by every successful breeder who has ever bred dogs. Breeding patterns can be seen in “paper pedigrees” but to a person who understands what he’s looking at, the information goes much deeper, because the dogs in the pedigrees should also be upholding the performance standards the intensive program is trying to set. The best way to describe a breeding pattern in a pedigree would be to say that the key dogs of the bloodline are placed in the same slots in the pedigree, so that they influence the results in a deliberate and consistent way. But this can only happen if the dogs being stuck in these “slots” are worthy of the effort!
Well, what does that mean? It really boils down to probability and mathematics. Each slot in the pedigree has a “percentage chance” of influencing the produced pups. Each parent, for example, influences the pups by a 50% probability (at least on paper). Each grandparent influences by 25% (again, on paper). But in reality, a truly prepotent brood dog will (for whatever reason) carry a greater percentage influence factor, while a dog that is not prepotent will fail to carry any influence (again, for whatever reason).
Well, when you discover that you have a truly prepotent animal, when you stick him in a “slot” on the pedigree tree he puts a prepotent “spin” on things. While in theory any sire has only a 50% chance to influence the pups, the truth is certain studs throw “themselves” into their offspring, 60-, 70-, 80% of the time. When you see a dog who produces like this, he is showing himself to be prepotent. (It works the same way with a prepotent brood bitch.) Therefore, the more you load your pedigree up with these prepotent individuals, especially when you interbreed them with other prepotent individuals of the same family, the more control you have over what you are going to get. The power of linebreeding will begin to show itself when you move further into each successive generation of your program, because you will be able to repeatedly load-up on more-and-more prepotent dogs, thus minimizing the effect of any unwanted dogs. So let’s take a look at a common breeding pattern, the double-grandsire breeding, to show how this works. A double-grandsire breeding is one where you pair a half-sister to a half brother, who thereby share either the same mother or the same father, thus doubling-up on that key dog or bitch. Below is an example of a double-granddaughter breeding I did back in 1999. What makes this breeding interesting is that I doubled-up on my key stud dog Poncho by breeding a son of his to a daughter of his, yet on the right side you can also see that not only did this breeding double-up on Poncho, but it quadrupled-up on the Hollingsworth blood behind all 4 grandparents, leaving the genetic influence of both elemental components at 50%.
This breeding above represents some of my own initial efforts as a breeder. If you take a look at the indivdual parents, Thunder and Rosey, the green lettering of the “Poncho” may make it seem like my initial goal when I bred them, as individuals, was to concentrate on on Poncho, but the truth is I was trying to preserve the Hollingsworth bloodline by this effort, because the two dogs I used in this breeding carried the Hollingsworth influence! This is where you can't just follow the “paper,” you have to follow the physical reality (traits) that the dogs you're using carry! In this case, the genetic dominance of the wall of Hollingsworth dogs behind Poncho, (Red Sonja and Little Bootie) was so heavy it would not be denied in this breeding—and the fact that both Thunder and Rosey were so strongly influenced by their Hollingsworth blood themselves made it a cinch. This is why every single dog in the breeding (including Sassy herself) came out as quintessential “Hollingsworth dogs,” even though “on paper” this breeding was “double-Poncho” too.
Key Point: On paper, Sassy was as much “50% Poncho” as she was “50% Hollingsworth,” but in the real world Sassy was for all intent and purposes a full-blooded Hollingsworth dog—from her long beautiful ears to her beautiful body and placid temper. Sassy proved to be a great, game old brood bitch, but she was “a Hollingsworth dog” genetically, and not a Poncho dog in the least. This is exactly why a person should not pay attention to paperwork as much as they should pay attention to their living dogs. There are probably a thousand people who would look at Sassy‘s “papers” and call her “a double-Poncho dog,” but I look at Sassy, as her breeder, and call her a quadruple-Hollingsworth dog. She is absolutely nothing like Poncho, and has nowhere near his speed or intelligence. What Sassy is is an absolutely gorgeous animal, a rock-solid bitch in her own right, and I consider her to be an extremely valuable dog. But the points I am making here are two: 1) You can’t just look at your paperwork, because the fact is the produced dogs you are trying to make can “pull” from sides of the pedigrees you weren’t planning on; and 2) even though a pup may not come out from the side of the pedigree you had planned, it can still be a valuable and important animal to your program, and can still be genetically-redirected further still. Sassy was simply 50% Hollingsworth too and that is what she “pulled” from. But the story isn’t over yet ...
