Line Breeding

[jayp]

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I would be interested n your views on this subject as i have been reading a wide selection of books both old and new and trying to rationalise my own opinions.The difference between line breeding and in-breeding are just a matter of degree,true? One good book by an experienced breeder of yore..said you can line breed to one dog only successfully and the other dogs in the pedigree should be unrelated. In other words one dog can appear more than once and this dog should have the attributes you require. In-breeding however should be undertaken only by experienced breeders.

What would you as breeders consider agood result? If a litter was produced by breeding very closely and say half the litter died, of the remainder one was a sickly specimen which didnt resemble its breed, of the oher two one was average the other however was outstanding. Would this be a mating worth repeating?

If a litter was produced by line breeding but not so close to be classed as in-breeding and the result was an even litter of healthy pups with a couple above average but not outstanding. Good result?

I do know that what is seen in the ring is only the best of a litter but if the rest of the litter is very poor then the value of the mating is dubious. How many of us are lucky enough nowadays to see siblings of a dog or bitch we would like to incorparate in our breeding and assess their worth.

I know this is a huge subject and could fill a book but any views from experienced breeders would be of great interest to me :- " :- " :- " Jan

 

[Seraphina]

you can line breed to one dog only successfully and the other dogs in the pedigree should be unrelated.

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It depends what you call "unrelated". It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find 2 Whippets totally unrelated.

I

What would you as breeders consider agood result? If a litter was produced by breeding very closely and say half the litter died, of the remainder one was a sickly specimen which didnt resemble its breed, of the oher two one was average the other however was outstanding. Would this be a mating worth repeating?

That is a very unrealistic scenario. Even in the most close mating (mother to son, father to daughter), being so closely bred they would not be genetically very different from each other, so as long as both parents were good representatives of the breed, the progeny would be also. If some of the pups died because of some deadly inherited problem, then the good ones would need to be tested (if it is possible to test for this particular hypothetical problem) and those cleared could be safely used for future breeding.

If a litter was produced by line breeding but not so close to be classed as in-breeding and the result was an even litter of healthy pups with a couple above average but not outstanding. Good result?

Line breeding is a inbreding, and if the parents (lets say cousins) both carried genes for the same problem as did your other, closer, mating the result would be identical. As would if 2 unrelated animals are mated and both carry gene for this problem. It just more likely that related animals carry the same genes, as EVERY individual carries some problems.

But inbreeding and that includes line breeding, has a more insidious impact on the breed, as reduction in gene diversity slowly, over generations, weakens the immune system. It also depends how inbred are the parents.

 

[Avalonia]

Hi Janis:

If you send me an email I will copy you on an article I wrote and that was published by Whippet Review in the late 1990s on the subject of linebreeding, inbreeding, outcrossing and type breeding. There is no sense reproducing it here but I can email it to anyone who queries privately.

Lanny Morry

 

[sander]

What would you as breeders consider agood result? If a litter was produced by breeding very closely and say half the litter died, of the remainder one was a sickly specimen which didnt resemble its breed, of the oher two one was average the other however was outstanding. Would this be a mating worth repeating?If a litter was produced by line breeding but not so close to be classed as in-breeding and the result was an even litter of healthy pups with a couple above average but not outstanding. Good result?

The result is IMHO good or bad (and should be judged the same way) regardless of whetever or not or to what extent the parents are related. After all, the goal is the same - to produce healthy dogs that are also hopefully an improvement over their parents. Breeding is not about producing a single wonder dog.

 

[Avalonia]

... any views from experienced breeders would be of great interest to me :- "  :- "  :- " Jan

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Several people have suggested I post the piece I mentioned -- I didn't think many people would be interested in reading my views and concerns with the way people breed, but boy was I wrong as I discovered with a full in-box! -- so I am posting the piece that was first published nearly a decade ago which I called Coming To Terms With Genetic Realities. My views are strong, but they are fact and reality based, and the truth is, if anything my observations of current whippet breeding in North America and in England has only convinced me even more of the need for all breeders to exercise intelligence and due dilligence (and not breed politics), in their breeding programs for the good of the breed in general.

We still practice what I have described, and coincidentally just brought in, in partnership with a very good American friend, the newest dog to carry the same genetic line we have used so successfully in our outcrosses now for nearly 20 years. For the curious, his father is litter brother to Patsy Gilmour's wonderful white bitch and Eng.Ch. Sporting Fields Winged Dove Over Dumbriton.

