Tell me if I'm right about this fellas. Game-bred s almost more of a type of pitbull now than it is actual bloodline. For this reason...if Jeep for example was in a pedigree 30 times but jeeps been dead so many yrs now and presumably none or very few of the dogs in the pedigree since him have been fought we don't know if they were game or not half of them coulda been curs but were nvr tested.
Hard to say what I mean but I hope y'all catch my drift.
EXACTLY. I have been preaching this for a long time. A bloodline (or family of dogs) is only as good as the person doing the breeding and culling. I have made the argument before and will do it again. We will use the dog Jeep as an example since we are on the subject. However we could use any known famous dog from any breed of working dog that carries name recognition with it. But for now we will use Jeep.
Here goes . . . . You could take 2 different dogmen / dog breeders, and go back to say 1988 and go to James Crenshaw's place and purchase 20 puppies directly Sired by Jeep and out of females sired by Jeep. So these 20 puppies are by Jeep bred back to his daughters. So this is as "up close" Jeep genetics as you can get. You give 10 puppies to one guy, and you give 10 puppies to the other guy. The rules are as follows. Each man must raise his 10 puppies to adulthood. He has to school them out, train them, select which ones are good and which ones aren't. He has to decide which ones are good enough to be bred and which ones aren't. He must breed them ONLY to each other for 7 years. He is allowed every 7 years to breed outside his own program to make an outcross. However, once he has made the outcross, he must breed back ONLY to the dogs on his yard that he has selected and culled from (that originally came from and go back to the initial Jeep puppies). So after following these rules from 1988 to 2013, you would have two different breeders with 25 years of heavy Jeep genetics in their programs, with only 3 outcrosses so far. Now ON PAPER, both sets of dogs are about as inbred Jeep as you can find. Both sets of dogs are gonna have basically the same percentage of Jeep blood. However, it is possible that these two separate sets of dogs could be as different as night and day. One group could be FAR SUPERIOR to the other group. They may even look different. What people don't understand is that you can't inbreed FOREVER. You have to go outside the blood at some point and make an outcross, or the dogs are gonna start breaking down (structurally, performance, mental, fertility, health, strength, etc, etc). So while both of these groups are real heavy bred Jeep, it kinda depends on which dogs were used as outcrosses along the way as to which group will be better. Also, maybe one guy culls harder than the other guy. Maybe one guy makes excuses for poor performance. Maybe one guy can't cull a dog, so he gives it away . . and the other guy is looking for a reason to cull because feed aint cheap. Maybe one guy is testing his dogs and putting his reputation and money on the line, and the other guy is just breeding puppies.
Now on top of all this, AD IN THIS MONKEY WRENCH . . . Either man can sell all the puppies he wants to during this 25 year period.
So the moral of the story is . . . What exactly is a Jeep dog? One man's Jeep dog could be total garbage, and the next man's Jeep dog could be a superstar.
A bloodline is ONLY as good as the individual man who buys their feed.
Awesome post redriverslim...I totally agree...and the 3 outcrosses will change the line depending on those dogs and ho how their offspring are used in the program...
We need more like you on here..