Genetic Re-Direction
While on the subject of the various breeding patterns and genetic combinations that have proven time and again to be successful, it is important to keep the concept of “Genetic Re-Direction” in mind. Genetic re-direction is a term I coined several years ago to describe the “steering” effect we must always do when we breed dogs. You might remember the analogy to driving I gave previously, where I said that even if you are driving a car and are pointed in the right direction, you still have to steer the car as you continue driving forward, otherwise you will quickly go off course. So too, even if you have a Flagship Dog who embodies your ideals as the perfect animal, you will still have to continuously breed this dog, and the dogs you get off him, in the right direction—toward your original goals—otherwise you will likewise quickly go off course. The “right direction” is either their basic genetic composition, physical performance, or (preferably) both.
All right, so let’s consider the art of genetic re-direction as it applies to Sassy’s pedigree on the previous page and how it can be manipulated. When I created Sassy, I had already set into motion a course of “direction” so heavy in the direction of the Hollingsworth blood (which is itself tremendously prepotent) that just one double-breeding on Poncho was not enough of a genetic influence to totally change course and “make more Poncho dogs,” when I had twice as much Hollingsworth influence behind her. What I did was make another litter of Hollingsworth dogs (and it was a good litter too!). But I wanted Poncho dogs, so I made another breeding, using Sassy later in her life, to once again try to re-direct my bloodline back in the direction of where I wanted it to go: towards Poncho.
By using the principle of Genetic Re-Direction, both on paper and in physical traits, I bred the heavy-Hollingsworth Sassy to the heavy-CH Hammer-bred Silverback. Not only was I triple-breeding on Poncho (via his sister Missy), but the topside of Silverback is also purebred CH Hammer (where Sassy was purebred Hollingsworth), which in essence re-created the original Hammer/Hollingsworth combo that produced Poncho’s litter to begin with. In re-directing the heavy-Hollingsworth influence of Sassy back to a heavy-Hammer dog like Silverback, I not only “refreshed” my original Hammer/Hollingsworth foundational breeding “on paper,” but I likewise triple-bred on the littermates of that breeding by using a direct son of Poncho’s sister Missy over a double-bred Poncho bitch in Sassy. This time, the genetic spin I was looking for obtained, and I was successfully able to turn my genetic course around from continuing in the Hollingsworth direction, and instead was able to re-direct it back toward my preferred course, which is linebreeding on Poncho and Missy. I had loaded-up on the Hammer side of my genetic components in Silverback on one side of my yard, and I had loaded-up on the Hollingsworth side of my genetic components on the other side of my yard in Sassy, and so I once again was able to “reinvent the wheel” by blending them together, and I got one little pup out of the 10-year-old Sassy that turned out to be a spittin’ image of Poncho. He has same exact coloration and markings as Poncho, the same intense eyes, and the same full-drop ears. Hence the name PonchoBack—I got Poncho “back” again—who proved his greatness in overcoming a devastating littermate to Gr Ch Rose Red, stopping him in a truly great fight in 2:36 In fact, this exact same level of success came from another “triple-bred Poncho” breeding when it produced Ch Miagi (4xW) out of Sassy's sister Razor being bred to a direct son of Poncho in Hero:
The point of this discussion is that many things had the potential of happening genetically with this blood in my hands, but by directing it, and then re-directing it, toward what I like most (Poncho dogs), I was able first to steer it in one direction (toward the Hollingsworth dogs) and then when re-directed it back towards the Hammer dogs, a new pair of World Class Head dogs were created (which is what I like most). Thus is the power of paying attention to everything that is happening at the same time in your breedings, and directing things to where you want them to go. You likewise should not worry if your own breeding plans don’t work out the way you want in your first step—as it may work out to perfection in the next step. You see, different breeders may have done different things from what I did. One breeder may have continued to breed in the Hollingsworth direction. Another breeder might not have had any idea what direction he was headed, and just decided to breed Sassy to some different blood to “see what happens.” Whereas with me, I decided the best overall dogs were a combination of the two elements, the Hammer blood and the Hollingsworth blood, put together, and so that is what I set out to do, which was re-balance everything once again.
