Continuing the analysis of the pro-inbreeding essay over on the Absolut Bullmarket French Bulldogs site:
Many people believe that in breeding itself creates genetic disease. This is incorrect.
Again with a pointless strawman, as if putting out a statement that is easy to defeat will lend credibility to the rest of what she has to say. A Google search for “inbreeding causes disease” returns only 6 results; apparently Carol believes this is a wave of ignorance taking over the world. What is true, and what is really being argued even in those 6 poorly worded results on Google is better said, “inbreeding causes recessive disease expression.”
What is correct, however, is that inbreeding, by tightening the gene pool, increases the chances that recessive characteristics, including genetic diseases, will be expressed. A breeder may choose to do a tight line breeding to try to identify and remove potential carriers from their breeding pool. A breeder may also have two dogs, both of which have attributes which are very hard to come by in their breed – perfect angulation in a breed plagued with straight rears, fantastic breathing in a breed which tends towards airway impairments, or any other elusive quality a breeder wishes to capture for the future of their lines.
Again I must restate that inbreeding alone does not “tighten” the gene pool. Inbreeding plus ruthless selection does. Nor does tightening the gene pool by itself create recessive expression. Increasing homozygosity does this and this happens as a result of inbreeding if you have ruthless selection or not! If you inbreed on a recessive trait, you’ll get affected puppies. If you keep all the puppies and breed them all equally, you haven’t done anything to tighten or shrink the gene pool.
The rest of her argument speaks to problems caused or exacerbated by a small number of founders, inbreeding suppression, or excessive selection. The often used stinker is that somehow inbreeding is the solution to problems caused by inbreeding! Well, in a way this is true just as Ebola is the cure for Ebola. Eventually it kills you before you (and it) can reproduce and your inbred line dies out. Sadly, this is not a breedwide, macro solution that we can tolerate. The solution to inbred dogs should not be the extinction of dogs.
Another less pleasing possibility is the unfortunate habit of most puppy mills of simply throwing together the closest dogs at hand to produce puppies. Since it is not likely (let’s be honest and say it is impossible) that a mill will do what is required to ensure the offspring have no recessive defects, which is keep all offspring to maturity, this is definitely a situation to avoid.
Here we have a classical diversion. Don’t mind my sins because the man over there is even worse! Speculation about what puppy mills and “backyard breeders” do or don’t do has no bearing on the ethics and efficacy of inbreeding carried out by breeders. Dog breeding is not a choose your own adventure book with only two choices: Inbreeding depression vs. Puppymill atrocities. This is a false dilemma.
Intermittent inbreeding within a line or breed is not damaging to the long term health of the animals. However, inbreeding over successive generations can lead to reduced fitness and fertility problems among the offspring, resulting in a phenomena known as in breeding depression. It can take several generations to show up, depending on the traits involved.
This is misleading. Inbreeding is both as dangerous and as effective in exact proportion to how much (successive generations) and in what way (how close) it is used. It can not be more effective and less dangerous, those two traits are based on the exact same thing: the ability to double up on alleles. nThe danger of inbreeding, even just a little bit, is that a new mutation that would otherwise never be doubled up on will be doubled up on.
Let’s take a look at this example, based on an actual litter we produced:
Rebel Gambit Joe Joy Tara Spike Lily Roseanne Mark Frank Gemma Tara Spike Lily In this case, the example shown is that of a half brother, half sister breeding. The dogs used share the same mother, but are out of different fathers. This breeding may be used again to try to identify and remove potential diseases from the breeder’s gene pool, or it may simply be a case of trying to ‘lock in’ an elusive breed characteristic which both siblings share, such as correct rear angulation. Again, I would expect to hear from the breeder, if I were a buyer, what their specific reasons were for doing this breeding. The plus is that the non appearance of genetic disease in the mature adults resulting from such a breeding are highly unlikely to be carriers of it, as well.
Here, Carol says that she wanted to double up on a full 1/8th (12.5%) of Tara’s genes in order to “lock in” “correct rear angulation.” Is this worth the risks? Most deleterious diseases are simple recessive mutations on a single allele. This means that if Tara has one such bad allele, 12.5% of these puppies will be AFFECTED and 25% of the puppies will be Carriers. And this is true, additively, for every single deleterious recessive Tara carries.
