“For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer.”
-Horace, “Odes,” III, 6, l. 1.
Many of you saw Pedigree Dogs Exposed and were shocked. You were looking at breeds that were so far gone as to never return; disfigured, diseased, and dead ends. You could see the disease. Those monster dogs are never going to be made right by the same people who drove them off the cliff trying the same techniques to “fix” them that they used to create them.
You’ve seen what destruction looks like when it’s too late. But what does impending doom look like? What happens when the disease isn’t as visible as the wobbly legged German Shepherds or the apoplectic Spaniels? What are the signs of the apocalypse that we can notice before it’s too late and when we still have the time to act.
^ That ^, my Border Collie friends, is the best sign of impending doom you are ever going to get.
The chart shows the Coefficient of Inbreeding of the entire ISDS Border Collie Gene pool through the years. The solid line looks at only the last 6 generations and assumes that all the dogs in that last generation are in no way related. The Dotted line looks at all generations back to the beginning, also assuming that the original stock is in no way inbred.
The two lines trace each other in the beginning because there simply weren’t 6 full generations of data. But the split you see right around 1960 shows that despite the overall trend of breeders to outcross, resulting in the 6 generation line dropping from a high of 4% in the early 1960s down to about 2% in 2000, the real trend within the breed is a skyrocketing line approaching 8%.
This means that the current patterns of breeding are insufficient to slow or prevent the decay of the gene pool. This is what doom looks like before it happens.
The sins of the father truly are laid upon the children.
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Maybe you explain what an 8% coefficient of inbreeding means somewhere else. Does it mean that 8% of the dog’s genes, which where received from the father, match the genes received from the mother (in that they come from the same traceable ancestor)? And are there not isolated bloodlines throughout the world where have not been largely mixed with American border collie lines? If this really is a problem then importing some herding border collies from South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia seems like an easy solution.