And now for the final fact-check of Carol Gravestock’s often shoddy rationalization of inbreeding at Absolut Bullmarket French Bulldogs:
We might also say that a breeder utilizing this method [line breeding] has let previous generations take the risks associated with tight line or inbreeding, and is using the results to create their own line breeding. One can choose the best, healthiest results of in bred or line bred dogs available and use them, without chancing the risks associated with doing such breedings one’s self.
Here we have the worst sort of rationalization after the fact, the kind of self soothing one does when you regret your past or your ancestry. Grandpa the fascist was just taking orders, my parents’ cult was a positive learning experience, that abusive relationship was actually good training for my marriage. The essence of her argument here is that past inbreeding is ok since the risks are magically quelled if someone else did the dirty work.
This is not how inbreeding works. Inbreeding concentrates genes and selection removes them. Continued line-breeding does not magically unpair the homozygous genes, it pairs up more of them. Further inbreeding does not add information, it removes it. Every generation the level of homozygosity increases, the chance of doubling up on another recessive disease increases, the immune system weakens, fertility and health plummet as inbreeding depression increases.
You are saved from past inbreeding only as much as you have outcrossed since.
You don’t inbreed for health, so why would you select the healthy puppies? None of the puppies are healthier than the parents, none are healthier than if you outcrossed, so why are we to expect that we even have the ability to select an inbred puppy that has all the “illusive, perfect rear angulation” you inbred for and which is also free from deleterious recessives?
If you inbred for a perfect ass, you’re going to select for a perfect ass. You don’t inbreed for health, ever, so the idea that you can select for health is absurd. This is as inane as giving people cancer to make them healthier, it is not done, it does not work.
Nowhere in dogs do we find paragons of inbred health. If inbreeding created health we would expect to see as many amazing specimens of vitality as we do look alike hair models with perfect asses. Scientists don’t study the dog genome because it’s healthier than humans, they study it because breeds are significantly more diseased.
According to geneticists, Line-breeding can be carried on for many generations without deleterious effects on the line or breed as long as the individuals involved have few hidden genetic disorders. Testing of both parents, and of as many previous generations as possible, is key to ensuring a line bred litter has the maximum chances of being free of inherited diseases.
I’d love to read the reports of these unnamed and uncited “geneticists” so their academic credentials can be stripped and they can get jobs more befitting their station: i.e. picking up dog shit instead of spewing it. Fortunately, it’s improbable such “geneticists” ever existed. I suspect that neither Carol Gravestock nor the website she stole that paragraph from have ever met a geneticist–let alone a consensus of them–which would say something so asinine.
The most glaring error is “as long as the individuals involved have few hidden genetic disorders.” There’s not a single dog on the planet, including the boxer who had her entire genome sequenced, that we can verify as having “few hidden genetic disorders.” We can’t even identify what the vast majority of genes do, let alone tell if they are potential deleterious alleles. Despite the great advancements we have made we are in a state of ignorance and we must be humble about that, not arrogant.
Few diseases even have names, even fewer have diagnostic tests, and only a pathetically small few have a DNA test that can identify clear, carrier, or affected status.
If Carol Gravestock would agree to never inbreed until she can prove that her stock has no genetic disorders, that’s a deal we should hold her to. She and her line of dogs will be long extinct before the day comes when anyone–including a billion dollar genome sequencing project, let alone a hobby breeder on a budget–can prove that their stock would suffer no harm from inbreeding. I suspect that day will never come. Science hasn’t yet settled how many planets we have in our solar system, let alone identified every possible disease in the human or dog genome!
The entire notion that testing will save us, or at least allow breeders to inbreed with impunity, is a farce. There are only a small handful of tests and the rate at which science gives us new ones is staggeringly slow. If the book of dog disease is the size of a dictionary, our current understanding is a few pages and our ability to test is but a few scattered letters and a bit of punctuation on some random page.
Spreading such lies intentionally is unethical and an evil act. It is evil because it will undoubtedly lead to the needless pain and suffering of animals and their loving owners and the only possible benefit is to satisfy the ego of a narcissist breeder. How is this different than the most extreme evils that Eugenics has wrought on our world in the last century?