This brings us to another element of breeding dogs, which is keeping pockets of purebred representatives of your original components around to re-blend back together again down the road. Not only do you want to linebreed on your top dog by using him to mix with other like-bred bitches (or a key bitch to mix with like-bred studs), but you also want to keep elements on your yard bred like your key dog’s father, as well as elements bred like your key dog’s mother—by breeding your key dog to both sides of his own pedigree, so that down the road you can re-blend these produced dogs with each other again. This will enable you to “re-invent the wheel” on two different levels: 1) you will be “refreshing” the same basic genetic pattern that created your dog to begin with, by breeding a dog linebred on his topside to a bitch linebred on his bottom side, and 2) you will also be doing this while linebreeding on him.
This is called “genetic management” which is making sure you keep your available options alive to maintain your precious gene pool on many levels. You need to do this because some combinations you try aren’t going to work right, while others will, and you may also have to “go back to the beginning” again, every so often, to “refresh” your basic genetic combinations that got you started. This is what I did to produce PonchoBack, and if you check the pedigrees of Fletcher Chavis, Ronald Boyles, E.J. Hollingsworth, Floyd Boudreaux, Tom Garner, and many other top breeders you will see them doing this many times over in their family breedings too.
When Fletcher Chavis hit the jackpot by creating his famous Redboy/Jocko “battle-cross,” he didn’t keep crossing those dogs. And he didn’t just keep breeding his new dogs together only. What he did was he dropped anchor right there on the spot and set to build an army of like-bred dogs on his yard, as well as purebred pockets of both sides of this pedigree as key elements to tap into when “refreshment” was needed. He would load up on some old Redboy dogs here, and some old Jocko dogs there, while at the same time he was going forward with his newly-created Redboy/Jocko cross-dogs. Yet there were times when he would occasionally re-blend his new dogs back again with elements of one side of their original composition, or to the other side too, when needed. Check Chavis’ pedigrees and you will see this happen over and over again. All good breeders do this, and if you want to be a good breeder you will too.
In getting back to genetic breeding patterns, while keeping in mind the concept of genetic re-direction, there are 7 basic breeding patterns upon which you may make an infinite number of possible breeding decisions. They are: 1) brother/sister; 2) father/daughter; 3) mother/son; 4) double-bred; 5) triple-bred; 6) triple-cross; 7) 50/75. The key to forming a bloodline around your best and most favorite-style dogs consists of 3 basic factors:
Keeping your original goal clearly in mind as you evaluate each new generation;
Making use of time-proven genetic breeding patterns in your program; and
Using only prepotent individuals to fill-in the key slots of those genetic breeding patterns.
Again, you will remember what I said previously: “The power of linebreeding will begin to show itself when you move further into each generation of your program, because you will be able to repeatedly load-up on your prepotent dogs, more and more, thus minimizing the effect of the unwanted dogs.” You do NOT put ordinary dogs in the key slots in your peds, you put truly prepotent dogs in those key slots, if you expect to develop a truly prepotent bloodline. Why would you double-breed on a stud that throws inconsistent traits? Only a fool would do this, and yet you see fools do this all the time. Instead, you double-breed on a stud that is (and consistently-throws) a much higher-than-average percentage of what you’re looking for than your other studs. When you keep sticking the prepotent dogs in the proper “pedigree slots,” what you do is you begin to diminish the myriad of other genetic influences that might possibly be back there, and instead you begin to hyper-focus on the prepotency of that special individual you keep repetitively breeding on.