Anyway, here is my opinion piece.

Lanny Morry

Coming_To_Terms_With_Genetic_Realities.doc

 

[Avalonia]

Anyway, here is my opinion piece.

Lanny Morry

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Several people wrote to say it didn't open and I tried it and by gosh it doesn't for me either though it is a simple word file. So I am cutting and pasting it below:

COMING TO TERMS WITH GENETIC REALITIES

Lanny Morry

Avalonia Whippets, Manotick, Ontario, Canada

(Note, this article appeared in Whippet Review in the late 1990s)

From things we cannot control…

My great uncle Joe was acknowledged by all who knew him as an expert on English setters. He bred, raised and field trained English setters for over fifty years, often in partnership with my grandfather, and he was widely admired for both the quality of his dogs and the depth of his knowledge and experience.

So when uncle Joe announced that his accumulated knowledge and decades of experience had put him into the position where he could breed what he wanted, when he wanted, and he would prove it by breeding a litter composed entirely of bitches, everyone sat up and paid attention.

Uncle Joe was a pedigree fanatic. From the time he bred his first litter as a schoolboy he kept extensive pedigrees with detailed annotations about each litter, its growth, development and performance in the field -- my grandfather claimed the records incorporated the number and type of every bird ever retrieved by each of these dogs -- so everyone assumed his prediction was founded on some pretty convincing documentary evidence.

Well of course, you guessed it. The heralded whelping day arrived and with it a litter of 8 of the nicest blue belton setters you could hope for -- all of them male.

Uncle Joe never lived it down. While he continued to maintain his extensive record keeping system till the day he died, he never again ventured an opinion about what the puppies in any litter would be like before they were born.

To things we can, and must:

I do not think it is an unfair to suggest that a large part of the blame for poor quality dogs of all breeds should be attributed to thoughtless breedings on the part of people who shouldn’t be breeding dogs at all. Breeding requires good dogs, a thoughtful process, and a “breeder” absolutely and utterly committed to the breed.

It certainly does not require either neophytes or hacks --people making ill-advised decisions to breed "my pretty (fill in the name of the bitch) " with "(fill in the name of the popular, winning dog)" with scant or non-existent regard to breed-type or pedigree.

And it certainly doesn’t require any more “politicians” –- people breeding not to dogs, but to the politics of breeding to each others dogs, regardless of their compatibility, because there is future gain to be had by one or both individuals somewhere down the road – usually in a show ring.

If you aspire to be a breeder in the truest sense of the word then it is essential that you must first have a thorough knowledge of your own breed and its strengths and weaknesses, as well as a fundamental knowledge of all the technical aspects of breeding. And that of necessity includes a thorough knowledge of the differences, benefits and pitfalls you face when you choose to linebreed, type breed, inbreed and outcross.

It is also important to be able to differentiate between dominant and recessive traits, and to be able to recognize which dog's traits may prove to be dominant in the resultant litter of any breeding.

Finally, it is crucial that when you plan to breed you know enough about the breeding process to begin with that you recognize that you must buy the best pedigree you can get your hands on if you expect to breed consistent, high quality puppies.

It has been my lifelong view that were I given a choice between two dogs, both of whom are of general good conformation, and neither of whom exhibits major faults, and one of whom is a great dog in the show ring with a poor pedigree and the other of whom is not a show dog but has a solid line-bred pedigree that suggests some consistency of thought has been applied to the breeding process that resulted in this dog, I would take the dog with the better pedigree every time.

So precisely what do all these terms -- line-breeding, in-breeding, outcrossing and type-breeding mean for your breeding program? Herewith, my take on what they are, and why they should be important to anyone who plans to breed dogs and plans to do so with the betterment of a breed in mind.

Line-breeding:

Line-breeding is the mating of dogs with common ancestors to each other. When you linebreed what you are attempting to do is stamp and reinforce the qualities and type that is common to those common ancestors. It is a consolidation process.

To take an example from my whippet breeding program (which I conducted under the affix Glastonbury before adopting the affix Avalonia with my son Mick), when I bred my foundation bitch, Am.Cdn.Ch. Amazone's Glastonbury Lily (a daughter of Nevedith Wood Chip whom I owned) to Eng.Am.Cdn.Ch. Nevedith Up Town Guy (sire of the great Eng.Ch. Nutshell of Nevedith from his only litter bred while he was still in England), I did so in the knowledge that three of the four lines going back from these two dogs were common to both dogs, with significant repetition of common ancestors throughout the six generation pedigree. This was, in effect, a great-uncle/great niece breeding.