Shame on you, Carol, and anyone who reprints such callous misinformation.
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In the short run, one can select against deleterious recessives.
That is certainly true.
However, in the long run, the inbreeding depression issues start to set in.
And we have to know what those are.
The truth is we don’t know all the deleterious recessives that a dog has.
I have deleterious recessives in my genes. All organisms do.
Just because one does a single tight breeding without problems does not mean that there are no deleterious recessives.
It just means that the cards shuffled the right way. It doesn’t mean that it can’t happen again.
I have nothing against Ms. Gravestock; most of the information on her blog is very good.
She has been very supportive of my blog over the years, but I have to say that I disagree here.
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
I know, that’s why it’s time to take a stand and call people out for this. I know I risk losing a reader and someone who was one of the first people to link to my blog back when I started, but if she’s adult enough to publish that material on her website, she should be adult enough to take the criticism of it.
On another note, it is theoretically possible that a stint of inbreeding will leave the immune system alone and only double up on harmless genes, or even double up on a “longevity” gene or some thing else beneficial. This is possible. But in our current ignorance this is like making the moonshot without a telescope.
I imagine that if you looked at a population that has ample offspring and which is subject to natural selection, you might find that there emerge slightly more inbred individuals that live longer. This is the other end of the bell curve from the rare allele that on a freak chance gets doubled up and kills the offspring young.
The problem with even mentioning this possibility is that our dog populations and culture are in no way amenable to this sort of endeavor. We don’t breed and test and even know enough about dog genes to successfully try this.
We’d need a factory farm model of dog breeding with massive testing and even more massive culling.
The truth is we can SEE the genes that most breeders want to inbreed on. They are looking at structure after all. We have no tests, we can not see, the health and longevity genes. Nor do we know which ones would be beneficial in a homozygous form versus heterozygous.
So I don’t want to dismiss the possible, I want to demonstrate just how improbable it is.
It has certainly NEVER been done in dogs to my knowledge and I’d be thrilled to have an example to investigate if it has.
Christopher, you can call me “evil” as much as you want, but it won’t make me change my mind on the merits of a judiciously done, and carefully thought out breeding program that *includes*, but is not limited to, line breeding.
The basis of my entire breeding program has been health – I health test every one of my breeding dogs for everything known in our breed, using whatever methods are most current and accurate.
In doing so, I’ve managed to produce Frenchies that are living about 30% longer than the breed average, minimum, in addition to have no breathing issues, spinal issues or joint disorders, for the very most part.
Claiming that outcrossing is the answer to super healthy dogs is the argument used by every single designer dog breeding puppy peddler out there to justify their existence. It’s not true for them, and it’s not true for anyone else, either, and the proof of that is the number of sickly Bug/Frenchtons/Puggles that are over running all of our rescues and bankrupting us financially.
Outcrossing isn’t a magic bullet – breeding together two dogs who are free of genetic ailments *is*. I’ve just finished watching a mixed breed rescue dog die of one of the worst assortments of congenital defects and diseases that either I or her team of Veterinarians have ever seen, so please – spare *me* the myths about how all mixed breeds dogs are somehow miraculously free of any issues.
Step by step, with testing and careful planning, we can get healthier dogs. Occasional line breeding is part of the steps that many of us are using. If that makes me evil, then get me some black candles and a nice goat to sacrifice.
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It’s not the act that is evil, it’s the denial of the consequences. To be honest about the detriments is not to negate the merits. I’m asking for honesty, not propaganda.
Let me reiterate that I’m criticizing the elements of your “Myth of Canine Incest” post which don’t past muster. And they don’t.
* You’re really changing the subject by suggesting that I’m calling you evil for inbreeding. NOPE. I’m calling you evil because you either wrote or reprinted unsupportable statements that are dangerous and which give aid and comfort to people doing harm to our dog breeds.