Is this worth it for a cute ass? No one but a ribbon-chasing arm-chair platonist would think so. Let’s give Carol the benefit of the doubt with this “elusive” characteristic and assume that it too is a simple recessive. If it were dominant, we wouldn’t need to inbreed at all because we wouldn’t need to double up on this gene for it to be expressed. If it’s a simple recessive and we also assume that Tara is doubled up on it, best case scenario, Rebel and Roseanne each are carriers. Thus, 25% of the puppies will be doubled up, 50% will be carriers. We only get 1 in 4 puppies with what we want, yet 1 in 8 puppies will be affected by any given recessive disease. There’s only one gene we want, but there could be hundreds of recessive genes that we do not want, maybe thousands.
Would you play the lotto with these odds if it meant that you get a 1 in 4 chance of winning a very small jackpot, but you had to play Russian Roulette with three or four or five pulls of the trigger each time you played?
This become even worse if the “elusive breed characteristic” is not a simple recessive on a single allele. What if “correct rear angulation” requires the alignment of several genes? Inbreeding becomes less potent to line them up but it becomes no less effective in pairing up the recessive deleterious alleles. Maybe only 1 in 16 or 1 in 32 puppies will have this nice ass, but the chance of any one of Tara’s recessive diseases showing up is still 1/8 for each one.
Inbreeding is using dynamite to do plastic surgery.
And did you catch that last sentence:
The plus is that the non appearance of genetic disease in the mature adults resulting from such a breeding are highly unlikely to be carriers of it, as well.
This is a horrible lie. Utter stupidity. Just because the first guy to pull the trigger in Russian Roulette didn’t blow his brains out doesn’t mean there isn’t a bullet waiting in the chamber. It’s a mathematical certainty that we expect to see 1 in 8 puppies affected with any single recessive disease carried by Tara. If we dodge those odds and have no puppies that are doubled up, that scenario in no way changes the fact that we would expect to see 1 in 4 puppies being carriers for any single recessive disease carried by Tara. Recombinant genetics doesn’t change the way it works to let inbreeding showple sleep better at night.
This statement is unethical and dangerous. It is an insidious lie and Carol should be ashamed for spreading it. This stupidity is the reason that inbred popular sires can be so devastating. We assume that since they don’t have a given disease that they are highly unlikely to be a carrier as well, so heck, why not continue to inbreed on them? This assumption has no basis in reality and gives a false sense of security, thus increasing the use of this dangerous behavior. It is an Argument from Ignorance. “I don’t see X, so Y can’t be there!” Nonsense. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially in this case.
Carol isn’t presenting a system of test breedings to ascertain a confidence level that her lines are free from defects–like a business will randomly test a few of its products to be sure that most of them are free from defects. Instead she’s trying to co-opt that science in a half-assed way to say “look, I did this close breeding once and they didn’t all explode, so they MUST BE HEALTHY!”
* * *
Comments and disagreements are welcome, but be sure to read the Comment Policy. If this post made you think and you'd like to read more like it, consider a donation to my 4 Border Collies' Treat and Toy Fund. They'll be glad you did. You can subscribe to the feed or enter your e-mail in the field on the left to receive notice of new content. You can also like BorderWars on Facebook for more frequent musings and curiosities.
* * *
Look – Carol’s totally right that inbreeding doesn’t create a disease that’s not already there. You can actually use inbreeding to create better and better fertility – inbreeding depression is not a given.
The reason you can go to your fridge, open it up, take out some bread and peanut butter and jelly and make yourself a sandwich – and it didn’t cost you $80 to do it – is absolutely one hundred percent because of inbreeding.
The strains of wheat, oats, peanuts, grapes, and sugarcane that make your sandwich produce gigantic healthy crops at minimum cost because they were inbred so tightly that the individual plants are basically clones of each other. Inbred plants are the reason someone in the US won’t starve if they’re on minimum wage, and the reason the world can support four billion more people than it did fifty years ago.
Inbreeding is not in and of itself an evil. It does not in and of itself do anything but make the individual members of the population more predictable. More predictable in type, more predictable in size and shape, more predictable in disease as well.
Where Carol and I disagree is that I would rather have a bunch of carriers and unknowns – but no dogs with actual disease – and she’d rather know what she has, even if it means she has to see the disease. So I breed as far away from the individual as I can. I still think “no sick dogs” trumps the knowledge, but I think Carol is a fantastic breeder and you’re kind of out of your depth in criticizing the decisions she’s made.
