Top knotch dogs come from lesser parents?

I am on YBM side also...but like I have always said...best to the best and keep them related...but if necessary bred to the second best one time and then choose carefully from the offspring of that cross...that breeding is way better than a total outcross no matter how good the dog...that is if you think highly of your strain...

I have given an example of breeding a dog with a strong back line with a dog with a sway back to improve the dog and to not breed a sway back to a roach back dog...because now you will have 2 bad traits and not just one...but it is better to breed dogs that have good toplines...but sometimes it is the best option to breed out one bad trait when all other traits are of the best...

My beliefs about breeding dogs have never changed since the first time I joined ethd...except for a new theory I developed about a month or 2 ago...I now believe that hunting traits can improve just from selecting from your own line/strain of dogs...we can shop around and bring a new dog in to improve on a trait but if you already have very good dogs you can actually get better...as the breeders are selected it is possible to get more hunt and more grit if you are breeding to improve those traits...I now believe that hunting traits can be a combination of several genes that act as one gene in a chromosome...so if my theory is right then these genes can be rearranged so that the dog can be a better hunter or not depending on the arrangement...

The theory about improvement from an intensely linebred line of dogs came about from reading an article on a long haired breed of dogs...long hair is a recessive trait...and over a period of time when breeding this breed of dogs the hair keeps getting longer...so they would periodically breed a dog of shorter hair to get the length back to meet the standard...I found this article when I was looking to find some information on whether or not if hunting traits were dominant or recessive...never found any info on that subject...and when I bred the mtn cur for over 15 years, the over all hunting traits I was breeding for were improving not only in higher percentages of good dogs but was getting cur dogs that were extra rough, dogs that hunted extra hard and the ability to find game improved...all from just selecting the best and only breeding the very best from the same line dogs...