* I’m glad that the basis of your breeding program is health. But how many tests are there? Less than 10? Less than 5? How many diseases are there in your breed? Getting ok scores on 3 tests when there are 99 diseases that there are NOT tests for does not give on license to pretend that they are not taking huge UNKNOWN risks, for questionable benefit.
* I’m glad your dogs are healthier. I would wish that that this was the trend. Sadly, I don’t think it is. I see too many other breeds going to pot. They’re going the other way.
* Sorry, but your criticism of puppy peddlers is irrelevant. Ironically, you are employing the “Genetic Fallacy.” The genetic fallacy is committed when an idea is either accepted or rejected because of its source, rather than its merit.
Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if those designer dog peddlers aren’t actually producing healthier dogs when their only concern is making a buck out of a hot trend versus the conformation breeder who is willing to sacrifice health at every corner to get a ribbon for some meaningless and esoteric artistic vision of an ideal dog.
* I don’t find your dismissal of outcrossing convincing simply by saying that Puggles are sick and causing bankruptcy. There’s a whole lot of assumptions there that I think you need to back up.
* You’re wrong about outcrossing and the requirement of breeding dogs free from disease. If I breed a dog affected with recessive disease A to a dog affected with recessive disease B, _NONE OF THE OFFSPRING_ will have either disease.
That’s an improvement in health. We’ve traded two bad alleles in each parent for two bad alleles in each puppy, but the puppies are free from the effects. That’s a major net gain. Sorry, the mere act of outcrossing improves health and decreases disease expression.
* Don’t ascribe to me the some-all fallacy that you employ. You ignorantly think that your world needs to be black and white and that since you like some aspects of inbreeding that you must WHITE WASH the entire process.
I have NEVER said that an outcrossed dog is guaranteed to be free from disease and your observation that some mongrel died of a disease doesn’t refute anything I’ve said. If this dog died of a recessive disease, it must have been present in both parents, no? Well, then it wasn’t much of an outcross then.
* I don’t care about black candles and goats being sacrificed. It’s much more horrific when it’s nylon rosettes and ribbons and the dogs are being sacrificed.
Here is the kicker, Christopher. Inbreeding and linebreeding are ‘just tools.’ Steps to be used. Unfortunately, in the closed registry system, they are the only tools in the box. Eventually, you’re going to need a phillips head instead of a slotted one, and no matter how long you search, you’re not going to find one in the box.
Cross-breeding is just another tool to bring in desired traits, whether they are specific genes or prey drive or reducing coat. I really fail to see why dog people simply will not acknowledge this.
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It’s recognized in other domestic animal breeding cultures… I really don’t understand the mental block that dog people have about it.
“Step by step, with testing and careful planning, we can get healthier dogs. Occasional line breeding is part of the steps that many of us are using. If that makes me evil, then get me some black candles and a nice goat to sacrifice.”
Do the homework, look up the studies involving the MHC and DlA genes, the risk factors associated with them, and tell me again how it’s going to be possible to breed within a closed system without drastically changing breeding practices. And that would include running gene checks on every dog for DLA genes in order to increase heterozygosity, and reduce homozygosity, and making sure EVERY SINGLE DOG that is healthy has an opportunity to reproduce and add it’s genes to the pool (not just the close to perfect dogs.) Breeding culture would have to change completely in order to continue on with closed registries. Period. It is not a viable system, long term.
“Claiming that outcrossing is the answer to super healthy dogs is the argument used by every single designer dog breeding puppy peddler out there to justify their existence.”
Interesting assertion. You know, I know very, very few ‘puppy peddlers.’ Most of my crowd are working dog and aboriginal dog enthusiasts. And yeah, they advocate outcrossing and open registries, as *tools* to produce healthy dogs. Because until the pet trade started, that was how healthy dogs were maintained, as most ‘breeds’ were actually landraces and did not exist within a closed system or the conformation show system. But what do I know? I’m an evil cross-breeder. Planning a litter of cross-breeds I can peddle next year. Woohoo.
Jess recently posted..Justice League of America 54 cover and info!
What?
You’re planning another litter of halfghans?
