Breeding Better Dogs 101...

[Reuben]

as a kid we did not worm or vaccinate our dogs and they were all mutts...mutts have a very diversified gene pool...the first pure bred pup I got very sick and it was my first trip to the vet ever...he said the pup caught distemper and would die and he did...a not so diverse gene pool so the pups will all look alike etc...

Right now there are major issues with tigers/pandas and other animals that are on the endangered list due to a lack of diversity in their genes...and they say that this is a major issue that needs fixing if the species of these animals are to survive and not become extinct...the issues are low ferility, inability to fight off disease  etc...

I saw smaller testicles and some smaller dog and litter size slightly smaller...but they were hunting hunting dogs...

Larry, I remember when you announced in the back pages of Full Cry that you were starting a line of dogs...was a good while back...

[Semmes]

Well, Rueben, I think you understand I respect you and agree with you more than not. But that was a pretty passive/aggressive post IMO.

I agree that breeds were made from cross dog mixing but traits are set by tightening up on what works...

...or else we'd be running and working and breeding solely on scattered up mutts that fit the bill for whatever and it would work and wouldn't be no job specific breeds or lines thereof.

Specific traits are/were bred on then locked down thru line breeding. That's were breeds developed for job specific traits and along with that came phenotype, creating breeds.

Is there an occasional need for an out cross of a family or even a breed...sometimes yes IMO, contrary to ocenee's. ...to counter a bit of depression and these should be tested and evaluated for real results and it it worked retightened on to really see if there was a gained advantage or take another course to attain some vigor in a stale line or breed

.....respectfully from an observer and study of dogs/breeds and not claiming any measurable experience of breeding or creating.

That being said, while I do ascribe to a 'natural dog ' (laughs, I side joke with ab guys) theory, I also think a keen eye and testing and even training go a long way with picking such a natural dog

[Semmes]

Should read tightened on -sorted, and culled- then bred on for specific traits

[Semmes]

With that, I would respectfully volley this,not so passive and moderately aggressive post back to your court, and say there are folks out there that have set out and are setting out to create a vision and have either succeeded or are testing and progressing to succeed in creating a vision thru selective line breeding and there are those that's success was halted from some factor and may pick up and continue where they left off or change course and still have a goal that hopefully will be reached. But to pi$$ on another's grits is sour grapes at best and vomed off disengenuine at face value. Respectfully and your friend in dogs, and elsewhere and otherwise I'm almost sure of it...
 
....that was a runon sentence if I ever read one lol

[parker49]

one of the questions asked to me all the time about my dogs  is  larry  you need to outcross you are so line bred you are  inbred ...I say yeah  but what  you think all the rabbits rats and squirrels  do they been breeding the same  pool for hundreds  of  years  in an area .... a  good friend  of mine  told me  one  time if  you raise  enuff  chickens  you'll have  some born without feather's  hahahaha  ..   when mine grow  8 legs and  run sideways  like a spider  i'll  cross out  hahahaha  but mine  is  perty sound so far ...... hen I have a litter I DO NOT  baby them ..and don't breed runts..if you do your asking for trouble .......that's tried and true from nature itself and probably the cause of the panda problem human interference .....

[Reuben]

one of the questions asked to me all the time about my dogs  is  larry  you need to outcross you are so line bred you are  inbred ...I say yeah  but what  you think all the rabbits rats and squirrels  do they been breeding the same  pool for hundreds  of  years  in an area .... a  good friend  of mine  told me  one  time if  you raise  enuff  chickens  you'll have  some born without feather's  hahahaha  ..   when mine grow  8 legs and  run sideways  like a spider  i'll  cross out  hahahaha  but mine  is  perty sound so far ...... hen I have a litter I DO NOT  baby them ..and don't breed runts..if you do your asking for trouble .......that's tried and true from nature itself and probably the cause of the panda problem human interference .....

I agree with what you said...

human interference brings a lot of issues because we tend to vaccinate and worm the pups and make warm beds for them in the winter...

on the other hand the coyote bitch must be born with the natural ability to nurture her pups a certain way as well as the sire to help feed the pups not to mention that they sire/dam had top live through disease and then make it on their own once they were wiened...so if we followed the rules of mother nature it would be a different game...survival of the fittest according to the balance or imbalance of nature for that particular time...

[parker49]

that's why I say what I said about not babying my litter's and runts .. like the coyote natural culling makes for  a stronger gene pool with instincts to survive in a certain environment.... mother's in the wild hardly ever have  young in the same  place  why . disease . turn a gyp out to have  pups  she will usually go dig under some log pile  in  (new ) ground ..no disease ....  if I didn't let the natural process cull out the weak at birth I guarantee you  I'd  end  up breeding myself problems ......