When I bred Sassy for instance, there was a big clash in genetics between my loading up on Poncho versus my loading-up on the Hollingsworth dogs behind him and all the others. The Hollingsworth dogs dominated because there was more of them back there, on top of which I used two Poncho offspring that themselves happened to pull off of the Hollingsworth side of their pedigree more too, so I got an all-Hollingsworth-like litter, including Sassy.
As I progressed further and introduced Silverback to the genetic mix, I pushed-back the Hollingsworth dogs a bit, and then I triple-bred on the dogs I decided I liked better, Poncho and Missy, and whollah! I got “PonchoBack.” There was nothing wrong with Sassy, nor was there anything wrong with the Hollingsworth dogs either. They were all beautiful, stunning, rock-solid dogs. But none of them had that nearly-human intelligence and just the uncanny ability to figure anything out and turn it against an opponent. But Silverback did have this intelligence, and so did his mama Missy, and thus I used both him as an individual, as well as what was behind him genetically in Missy, to re-direct the next step in my program back to where I wanted it, and I got exactly that. With that said, let me show you now the 7 linebreeding patterns that you can use to a lifetime of good effect:
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These are the seven basic breeding combinations you will be using. This is not to suggest there aren’t more and different combinations than these, but these are the most common breeding patterns used to manage a bloodline. In my own program, Poncho was the Flagship Animal, and so he was generally the dog I wanted to “influence” my program. Of the breeding patterns you see here, the brother-sister breeding (pattern 1) and the triple-cross (pattern 6) are the least-used. For some reason, brother-sister breedings tend not to produce with the same consistency as other inbreeding/linebreeding techniques. There have been a few great dogs produced like this (e.g., CH 357), but for the most part they don’t amount to much. Even Maurice Carver himself said, “Brother-sister breedings will put you two steps forward and 3 steps back.” I am not saying don’t use them, but I would only use them very, very sparingly. In fact, I have only made one brother/sister breeding in my life.
In my personal opinion, the father/daughter breeding combo and the mother/son breeding combo (patterns 2 and 3) are the very best breeding patterns to produce prepotent broodstock animals, and if a dog from a breeding like this has match ability also it will be the best producer you ever had. Also called, “¾-¼ breedings,” these breedings will usually serve as the acid test to determine whether your stud dog (or brood bitch) is truly prepotent. You can make the ¼ element of the same basic bloodline as yours, or you can have the ¼ element be an “out,” which has time and again proven to produce blockbuster performance dogs and brood dogs. In both breeding patterns 2 and 3, the ¼ element was of the same general bloodline, and the produced dogs were tremendously prepotent animals. But I also have made such a breeding with a ¼ “out” and the resulting breeding produce Sudden Death’s CH Honeybunch. I even bred two ¾-¼ Poncho dogs together (a sister to CH Honeybunch to Duke Nukem represented by pattern 2), and I got PrettyBoy, who won in 2:42 and lost game to CH BigBoy in 1:10. So you can stack these linebreeding patterns on top of each other also and still get good dogs.
In fact, the breeding I made to produce PonchoBack is nothing but combining a triple-breeding of CH Hammer on top (pattern 5) bred to a double-breeding of Poncho on bottom (pattern 4). Not only was this a combination of these two breedings that I used, but further it was itself a triple-breeding on Poncho and Missy too. As also mentioned, a very similar triple-breeding on Poncho like this (represented on pattern 5) was Sassy’s sister Razor (double-Poncho) bred to Hero (right off of Poncho), which produced both CH Miagi and CH Pierce, bred almost identical to PonchoBack. The only real ¼ difference genetically would be Ouch vs. Kitana. But with any triple-breeding (pattern 5), you must first build it on a pattern 1 or 4 dog, as Ouch was brother/sister (pattern 1) while Razor and Sassy were pattern 4. With pattern 4, you can make the stud your double-bred focus as I did with Poncho, or you can make it with your bitch. You can have the bottom of one side “pure,” the bottom of both sides “pure”—or one side “pure” with the other ¼ being an “out”—or you could even have both ¼s be “outs” and then double-up on the key dog again, with two “outs,” which has also been done time and again. However, I personally would only want a ¼ “out” at most in a double-breeding, for another way to achieve a ¾-¼ effect.