The fact that you think rear angulation is meaningless shows that you don’t know conformation yet. The correct rear angles make the difference between a dog sound through his entire life and one that is not. Rear angulation is not a pretty-pretty piece of nonsense; it’s the powerhouse of the dog and wrong ones will actually kill your dog quicker and more predictably AND more painfully than most diseases. If you have crappy rear angles, you’re asking for arthritis, which leads to ACL tears, which plows a dog under faster than hip dysplasia, faster than most cancers, faster than brachycephalic syndrome ever could.
Conformation is very rarely platonic. It’s where the rubber hits the road in terms of longevity and the ability for the dog to live a normal life. If you study Rachel Page Elliott enough, you’ll start to figure out the difference between essential features – and rear angulation is one of these – and cosmetic features like ear set and size, or length of muzzle. Just about everything behind and below the jaw bone, by the way, is essential. That’s why the dogs in the Group ring don’t actually look all that different, when you discount size and coat, and how one judge can determine a winner from among the twenty dogs he’s looking at. It’s all the same stuff – balance, angulation, ribbing, topline, croup, efficiency of movement.
Carol understands how dogs move and should be put together. If she’s making a decision to concentrate really hard on rear angles I for one am not going to get in her way. If you can show that YOU understand how dogs move and should be put together, and you understand the French Bulldog standard, then you’re ready to make a comment on whether she should have done that breeding. You can then determine if the concerns of raising the COI trump her concerns over rear angulation, and what’s more Carol will actually listen to you! Before that point, if all you’re doing is talking about one aspect of a breeding and making it very clear that you don’t understand any other aspect, no show breeder is going to be convinced.
Joanna Kimball recently posted..Ruffly Speaking is on medical leave
Joanna,
(1) I don’t think you understand my point about “inbreeding creates disease.” This is a straw-man. Of course it isn’t true. But it is irrelevant. It’s as stupid as saying “Soldiers don’t create bullets, they just use them to kill people.” What’s important here is not the creation of the disease but the EXPRESSION, the concentration, the harm being done to the animals.
The “creation” of “disease” (and I need to use quotes here because both are rather complicated terms with complex definitions) is not at issue. And it provides no help to either side of this debate really. It’s a moot point.
(2) Please provide a source that documents inbreeding leading to better fertility.
(3) I’d be happy to discuss inbreeding paradigms and even Genetically Modified Organisms in food with you, but I expect more from my dogs than I do my corn or my broiler chickens. I want my dog to survive 15+ years, why not reach for 20? I don’t care if my chicken would be dead of a heart attack 1 week after its planned slaughter date.
And my favorite fruit? It’s a hybrid. Mmm Mmm Honey Crisp apples are delicious.
Really, let’s keep it to dogs unless you want me to school you on all the ways in which inbreeding in, say, bacteria doesn’t apply very well to inbreeding in pets. If you can find a way to produce a “litter” of 10,000 puppies and then let natural selection work on them ruthlessly, we can begin to compare fruits and nuts to dogs and people.
Joanna –
“Inbreeding is not in and of itself an evil.”
Did you really read my posts? I’ve said OVER and OVER again that it’s inbreeding AND SELECTION.
Also, inbreeding depression vis-a-vis the immune system is pretty much guaranteed and this does make inbreeding in and of itself an evil. I’m fully aware that this is a huge area that science doesn’t have a grasp on yet, but it’s an absolute truth that we see poor immune response to inbreeding with no known disease paths.
Perhaps one day the mechanism will be clarified and will be given a name and thus we’ll have a diagnosed disease, or it could be that, as I have noted, inbreeding leads to an absolute loss of information. It could very well be that the immune system simply works less well when it has less information to work with.
“Where Carol and I disagree is that I would rather have a bunch of carriers and unknowns – but no dogs with actual disease”
Good for you. I’d rather buy a puppy from a breeder who has this as their ethic. THIS is how to deal with disease. Nowhere have ANY breeders in any breed EVER at any time made their dogs healthier by inbreeding and cutting, inbreeding and cutting. The theory of inbreeding and cutting to dig your way out of the problems caused by inbreeding and cutting is a failure. If you have evidence of this working somewhere at any time, I’d love to know about it.
The conformation shop talk is an interesting thing to cover, but that will have to wait for another day. It’s really too much of a diversion from the core issues being covered. I’m weighing the value of health versus what benefits are supposedly being gained by shortcutting breeding with inbreeding and selection. I’d welcome an essay from you that could justify that rear angulation is a matter of enough importance to justify the atrocities that inbreeding has brought us and that the dogs are better off in the end.