[jdt]

mr parker , you are exactly right . nature is the only sustanable law there is .....  and it will apply to the human race sooner or later also .

[WayOutWest]

It's a common thought that inbreeding makes your animals smaller but I have seen it go the other way just as much.

[oconee]

I could care less how mother nature and Coyotes sort out in the breeding.  I'm more concerned about the results i'v witnessed from good houndsmen and dog breeders.  The best dogs I have seen are typically tightly bred and the men I see have the best results are all line breeding on some blood they has good results with.  Now how that fits into mother nature's plan, I don't know and don't care.

[parker49]

well the way it fits  in is in weak offspring witch can result in poor genetics futher down the line .... mother  nature and natural culling takes  care  of that now I worm and parvo my pups  like everyone  else ...but sound stock  is  better  bred  dogs ...... its  just conversation...

[oconee]

Mr.  Parker, the guys I follow advice on breeding from didn't just have a few good generations.  I understand how nature wins in the end and I hope no one thinks i'v been taught to keep and breed weaklings.

[Black Streak]

Everything we are doing with dogs goes against mother nature.     The hunt and prey drive we breed into them is unnatural.  The dogs will run themselves to death or die latched onto a boar. 
  The kennels and small spaces they are raised in and live in is unatural.
The dog food we feed them is unatural and the good stuff is cooked out of it while we add stuff like cereals too it, preservatives, and other stuff.  This alone taxes the immune system way beyond that of wild dogs yet we say we are gonna let mother nature take its couse.   If we are not gonna feed the dog the nutrients it's digestive system was designed to function off of in the wild and then say we are gonna let nature take its course, we aren't really letting nature take its course.  Your already starting the dog out with a taxed immunity making the dog at an increased risk of contracting illnesses it's body can't ward off like a well fed wild dogs immunity can.    A wild dogs brain is stimulated daily through its life where as our dogs set in the pen for several days at a time and their entertainment and stimulation goes about as far as staring at flies.   This adds stress to our dogs, lack of excercise, and so on.        While genes play a part in the health of wild dogs, their diet is what I belive plays the most critical role.       
    What I'm saying is we are breeding dogs to do way more than their wild counterparts and giving them less to do it on.    We breed into them a drive that doesn't switch off when they are in the feild, they work 100 times harder than the wild dogs but aren't in as good of physical shape as the wild dogs are.  Our dogs aren't working to feed themselves.  If so they would stop hunting after they caught the first pig.    We have bred into them an unnatural desire and hunt drive that keeps going and going and going.   Dogs will run themselves to death, run the pads off their feet, take lots of punishment from pigs, even hold till the death.  This isn't natural in mother nature.   The diet in which we feed them doesn't have what a dogs digestive system is designed to have no matter what the label tells you it has in it or how good they claim it is for your dog.   We feed our dogs a sub par diet and expect them to go far above and beyond what nature's wild dogs do.
   I subscribe to feeding a proper raw diet and excercise and stimulation and big pens to live in, run and play in, and live with other dogs in.   I do what I can for their physical and mental health and do so in large part for healthier dogs and to put as much nature back into the dogs as I can.   Going through all this, I will help my dog up when it's down.  If it means giving antibiotics (which I hate) I will.    I worm my dogs because of the unnatural environment they are in and because they are not products of wild nature and because I myself will go see a doctor now and then, my dogs are no more special than I am.          I do my best to research treating things in my dogs and myself that don't involve anitibiotics.   I research how to have naturally healthier dogs.     Their diet is the first thing in this and this kinda natural diet can't be found in a bag or a can.     I do my best to let mother nature take its course and work for my dogs by putting as much of mother nature into my dogs as I can
      That's my take on the natural way.  I like a little of both worlds.

[parker49]

nobody thinks you been breeding weaklings  that's  just conversation not insinuating  anything on anyone ..... I've raised over 70 litters  of just these  black dogs myself  starting with 3 original dogs one male 2 females ....... I have  an educated guess  you could say .....

[Reuben]

good post black streak...that is about how I see it as well...I like using mother nature as  an example for things I see and believe in amongst other things...

[parker49]

I just don't help weak pups  survive and I don't breed with em later on if they make it ....now  I worm and  parvo and the rest .......

[Black Streak]

Thanks,  I just wanted to throw some things out there that I think get overlooked since nature got brought up into the selection process.     A few points of contrast can round off the rough edges of what I said but it would draw the thread way off breeding 101 for me to bring any of them into the discussion.
      