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
Yes, next year. I have decided to continue on with the project, no matter how many times I get written up in breed club magazines.
Now I just have to come up with a better, more cutesy name and attach a large price tag, and I’m all set.
Jess recently posted..Justice League of America 54 cover and info!
Maybe Scottie can upgrade from that Italian Greyhound he’s been talking about.
BTW Carol, did you even write that essay or did you just steal it from other places on the internet. I find that a lot of the paragraphs appear on other breeder websites.
I’m just curious because you don’t seem able to defend any of it in specific, so I doubt that you actually understand it.
My cross-bred dog died at age 11 from osteosarcoma; her purebred mother died at age 14.
I certainly don’t argue that all mongrels are inherently healthier. Each dog as it exists is the result of a shuffling of the genetic deck.
No one knows all the deleterious recessives in any organism. These often aren’t known until many generations of very close breeding, and by then, it could be too late. Vast numbers of offspring could be produced from those tight breedings that it becomes impossible to control the problem.
But even if we leave that alone, inbreeding is bad for the immune system. Decreased genetic diversity means weaker immune systems.
That should trouble everyone.
Both of those things mean that no matter how hard one tries to breed out genetic diseases, the chances of something bad happening in the long run are almost assured.
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
Isn’t osteosarcoma high on the lists for both retrievers and boxers? Not much of an outcross in _that_ respect. Sadly, looking for a good breed that doesn’t have cancer is difficult. It’d be interesting to see what the stats were on the whole litter and the father too.
The whole litter except for that dog was euthanized.
I don’t know what happened to the father.
He had very bad dog aggression issues.
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
Cancer at age eleven in a large breed prone to that type of cancer is not such a yikesy thing for me. Age four, five, six, that’s yikesy.
I lost an IG to malignant melanoma this year. He was fourteen. My old Afghan bitch will be fourteen in January. If she was diagnosed with cancer tomorrow I would not be running around in circles, screaming. She is an old dog, and the gatekeepers start to malfunction in old age.
I saw a comment on a blog about someone who wanted a Bernese mountain dog. The breeder admitted she’d never had a dog live past age six. THAT IS FUCKED UP, and certainly worth some running and screaming.
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You know you can do genetic tests on the dog from the out-crossed breed.
I find it interesting that in the UK, the KC allows naturally bobtailed boxers into its registry.
Even though they got that bobtailed trait from –gasp– crossbreeding with a naturally bobtailed Pembroke corgi.
Variation on very few genes actually separate a boxer from a corgi, and it was very easy to breed dogs that looked like boxers but had naturally bobtails. It took only a few generations of breeding back to boxers before they had very “typey” boxers with this trait.
http://www.steynmere.com/ARTICLES1.html (There are series of articles on them).
If we can do that simply by breeding for something relatively frivolous like a naturally bob-tail, then surely we should be allowed to cross breed for health and genetic diversity purposes.
retrieverman recently posted..Popular sire problems in a livebearer
Christopher and others–Thank you so much for these articles and the highly entertaining comments following them. I can’t tell you how I happy I am to have found this little group of LOGICAL THINKERS–in the dog world, you are a rarity!!! Tonight, I feel a little bit less alone in the world. 🙂
p.s. My (giant breed) anatolian shepherd, who joined my family before the AKC got their clutches on the breed, is 12.5 years old and is going in for surgery tomorrow to remove a fast-growing, cancerous tumor from his back. It hasn’t spread that we know of and considering his age, I’m happy he’s doing as well as he is.
I think it is UNCONSCIONABLE that people are breeding dogs with a life expectancy of six years. Will anyone ever admit that outcrosses are necessary if we have any hope of saving many AKC dog breeds? Why would most dog breeders rather die than allow their breed to have “tainted” bloodlines? Eugenics is creepy when applied to humans–why is it OK in dogs? Why is “purity” so important to show dog breeders? I don’t think I will ever understand this.
