Quote Originally Posted by QCKLime
That's a good reply, VDK, and I agree to an extent. You can only know so much about a breeding by looking at it on paper (Spyder is a VERY nicely bred bitch, btw, some of the stuff that I love in there), but to me, that breeding is still a "cross", even though it directs back to very similar ancestors for the simple reason that BOTH of those lines have been so well line- bred and maintained (especially in this particular instance) that the dogs don't resemble each other very much anymore.
The mainstay "traits" of heavy Chinaman dogs vs. heavy "Carver" dogs are very different, in EVERY specimen I've seen of both, so there's something to gain and lose in the hand off of what traits your male has and what traits your female possesses. Very different from taking two similarly bred dogs, known for similar traits, that carry said traits, and line or inbreeding in an effort to preserve those traits.
Now, that's just my opinion, and obviously I don't know your two individual dogs personally, this may not apply to them at all -- but as LINES, they are different. If you go far enough back, you're bound to intersect at some point with the great dogs of the past that SO MANY of our present day dogs are down from, but it doesn't necessarily prevent them from being a "cross" in a modern breeding. You have to decide when that ancestry is a moot point. A friend of mine and I were just corresponding about this the other day, after I referred to my dogs as "Banjo/Bolio crosses" because Banjo is essentially an inbred Butcherboy dog, and Bolio and Butcherboy are comprised of all the same dogs, or siblings thereof, just inverted. He asserted that it works so well because it isn't really a "cross" at all, and why it may blend well together now because it's originated and funneled through similar bred dogs, I still consider it a cross as well, as my heavy Bolio dogs are nothing AT ALL like my heavy Banjo dogs.

People who have never actually bred their own families don't realize that, even within the same family, there are sub-families that have absolutely no similarity at all (even though they look "the same" on paper).

I remember when I was young in the game, Big Ernie showed me one of his pedigees and I said, "Isn't that too tight?", to which he responded, "Nah, what most people consider 'too tight' I consider to be an outcross, and what I consider to be tight most people call insane." He went on to explain that dogs from 'this' group of his family were totally-different, traits-wise, to dogs from 'that' group of his family. In fact, the dog he beat Poncho with (Ch Leonard) was technically an inbred dog (Ch Julius and Ch Whitey were littermates, while Texanne was their half-sister), but he considered it an outcross.

I wasn't dogman enough back then to understand what he was trying to tell me, as "papers" were the only thing I understood in regards to "tightness," but I sure do understand what he means today. Forget totally different lines with "some common ancestry" back 6-10 generations, you can have a group of dogs that have all the exact same ancestors right there upfront, but that picked up different traits from one another, and therefore (even though 'on paper' they're loaded with the same ancestor) in reality they are totally different genetically ... because different traits funneled through, and so by breeding them together, you are essentially making an 'outcross' within the family.

To the average person, who doesn't actually know the dogs in the pedigree, and who is only reading a piece of paper, the breeding can look "too tight" to their un-seeing eyes, but to those who actually know the strengths/weaknesses of every dog in the pedigree, they can see that, in reality, the breeding is an outcross of completely different traits blended together, albeit from the same family.

Jack

PS: Here is a super-tight preservational breeding Big Ernie did on the already-inbred Ch Leonard: he bred Leonard back to his mother, and then he bred the bitch produced back to Ch Leonard, to produce Face.


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