         I have read some interesting but opposing view points on this thread and both seem to have merit.   Things such as line breeding often produces smaller dogs.    From what I've come to understand, this holds water but Mr. Parker says no and points out his experience of the 70 litters originating from the 3 dogs.    I'm assuming no out crossing was done for him to viemently defend such.   Very interesting to me.            
      I've pondered on things such as this and thought that line breeding will have an effect on size if the line gets too inbred.   Mr. Parker would make one second guess this when regarding this as an absolute rule.       I'm more into crossing bred dogs than pure breeds. Example: pit x dane for simplicity sakes.   F1 tends to yeild some dogs of good size but they aren't all the same size as expected.    Breed 2 F1's together from this litter or different ancestors but still pit x dane crossed dogs and the resulting litter tends to be smaller sized dogs than the F1's were.    I'm sure this would stop at some point but when adding a large breed to a cross, your often doing it for size so taking the progressively smaller pups and line breeding them isn't taken very far.   Not much cross breeding of this kinda nature is done here either to really have much of an effect on information gathering.
    I've been told that when out crossing a family of big dogs to bull blood such as the bull terrier, the bull terrier will consistently throw bigger pups than the pit.       What the heck!!!???         Lots of guys have a little pit blood in there bay dogs now to get them grittier.  Are these the dogs that are being line bred and getting smaller?   Could it be something like this?  Makes you wonder and want to investigate it a little but not enough info out there.   Just something to think about like I do.  I don't have an answere  just questions that can't be definitively answered.
    On the flip side of this I bred two 80 pound dogs together.   One was about 3/4 wolfhound but was small for her blood.  The other was a stag on the smaller side.   All the offspring are gonna be bigger than their parents and some at 9 months old are over 100 pounds and 2 inches taller than the tallest parent.    This isn't surprising given the amount of wolfhound blood but I didn't  see it coming to the extent it did on a couple of the big males.
    Have 2 bitches from a line of dogs.  Wolfhound, deerhound, mastiif.   They aren't huge and don't have much less wolfhound and deerhound in them than the pups I mentioned do, if any at all.   Just a lot less matiff in the pups.    The two bitches are not big dogs to me and the guy that has this line of dogs sees the size of the dogs decrease the tighter he breeds thus one of the reasons he has out crossed over the years..  No bull blood in his line either as of now.  The pups will get smaller than any of the pure ancestors used in developing the line of dogs if he breeds to tight.                
    It's very interesting how some people see the decrease in size dramatically while others don't experience it at all.      Lots of variables and things not done  the same between breeders.  One might be breeding the biggest of the dogs from a litter while another might be trying to retard the size a little in the beginning.  One might be working inside a pure breed and others might have crossed outside the breed.          
 Could the unintentional size retardation when breeding tight families be more conducive to one breed than another.     Lots of interesting stuff to consider when giving a definite answere and coming to an absolute conclusion.     I have enjoyed reading the different opinions and veiws but they kinda just add to the mystery.
     Anyone care to make a stab at sharing their thoughts on some of this stuff?

[Reuben]

This time around and early in the game I started with a 50 pound dog...redbone pitbull mix...I saw 5 of his brothers and he was about in the middle...bred him to a 35 pound Kemmerer gyp and now have 2 males out of that cross and they are about 60 pounds...bred one of those pups to a 50 pound plott gyp and the 4 pups I kept will average about 60 pounds...

Line breeding in my opinion also brings in new blood...inbreeding brings in very little...I think it will not be a problem until we see t or 6 generations of tight breeding...

[Judge peel]

My gyp had a litter and one of the pups came out and wasn't moving basically still born my wife grabbed the pup shook her up and down blew in her nose pup came to life. She was half the size of the rest very thin skin you could actually see her insides moving around. My wife bottle feed her daily at 6 weeks she was just like the others she is a good dog now she was worth the effort. All thru the word you hear of people dogs horses and so on that shouldn't be here that went on to be great so all that stuff is none sense to me if it has a chance then we should put forth the effort to give the animal a sporting chance. Good thing our parents ain't put such high standards on us or this forum would be empty   


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[oconee]

Good post Peel.  My wife brought two males in the house once to warm them up and save their lives because they got pushed away from the mother in the welping box.  I ended up raising the whole litter and boy howdy I wish I hadn't culled them pups that pushed these two weakling males away because i'd give them to Mr. Parker and he could show me how my wife went wrong when I unloaded these males that are still here.