Up Town Guy was line bred on both the paternal and maternal sides of his pedigree, while Lily's contribution to the common gene pool came only through her sire, whose dam was a litter sister to Up Town Guy's sire. As is the case with most linebreedings -- and I think this is typical of whatever breed you are in, and perhaps even more true in the case of newer breeds such as Chinese Cresteds or Cirneco dell’Etnas which are still relying on a very small gene pool and there is need to pull in lines from the most diverse sources within those breeds in order to consolidate desirable breed characteristics --- there is usually at least one weak line in every pedigree.

Recognition of that weak line and your knowledge of the dogs that make up that weak line is essential because it is here that your best opportunity comes to address faults or unwanted characteristics you wish to breed out of your line. By selecting the second parent for your planned litter carefully, and ensuring that it exhibits and even doubles up on strengths in the areas where the other parent is weakest, you may actually be able to eliminate, or certainly minimize the continuation of undesirable characteristics into yet another generation.

With careful attention to the strengths and weaknesses of the pedigrees of the dogs in a breeding program it is my experience that you can get most of what you want out of a breeding 8 out of every 10 times -- a far more reasonable set of odds to work with, than would otherwise be the case were no attention paid to the ancestral pool from which your gene base has been built.

In my case, the weak line and the characteristics I didn't like could be traced to Lily's dam line which was really a series of incomprehensible outcrosses (what I call "flavour of the month" breedings) resurrected only by Lily's maternal grandsire, a well-bred English-born dog with a sterling pedigree who was, however, unrelated in any way to Lily's sire.

By taking Lily to a sire whose strengths counterbalanced the weaknesses I identified in her pedigree, I ended up with a litter that closely resembled its sire, who fixed his type -- which is what I was most anxious to secure --on the seven puppies of that litter. Realizing what I got when the litter was on the ground I also chose to take some very good advice from Nev and Edith Newton of Nevedith whippets, who encouraged us to keep at least one dog and one female from this litter and use them as the foundation from which to breed on with. We did indeed do so, and all our Avalonia dogs today can trace lines back to Lily, Guy, Wood Chip and Victor and Mouse in that first important litter.

In-breeding:

In-breeding takes line-breeding one step further.

In breeding combines two very close relatives -- a mother and son, a father and daughter, a full litter sister and brother -- and thus uses a gene pool that is already common to both the sire and dam. The gene pool is not expanded through such a union because no new bloodlines are introduced by either partner to the mating.

I also consider the breeding of half brothers and sisters (a case where the sire or dam is common to both dogs) to be in-breeding in those cases where the unduplicated parents (the other sire or the other dam) are also related to each other. In cases where half brothers and sisters do not share common ancestors for the unduplicated parent, I am somewhat more ambivalent as to whether I would describe the resultant progeny as line-bred or in-bred.

I personally do not favor breeding half-brothers/half-sisters. I do however think there is often much to be gained by taking a granddaughter to her grandsire. I believe there is extensive evidence across a wide variety of dog breeds that documents the fact that much good very often comes from such a breeding. I am of course assuming that neither dog carries what I would call major faults – such as for instance in whippets monorchidism or cryptorchidism, which are inheritable traits that will only be reinforced if this sort of breeding is pursued. Lines should be assessed ruthlessly and determined to be clean for taints and faults before inbreeding is even contemplated.

The truth is, I know there are those who claim there have been some wonderful dogs created by in-breeding, but I confess that in the dozen or so in-bred litters I have personally examined there was not a single puppy I thought justified the decision to breed this way, and not a single puppy I would have selected to take home with me. I simply don’t think there is justification in going this way.

Out-crossing:

As I noted at the beginning, all of us who make the decision to breed are as vulnerable as Uncle Joe was when we attempt to predict what we will get in a litter. But our vulnerability is never greater than when we travel the outcross route.

If careful line-breeding is, if not a lead-pipe cinch, at least a real shortening of the odds that you will be very surprised by anything (or everything!) in the resultant litter, the world of outcrosses is really a step into the realm of the ethereal. Here, the odds lengthen in direct proportion to the degree of disparity that exists between the two gene pools that are to be united by the outcross. The greater the disparity, the greater the likelihood that you will be operating at the level of little more than a wish and a prayer, at the mercy of the gods that, somehow! disparate elements will coalesce and unite into a litter -- or at least a dog or two -- that is pure magic.

