Question on buying dogs.

[Officially Retired]

Honestly I can't I have bred 6 litters (6th coming up) , this year I have known this breed for 30 years , bred my first litter in 2000
I have never been able to tell which one will turn out, If I have to pick , I just pick on looks.
I like the bulldog types and I love the color brindle

Honestly, I would never make a breeding if I thought I would only have 1 turn out.

I make breedings that (I believe) the average dog in the litter will simply be gamer and smarter than the average dogs in other people's litters.

The "type" I look for is smart, athletic, and sure of itself.

The gameness has to be there genetically (you can't "see" it in a dog). But you can spot an athlete (not from a pic, but by watching it move).

They have a certain stance I like, a certain way they do things; it's almost like a "stamp" I can see in them that they bred "true to type."

Come to think of it , I am not a breeder , the choice to start breeding came out of necessity ( I figured I could not do worse than the ones I was buying) , I am just down to the third generation and I only breed when I need something.
to give you a picture of where I stand
I have a litter on the way because I have 4 empty spaces ( the dam is almost 5 and is her first litter , might even be her last)
my last litter was 4 years ago
I hope to get 4 males and if there more I get rid of the rest

Well, what I think you are doing, really, is making sure you keep the best one, rather than "hoping you choose" the best one, and letting the rest go.

There is always a risk of being wrong, so what you're doing is just ensuring you get what you want.

So and this an assumption
I think if you breed quite a lot and see a lot of those pups than you might develop some sense of which may turn out
so I breed far less to actually develop that sense

Which is understandable and the way it works in pretty much everything.

I have bred the same line for basically the entire time I have been in dogs. While all of the dogs are individuals, when you linebreed, you should be breeding for a TYPE, and almost invariably when I see that "type" I am looking at a true Poncho dog: fast, smart, game, pit savvy, tough, gets better the longer it goes, etc. That is just their "type."

All throughout the entirety of my breeding, I selected game dogs that came from entire litters of game dogs, not just "the one" game individual in a litter of curs. That right there set me apart from most.

People who breed to "the one" game individual in a litter are basically breeding to have ONE (or no) game individuals in their litters. (They don't think of it like that, but in essence that's what they're doing.) Such people can never believe in high-percentage litters because they have never experienced them. (Nor will they ever, until they move on to dogs that come from them.) That doesn't mean they can't have great individual dogs; but it does mean they will never have high-percentage turnouts, unless and until they start to breed for them.

I assume gameness in my line, because I have always made sure that most of the pups (or all) turn out game in the litters I produce. The foundation dogs I used (Hammer, Trinx, No Regrets, etc.) were absolutely game dogs who came from an entire litter of absolutely game dogs. That kind of selectivity makes all the difference in the world. People say "all-game litters don't exist," but they do. Such people may have never seen one, but that is because they're looking in the wrong lines (or wrong individuals).

Only if a person really looks for, finds, and then sticks with dogs that come from percentages like that, can he then produce percentages like that.
If you don't breed to such dogs, you surely won't get such dogs. Again, this should be common sense, but most don't think of things like this.
There is nothing about breeding that is 100% certainty, but can surely increase (or decrease) your odds, dramatically (one way or the other) through your selection

So if I can't get high percentages down, then I am not even at the point of breeding bulldogs yet IMO; I am breeding something else.

Further, I have always bred for a type of dog that "prevails in the end," more so than prevails right off the bat. A lot of times my dogs may establish control right away, on the head, but they seldom blow other dogs out of the water (unless there's a Coca Cola influence). What they do is pace themselves, conserve their strength, systematically dismantle, and save themselves for later. My dogs tend to get stronger and more serious the longer it goes ... while most people's stuff burns themselves out early, and starts fading out after :30-1:00. It is a recipe that has worked for a very long time ...

A lot of people call my dogs "low ability" because they don't kill everything early, but they do have "the ability" to win in the end, which is the most important kind of ability there is. What happens "at first" or "starting out," ultimately, is meaningless. Silverback was a rare exception to my usual dog, by his ability to just steamroll a dog and finish right away, but yet he threw dogs that could go 2+ hours, even though he himself could DOA a dog in :10. That is *not* typical of my line, but it is typical that they can beat dogs who can do this ...

Jack