I think rear angulation or ear set or efficiency of movement as much as they can be judged in a breed ring are irrelevant qualities to 99% of dog owners. If we combine all of the border collies in any given year that are being shown in conformation to a serious degree plus all of the border collies that are being trialed in sheep trials to a serious degree, I’d guess that we have 200 dogs maybe. That’s not even 1% of the 35,000 border collies born each year.
If you want a preview of why the breed ring is insufficient for the task of choosing good conformation, I’ll note that fads, not science rules what is “proper” conformation. We have laymen, not engineers or structural biologists, making these decisions. And that some 70 year old looking at a dog trot is a rather poor test for all these qualities that you’re supposedly testing.
If conformation was about conformation, it’d be done in a lab or a hospital with real tools to look at structure and with real measures of movement.
French bulldogs don’t have a purpose, so what’s the point of conformation?
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
I can say that there have been attempts to scientifically look at conformation.
Rachel Page Elliot’s work, which began with goldens, is important.
But I’d don’t think it’s the final word on working retriever conformation, for Bill Tarrant had an entirely different concept of a working retriever conformation from what one sees in show-line goldens and Labs.
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
The final word in conformation in running dogs is…there is no final word.
Just had a conversation the other day about Saluki types running up and down hills. No one said “side gait.”
Jess recently posted..Justice League of America 54 cover and info!
Forgot the bloody link!
http://saluqi.home.netcom.com/belkin.htm
Jess recently posted..Justice League of America 54 cover and info!
The question we need to ask is, why are we testing the movement of a coursing breed in a little ring when we are perfectly able to test them in the field running after real or synthetic prey?
Racing greyhounds don’t have HD. Show ones do. So much for being able to judge efficiency of movement in a little ring by a judge who has no degree in biological structure or engineering or racing science.
That’s probably because most racing greyhounds get a bullet in the head before making it to an age where HD would be noticeable.
Go to Pubmed and search for ‘greyhound hip dysplasia.’ The rates of dysplasia in racers is so low that they are used a baseline (zero dysplasia) population and have been crossed with high rate breeds like Labradors to study the inheritance.
Jess recently posted..I Know You’re Watching
Actually a large number of slow and not fit to race NGA greyhounds in the US are placed in individual homes because of a rather aggressive program jointly sponsored by the American Greyhound Track Owners Association and the ASPCA. This is great for the greyhounds while it has made it more difficult for breeders of other sighthound breeds to sell puppies. I do not have the current NGA whelping stats but 10 years ago they were whelping around the same number of pups as AKC Dachshund breeders – 20,000 a year.
2/3rds of the phone calls I get about Borzois ask if I have a rescue available because they want to “save a life”. Since the AKC breeders currently register somewhat less that 700 pups a year NATIONWIDE there are relatively few rescue Borzois out there – I would estimate less than 50 in most years.
Of course we have the problem that the gene pool is shrinking which is not good for a breed of dogs.
Let me qualify my last statement:
I meant that they don’t have a purpose where they would have to run all day.
It would seem to me that they could have very inefficient conformation just built in.
This is something that could never be tolerated in certain other breeds.
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
French bulldogs don’t have a purpose… heck, they can’t even breed on their own! Without artificial insemination and cesarean sections the breed would cease to exist. They are the “poster dog” for just how far away from suitability for any purpose at all we can breed a dog.
Andy Ward recently posted..Calling Out NKC
Conformation problems:
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
Functional conformation is something that can be tested empirically.
If you read Coppinger’s book, there is really good discussion about husky gaits.
The only way to figure out whether a husky has a functional gait is to run it in a sled dog team.
The gaits have to fit all the other members of the team; otherwise, it gets clunky and inefficient.
Rachel Page Elliot did something like this for the golden and then a ton of other breeds. There are some weakness is in what she did.
I’ll give one example:
In working Irish setters in Ireland, the field breeders have always selected for a rocking, loping gait. It is sometimes called a wolf hop or a wolf lope.
It is the most efficient gait for moving over hilly terrain.
It has been systematically bred out of both Irish red and white setters and Irish setters.
For some unknown reason, I’ve seen this same gait in working strain golden retrievers.
If you want to see a dog that really has it, check out the Irish setter episode of Breed All About it. There is a field line Irish red in Ireland that really lopes.
But even at that conformation is something that needs much more empirical testing than exists behind most breed standards.
Rachel Page Elliot did some work here, but it still needs more study.