Out-crossing is the union of two purebred dogs of the same breed who lack any common ancestors -- at least in the first three or four generations of their pedigrees, which are the generations I think are generally accepted as counting the most. It is a particularly common pursuit of people who breed dogs based entirely on the appearance of the two parents, or of those who are breeding politically, and know or want to know more about the owner of the dog, than the dogs and their ancestry. Outcrossing is particularly common in North America where winning in the show ring at almost any cost also often includes breeding to unrelated but heavily campaigned dogs in the hopes of producing the next great show ring winner. I shiver every time I see what people have done to the breed over the past three or four decades in America by following that formula.

I am also always amused by those who decide to breed two totally unrelated dogs in the hope of capturing the essential qualities of one long dead ancestor who now appears once in the sixth generation on one side of a pedigree. But every time I get together with a group of “breeders” I can count on the fact I will meet at least one person who actually considers this to be a viable concept. I have an acquaintance here in Canada who spent nearly 20 years breeding one dog and his several generations of sons in the hope of recreating a Crashaw dog he had owned in England as a young man. His pursuit relied on that dog’s genes carrying forward from what was then the fifth generation back in the pedigree of the dog he started out with. Of course he never got it.

Unless you have a dog known to be so prepotent that he consistently stamps his type on the dogs he sires you stand little chance of bring the past forward convincingly in a pedigree. You really have more likelihood that elephants will sprout wings and fly first! The marvellous American dog Am.Cdn.Ch. Sporting Fields Kinsman, was an outcross who proved to be a remarkable exception. Himself an outcross he was so pre-potent in terms of type he successfully stamped his smaller size (he was about 20 inches) and his type on several generations of dogs bred from him. We at Avalonia used two Kinsman kids – a son and daughter -- as our outcross dogs for over a decade.

Outcrossing opens the potential litter to the most vast gene pool possible, because no ancestor is likely to dominate in such a union. Thus all the relatives on both the sire's and dam's side may be called upon to contribute something to the litter.

Outcrossing can produce dramatically good, or dramatically bad results for just this reason. It may also just level the pluses and minuses out so much so that the litter is generally a wash -- mediocre throughout.

Some of the greatest American showdogs have been outcrosses, including the great Kinsman who was number one whippet, and hound, in America for several years. But the harsh reality is, the vast majority of these dogs are one hit wonders whose gene pool is so disparate that they can never successfully reproduce themselves with any consistency. Breeding to such dogs leaves many poorer quality whippets behind as a result.

These being the possibilities, in my view, outcrossing is again a process which demands it be carried out with due consideration to breed type.

Type -breeding:

The introduction of type breeding into the outcross process goes some way to mitigating the inherent dangers of any outcross. At least by sticking to type and mating two dogs who are very similar in type there is at least the chance of maintaining that type throughout the resultant litter. So in my view, type breeding is the safest haven available to those who must resort to out-crossing in order to create a new "line".

Cross-breeding:

Finally, there is cross-breeding. Cross-breeding, just so there is no mistake about what this is, unites a Sheltie with a Whippet and produces a half-breed dog -- in this case something some who attempted just this in the United States began referring to as the “Long-haired Whippet”, but which the American Kennel Club and the rest of the world readily recognized as a mongrel. Cross breed dogs are not purebred and they are therefore not registerable, but that does not make them any the less marketable.

In England crosses between sighthounds to produce dogs called lurchers is common. But here in Canada it is positively forbidden for those who want to register dogs with the Canadian Kennel Club. If the CKC learns of any member that has crossbred two purebred dogs to produce puppies for sale it is standard practice following a disciplinary procedure for those CKC members to be banned for life from club membership and all the rights and privileges of the Club, including the right to own, show or register purebreed dogs in Canada.

 

[doris]

thanks for that, it was interesting reading :thumbsup: and much easier for me to understand that the whole genetic/colour thing, which still goes over my head :wacko:

 

[saraquele]

very very interesting , thank you for sharing

 

[jok]

very very interesting , thank you for sharing 

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ditto

thanks very much

 

[lizzyb]

Thanks for the interesting read :thumbsup:

No I had trouble with the download ,it was all fuzzy wuzzy :teehee:

 

[georgina]

thank you Lanny for such interesting reading

 

[dolly]

:cheers: Thanks Lanny :cheers:

 

[dawn]

Anyway, here is my opinion piece.
Lanny Morry

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Several people wrote to say it didn't open and I tried it and by gosh it doesn't for me either though it is a simple word file.  So I am cutting and pasting it below:

 

COMING TO TERMS WITH GENETIC REALITIES

It was OKish for us [SIZE=21pt]BUT[/SIZE] when I saved it the file was saved as a .php file. I just right clicked on the saved file and used 'Open With' to open with word. Simple really.

