Well, I agree that breeding "best to best" within a family is (by definition) "Best Practice."

However, if you followed what I was saying, the point being made was that, even when you do breed "best to best," you can still come out with bums. When I bred Poncho and Missy together, I was breeding best-to-best, but yet I got the bum Phoenix. When I bred Poncho to Screamer, I again was breeding Best-to-Best, and I that time I did get an ace in Jezebel. However, most of the dogs in her litter were just extremely game, average dogs.

When I bred the ace Jezebel to the bum Phoenix, 2 out of 3 dogs produced were A-level dogs, with one bum in Perfect. And even though Perfect was far from 'perfect,' she still had a bunch of super dogs in her immediate ancestry, and so it was my job to "re-shuffle the deck" in such a way as to get all the good stuff back out of her ... and by breeding Perfect to U-Nhan-Rha, I was able to do that: and I got across-the-board excellence in that litter.

The point is, when you inbreed with bums, if there is enough really good genes "right there," just below the surface, with the correct INbreeding selection you can sometimes bring it all right back out again So too was the story of the Gr Ch Junior dog a few pages back. 6x and 7x winners were bred together (best-to-best), but all these breedings did was produce a bunch of losers. Those losers were interbred to produce some decent, but not spectacular, dogs ... but when Jackson re-shuffled his own deck a third time he got a brand new 6xW out of the mix.

Therefore, the lesson to be learned here is breeding "Best to Best" doesn't necessarily do anything for you ... because it is a breeding fact that excellence tends to revert back to average

Therefore, at the end of the day, it is the ability to re-shuffle the deck and bring back the excellence out of that "genetic deck" that means everything to the saying "Keeping The Blood Alive" ...

Jack