Very few people get to the point in their programs that they do pattern #6, which is taking a father/daughter-bred gyp (pattern 2) back to that key stud dog again. But I think that the performance/production record of Chavis’ CH YellowJohn, whose pedigree was used in this example, proves that this combination can be extraordinarily successful, in both the ability to win as well as to produce winners. The key wasn’t the just the breeding pattern only, however. It was the fact Redboy was such a prepotent animal too that was the truly deciding factor. These breeding patterns are only useful if the dog you are sticking in those slots fits the definition of a prepotent animal. Sticking a mediocre nothing dog in these slots will not create a prepotent bloodline, just a lot of useless “close-bred” garbage.
Finally, breeding pattern #7 is just a pattern 2 and pattern 4 fused together: a ¾ (75%) dog mated to a 50% dog. And there have been many, many great dogs produced from this combination. From my own bloodline, CH Mr. Serious comes to mind, and perhaps one of the most famous dogs of all time, GR CH Buck, was nothing but a 50% Bolio-bred dog on top (Little Tater) bred to a 75% Bolio bred dog on bottom (Red). The only difference in Buck’s pedigree from the one shown was the fact his sire Little Tater was not a direct son of Bolio, but instead a double-bred grandson (which is breeding pattern #4).
Conclusion
These breeding patterns I have shown you are by no means the only way you can breed your dogs, but they are simply the best way to breed your dogs on average—and that includes blending various combinations of these patterns together at some point down the road too.
But here again, these breeding patterns will not work on just their own. They require an intelligent and knowledgeable selection of the right dogs to stick into these slots on your part. Again, using a mediocre dog who can’t produce as the foundational animal to build these structures around won’t get you what you’re after. However, when you are blessed with a truly great animal, that defines your ideals and goals, and that also is blessed with the legitimately prepotent ability to produce your ideal, dependably and consistently, then if you build a breeding framework around these patterns and structures, using this dog as the star—and supported by like-bred, like performing individuals—you will eventually build a monument of genetic dependability for yourself—provided you continuously go through each successive generation of dogs produced and select only those individuals who accurately-represent your ideals to put back into your program.
One more thing: as you continuously move forward, every 2-3 generations you should get another ace or super dog. You can’t reasonably expect every litter to be full of aces, but you can expect every litter to be full of good, solid bulldogs who epitomize at least some aspect of your perfect ideal. One group may have average mouth but great air, another group may have average air but great mouth, and then you simply re-blend these dogs back together again. Etc., etc., etc.
Anyway, take some time and really study the patterns of the great breeders of the past. Study the breeding patterns of the great breeders of today. You will see these same patterns played-out time and again, all from bloodline breeders. You will never see a single long-term-successful breeder who does not use these patterns, either. You will never see a long-term successful “blood mixer” or “scatter-bred” breeder. The only breeders who have ever, or who will ever, stand the test of time are bloodline breeders. Even when a breeder bases his yard off of an original cross, the first thing he will do is get elements of both sides of that cross together, and then constantly re-shuffle these decks again and again, blending and re-blending these two lines—until, eventually, what that breeder makes is his own bloodline.