What if dogs were bred more like sheep (and I assume other livestock–I am mostly familiar with sheep)? If I want collies and all I have is a german shepherd, I breed my shepherd to a collie, keep a puppy, breed that to a different collie–and so on, until I get to a point where I have a kennel full of “grade” collies (as they would say with sheep, lol). Basically–once my dogs have a high enough percentage of collie blood in them that they look and act like collies–they’re collies! It makes perfect sense to me. But I guess to some people that is a pretty horrifying scenario.
I’m so sorry to hear about your Anatolian with cancer, if you read back a few posts on my blog you’ll find one called “When it’s NOT cancer” which documents a recent scare I had with a puppy I bred.
I know the dread and the fear. I wish you all the best.
I also want to compliment you on speaking out against demodectic mange on your website. I find it appalling how this can be considered “normal” and business as usual. How many more signs of breed-wide impaired immune systems do we need to see before we stop calling impairments normal and accepting early deaths and disease filled lives?
As you said, who wants to bury a dog at 6?
hi Christopher. I just dropped Conrad at the vet–thank you for your nice comments about him! He is a good boy.
Breeding for normal eyes in collies is very trendy right now, and people are asking very high prices for CEA noncarriers…which I guess is causing more and more people to jump on the normal eye bandwagon. Unfortunately there are certain lines of collies which are known for normal eyes and which also have a high incidence of demodex, collie nose, and other skin problems, and many new breeders are going to these lines to get their dogs. These dogs also don’t have much to recommend them in the temperament (or brains) department. I have firsthand experience with this, unfortunately, as do some other collie folks I know. It’s gotten to the point where it’s difficult to find a normal eyed dog that isn’t from these lines!
So yeah, breeding for normal eyes ONLY is no better for the dogs than breeding for show ribbons!
The second scariest thing breeders are doing next to not caring about disease is caring about it in the wrong way!
This idea that you can (and should!) breed it out in 2 or 3 generations is harmful and really drives up both unintentional inbreeding and the popular sire effect.
They throw away precious diversity that can’t be restored to pounce on some luke warm disease that has been tolerable for decades but is suddenly so intolerable that it needs to be gone ASAP! using the same short cuts that got them in the CEA mess in the first place.
God forbid they turn to an English Shepherd or a Border Collie, an Aussie or a ____ to clear up the eye issue. God forbid they put in a 10 year plan to deal with it and preserve what little diversity the breed does have instead of a witch hunt which is burning down lines indiscriminately. God forbid we breed for carriers instead of only clears.
If you think the breeding is scary now, wait until we have more than 2 or 3 DNA tests. What happens when there are 10 tests or 100 and the breeders have to come to the cold harsh realization of just how sick and diseased every purebred breed really is. And there’s no way to breed your way out of 3 or 4 diseases, let alone 10 or more.
I kind of went off on a tangent there, sorry about that! 🙂
Relevant diversions are always welcome. We won’t turn away a breeder who is willing to talk about issues of health, testing, etc. Welcome and thanks.
Association of canine juvenile generalized demodicosis with the dog leukocyte antigen system
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1399-0039.2010.01463.x/abstract;jsessionid=3268A2B0B3222357F081516A086D06DE.d02t02
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Interesting! So it sounds like there will be a test for it eventually. That would actually be a really good thing…!
The insistence on pure breeding is nothing more than projecting the ego onto the dog. It’s mythology and religion. Pure blood enthusiasts also like the logical fallacy of any crossbreeding being of ‘unknown’ ancestry, or bringing in ‘unknown’ disease. (Hint: every dog has ‘unknown’ disease.) My absolute favorite are the Dal people who insist that Pointer characteristics or diseases are going to pop up suddenly and ruin Dalmatians. (Hint: You can selectively breed out/away from characteristics from a crossbreeding, just like you can breed out/away from characteristics from a purebred mating.)
I have Afghans and Salukis, and I was told that a Poodle and Doberman were crossed in, for coat and color, respectively, at some point many, many years ago. That is an unknown breeding.
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Poodles and dobermanns are related in the big genome wide study that came out recently.
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Figures.
Jess recently posted..Superman Batman 78