Sorry it didn't work out as expected though Lanny - at least my instructions worked OK :cheers:

 

[Avalonia]

:cheers: Thanks Lanny  :cheers:

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Thanks, but now a question to you, where are those puppies? Enquiring minds want to know!

Lanny

 

[jayp]

Thanks Lanny, good piece have afew questions will email when have got thoughts together :cheers: :cheers: jan

 

[JAX]

Thanks for that Lanny . :cheers:

I know most of us line -breed whippets here and abroad but what I find odd :wacko: is that when Dog World or Our dogs put in the Pedigrees of Best in Show / Top Dogs pedigrees they very rarely ( if ever ) have any dogs in the pedigree more than once , yes , they are usually all complete outcrosses Its some thing I find really strange :wacko:

 

[jayp]

I have noticed this too this is related to what i read in old breed books that only one dog appears in the pedigree more than once the rest are unrelated. I realise if you go far enough back they will have a common ancestor but i am talking about the last 3 to 5 generations :- " jan

 

[Seraphina]

As the story of uncle Joe beautifully illustrates, breeding dogs is a lot about good luck and coincidence. Person who is lucky enough to start with a quality bitch and mates her to a suitable quality dog has a pretty good chance to get good pups. Each dog can only be as good as the genes he inherits form his parents. It does not matter how many ancestors in his pedigree have a particular trait unless at least one parent (in case of dominant gene) has it, this dog will not. In the case of recessive genes both parents would have to have it, and even then this dog may not inherit this particular trait. And I am talking about simple inheritance depending on single pair of genes. Most traits, of-course, depend on number of genes, and it really is beyond anybody's capacity to understand how it exactly works.

Line breeding really is inbreeding, and it is very naïve to say this sort of mating is very close and this one is not so close. With the exception of parent to of spring mating, it is absolutely impossible to determine how closely related 2 individuals are. And even with parent and offspring mating, all you know that the off spring has 50% of each of his parent’s genes, but with some obvious exceptions (colour possibly), you do not know which half. And even with colour, although you usually know what colour the dog is, you cannot always know what recessive colour genes he carries.

Siblings may, in one extreme, share almost all of their genes, in the other extreme almost none. If you have 2 not very closely related parents (and I am talking genetically, not what shows on their pedigree) it is possible that, say a bitch form this litter will have certain selection of genes from her mother and certain from her sire, while her brother ends up with the other half from each of their parents. So hypothetically brother to sister mating can be anything from whole litter of almost identical genetic make up, to pups with very varied genes. On other hand animals less closely related, according to the accepted

line-breeding rules, may in fact be genetically closer. As I said before, it is not just the immediate relationship (uncle X niece, cousins) that matters, but how inbred the whole line is.

 

[playawhile]

When I read the text I wonder were does modern science fit in and all the knowledge that has been produced about how to keep a population healthy?? In most aspects of life we trust and depend on science and progress but not when it comes to breeding dogs! Why is it so? Whippets are often bred in the same way as 100 years ago and ask yourself, who would you like to treat you if ending up in a hospital, a doctor educated 100 years ago or someone trained in recent years? I can see that line-breeding and inbreeding was a very effective and good way of consolidating the whippet in to a uniform breed but can we see what is in head of us? Is our breed an endless resource of genetic variation that can be diminished without serious side effects in the long run?

Henrik Härling

 

[~elizabeth~]

When I read the text I wonder were does modern science fit in and all the knowledge that has been produced about how to keep a population healthy?? In most aspects of life we trust and depend on science and progress but not when it comes to breeding dogs! Why is it so?

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There are more scientific measures of inbreeding, for practical purposes Wright's inbreeding coefficient (which can be calculated with pedigree database software), and a correlation between higher percentages of inbreeding and birth defects has been made by researchers.

Inbreeding and linebreeding

Careful study of this explains the situation so clearly put by Lida/Seraphina :thumbsup: dogs who themselves possess low inbreeding coefficients can, when mated to close relatives, produce offspring who are still less inbred (i.e. lower inbreeding % in Wright's terms) than a match where the individuals are less closely related but possess a high personal coefficients.