Such is the path Fletcher Chavis took, and such is the path Victor Aycart took. These men started with a great original cross, that really nicked, and they had a great Flagship Animal to represent their cross. From there, all these men did was interbreed supporting members of these same basic cross with their Flagship Dog, as well as go back to one side or the other of their original crosses at times, only to move forward again with their same basic breeding combination. You never saw these men jump around from bloodline-to-bloodline. You saw them receive a genetic gift in a dog, you saw them recognize that gift for what it was, and then you saw these men stick with that decision and work with that combination for the rest of their entire dog careers. That is what all great breeders have done, that is what all great breeders still do, and that is what anyone who hopes to be able to breed great dogs themselves, consistently, must do as well.
It is my hope that you become blessed with such a foundational animal for yourself, and that you also recognize and respect this dog for what he is, and that you recognize his potential as a brood animal as well. If you do so, and if you are right in your judgment, then following these breeding patterns will guarantee your success at preserving his traits, just as surely as following the other sections of this book will help you in these regards as well.
Preserving excellence in these dogs is a multi-faceted challenge, on every level, from beginning to end—starting with just keeping these dogs healthy and alive for a lifetime, to schooling them right, to evaluating them fairly and correctly, to calling their weight right, to conditioning them properly, to getting passed another dogman’s experience and charge to get a win, and then to keeping your athlete alive after that. Remember, even if you get your “dream ace,” you can still kill off his quality genetics by breeding him wrong, and thereby lose everything you worked so hard to get.
My goal in this exhaustive article was to help you “keep them alive” in this regard as well, by showing you the time-proven breeding methods that have been used since antiquity to keep genetic consistency alive and well in a bloodline. Bloodline breeding is the only way to go for long-term success, and basing your line on a truly defining, Flagship Animal (with the right supportive breeding partners), and then basing your breedings on time-proven patterns, is the only way to succeed for the long haul. Good luck to you in your goals, and I hope that this entire book (and this website) help you in this regard, from beginning to end, every step of the way.
~ California Jack (Disclaimer)
Very good Read.
I try t pay attention to each and everyone for over the last 40 years when it comes to making good bulldogs better.
You can always lean something from everyone if you listen close enough.
From the start of it all I have been a family bred man.
Those that started me out in the 70's had bred there own family from scratch. I had family members and friends that had there own family of animals from dogs to horses to even pigeons .
I didn't just learn how to read a pedigree but how to manipulate %'s . I learned how to make establish a base and also how to change the base with out changing the dogs.
I had learned that 1st hand experience with each dog will always over shadow reading and talking about dogs you never owned or even had your hands on.
It's never how the dog is bred as important as how you plan on breeding the dog. It doesn't take much to have a dog change directions and if your not basing what you do by what you have seen then even dogs related can and will produce different dogs. Each breeder has a different standard and 25% is a major factor in all dogs. It's always better to produce a dog to go with a already proven dog on your yard than it is to build up a producing dog. A cross may give you a show stopper but if you don't know and understand how to maintain or how to add what a dog is missing than you'll spend your youth , money and time chasing other folks dreams.
I like seeing how other breeders perceive things. Once again great read and great info.
For over the last 2 1/2 decades I still stand behind what I feed. I still go by allot of things I have learned over the years from the un famous just as much as the famous in this thing we do.
I had started with a continued using line breeding patterns . For me those worked the best. Saves time, money and culling.
The more you see , the less you guess. That's what I believe and know. Another thing was I could buy a great dog but I could not buy the family of dogs I wanted. I had to breed them myself.
Great dogs don't always produce great families, but a great family will always produce great dogs fro time -time. Focus on what you have not what you have heard , base dogs on them and not there papers, and Last but not least is "Keep them tight and check them hard". It only takes a drop of crap to turn a pure jar of honey into a jar full of crap.
Base pit bulls on performance not propaganda.
They best will show you they are the best. No one has to talk you to death about it.
As I was told let the chain spots be the tittles. They have to earn them and kept them.
Just my 2 cents after 40+ years and over a dozen generation and a handful of different but related families,
http://www.thepitbullbible.com/forum...p?dog_id=62787
My 2 cents when it comes to making good dogs better.