Ultimately, conformation has to be like Coppinger’s testing of husky gait. It has to be in the real world.
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
The Irish Setter in the movie appears to me to be doing a full, flex and extended back double suspension gallop – which is seen in the best galloping sighthounds (and in cheetahs). It is hard to be sure as the legs are out of sight but the body action is that of a dog doing a double suspension gallop.
Here is a link to such a gait in one of my best lure coursing Borzoi
http://www.silkenswift.info/blaze.gallop.html
Blaze was the result of many generations of breeding Borzoi for success at lure coursing and he is currently in the pedigree of a majority of US top lure coursing Borzoi. My feeling is that most of his desired traits were dominant or semi dominant and I have NOT encourage people to inbreed on him but rather to try and pick dogs with good performance histories in order to breed high speed performance dogs.
Evaluating sighthounds at a trot in a show ring is as stupid as evaluating Michael Phelps based on his performance walking to the refrigerator to get a carton of milk.
Rachel Page Elliot in my opinion, made the mistake of thinking ring trot would predict galloping performance.
I need to get my films together and do a web site on dog locomotion based on my research.
http://tinyurl.com/28u26yc This is the best part of Coppinger’s book. The domestication theory is probably not accurate, as is some of the analysis on neoteny and dog behavior.
But his analysis of physical conformation is pretty interesting.
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
Why is it that if Christopher doesn’t agree with inbreeding, he must not understand confirmation?
I also don’t understand why one would think that inbreeding is the only away to achieve good confirmation. Oh, wait. Perhaps I misunderstood. It’s not the ONLY way. It’s the fastest way. My bad.
K9Trainer5 recently posted..Moxy
I believe what Chris quite correctly in my opinion points out. Properly to
address crippled dogs and poor movement confirmation don’t mind that breeder over there because the dilemma facing all breeds leaves one thinking there are only two choices.
This is only speculation there are only two choices Inbreeding depression vs. puppy mill atrocities.
Thinking do not mind breeder over there propaganda dilemma puppy mill vs. backyard breeder that there are no other options. False
Comments on Hip Dysplasia and breeding functional dogs.
when I was a grad student at UPenn working on my high speed locomotion in dogs project one of my dissertation supervisors was Gail Smith of Penn Hip fame. He did Penn Hip and OFA films on around 100 of the Borzois I had bred over the 13 year period I managed to stay at Penn (I was trying to be a graduate student for life) and my dogs became the “controls for the project”. There were a few HD Borzois in the batch but none of them were lure coursing competitive dogs and the HD Borzois had atypical (for my dogs at least) aspects of their conformation. Thin non-jodhpur muscled thighs, very large size and in one case the dog was a tiny, poorly muscled runt although physiologically healthy (live to be 13 years 5 mo.).
We bred one of the Borzois with excellent hips to a dysplastic very loose ligamented German Shepherd of low stationed show ring conformation. The puppy had such bad hips that at a year of age there were no formed hip sockets. (out of 10 pups 9 were stillborn – also a interesting result – next generation back to the Borzoi was only 2 pups). The next generation back to Borzoi produced one with terrible hips and one with hips like a Borzoi. My conclusion from this is that rather than being polygenic the HD in the Shepherd was a dominant gene (probably a connective tissue defect). In Shepherds and other HD prevalent breeds I would hypothesize that various modifying factors have been selected for to somewhat reduce the effect of the primary connective tissue defect gene and so the condition appears to be polygenic until a breeding is done to a breed in which the c. t. defect is not present so none of the modifying genes are present.
The phenotype of the really athletic sighthound breeds (Saluki, Whippet, Racing Greyhound, Some Borzoi, Scottish Deerhound) is actually more like a wolf in the proportion of limb length to body length. Most of our large breed dogs as kept in the US, UK or Europe tend towards a dwarfy, heavy bodied phenotype where a large bulky body is combined with shorter stockier legs and with little emphasis on heavy muscling. The genes that create this may well be various sorts of connective tissue defect genes.
McKusick’s classic book “Heritable Disorders of Connective Tissue” is worth tracking down and reading for anyone involved in breeding dogs. It is enlightening to see how many of the exaggerated body forms we see in dogs are actually also seen in various unfortunate humans victims of genetic mutations.
However I do not think sighthounds suffer from Marfan’s syndrome. In contrast to the loose ligamented Marfan’s victims athletic sighthounds have very tight connective tissue (ligaments, skin, tendons).
Notice – all typos are mine. I tend to type too fast.