Larry, did you notice your dogs getting smaller the tighter you bred them? My last litter all came out quite a bit smaller after 4 generations.
I'm not Larry but I will tell you that is a very common effect of what they call inbreeding depression. A lot of times when genes get real tight loss of size is a lot of times what is first noticed. We used to see it all the time with bulldogs. It just happened with my friends litter of Mayday pups he had about 14 months ago. The dam was a little over 50lb the father walks around 60lb and so far it looks like none of the pups male or female will get even close to 50lb so far the females looks they are going to range between 35-40, and males 40-47lb maybe. Both dogs were very closely bred, and both bred pretty tight from the same family.
Whats weird in my opinion is how some families hold up to inbreeding really well and you can breed them super tight without many problems and other families as soon as you start, you notice defects and problems. I always thought that was based on how big of a gene pool you started with but there seems to be other factors too.
