Lusia at Lassie Gets Help puts forth Dewi Tweed, the 2010 International Supreme Champion sheep dog as proof that the “genetic bottleneck” in Border Collies is benign or perhaps a myth.
Richard Millichap’s most awesome Dewi Tweed gathers sheep in the Welsh mountains. Enjoy! [For those interested in the border collie’s “genetic bottleneck,” Kinloch has a link to Tweed’s pedigree, with the inbreeding coefficient numbers listed for his ISDS parents and grandparents.]
Sadly, COIs for one dog’s parents and grandparents don’t really tell the story of what’s happening with the breed. Especially when you’re only looking at 6 generations. But let’s look at Dewi Tweed anyway.
Here’s the published pedigree:
And here’s a Legend to explain what the notation means:
The first thing you’ll notice is all the green. Every green dog on the pedigree has major trial results. I count 18 of the 62 dogs on the pedigree with major trial results. You’ll notice that the top of the pedigree is dominated by Bwlch Taff, a major sire with 715 registered puppies to his credit, and whose genes alone comprise over 3% influence on recent dogs. For reference, Wiston Cap has a current breed influence of over 14%, making him literally the great-grandfather of the breed.
In a normal pedigree with no inbreeding, parents each have a 50% influence, grandparents a 25% influence, and great grandparents 12.5% influence.
In the case of Dewi Tweed, popular sire Wiston Cap has a blood influence of 18.4% even though you have to go back at least 6 generations before you find him on the pedigree. So even though he’s been gone for more than 30 years, he still holds more realestate in Dewi Tweed’s pedigree than a great grandfather. But that measure alone doesn’t account for Wiston Cap’s impact on Dewi Tweed. The COR is what’s called the Relationship Coefficient, and it estimates the percent of genes passed down from any specific ancestor to the target dog. Wiston Cap’s COR on Dewi Tweed is 26.7%. So although he only takes up the equivalent space of a great grandfather, Wiston Cap is like a grandfather to Dewi.
This isn’t too surprising given that Wiston Cap appears 156 times on a full pedigree of Dewi Tweed between the 6th and 16th generations, with the 1st generation being the parent dogs, not the target dog.
In fact, Dewi Tweed has blood from 9 of the top 10 most popular Border Collies.
What is clear from the chart is that Dewi Tweed is the product of a concerted effort to breed to a very select few popular dogs. It’s also clear that those few poplar dogs are also highly related.
This is the popular sire effect. Just look at how some of them like Ben represent a very small theoretical percent of blood but a commanding influence on the genetics. The concentration of genes in the gene pool through inbreeding and line-breeding have allowed Ben to pass down his genes over 17 times more than would be expected from his 15 appearances on the pedigree. You can’t magnify genes within a gene pool without marginalizing other genes.
It’s not surprising that the youngest popular sire Wisp (who has still managed to romance his way into the top 4 studs of all time) doesn’t have influence on Dewi Tweed; as of the year 2000, roughly 80% of the puppies born did not have any influence from Wisp yet. There simply hasn’t been enough time for him to work his way into more lines, but we’ve already experienced his exponential rise to fame and his influence is leveling out at 4%.
Although Donald McCaig recently said:
I’ve heard the complaint that Border Collies aren’t any healthier than other purebred dogs, that pedigrees w/o Wiston Cap (d 1979) are rare. True about Cap. And intensive breeding to a single sire was, genetically, a risky idea. As it happens, the community dodged the bullet: Wiston Cap didn’t have anything wrong with him. And there hasn’t been another Wiston Cap – the community is “flavor of the month” and what I want in a dog aren’t necessarily the same combination of virtues and vices another equally qualified handler might want.
The truth is that there HAVE been many other popular sires who have cemented their place in the breed forever and consequently narrowed the gene pool. Here is a chart of all of them, Wiston Cap is #31154. He isn’t even the most popular sire. That honor belongs to Cap 3036 who would have still surpassed Wiston Cap even if Wiston Cap wasn’t so highly inbred on Cap 3036 in the first place [~24.5% of Cap’s genes are found in Wiston Cap]. You can see Cap’s rise to dominance happened even before Wiston Cap was born.
Luisa noted that Dewi’s parents aren’t very inbred when when we look at only very recent generations, 6 generations in the case of the supplied chart. Well, a COI6=4.4% for the sire Lad isn’t a very impressive number. That level still indicates active line-breeding, as we can see, the same sire Bwlch Taff appears twice in the third generation. The dam’s COI6 is much better at 1%, but we can still see inbreeding on common ancestors like A. Owen’s Ben.
I entered 3149 ancestors of Dewi Tweed into my pedigree program and ran Dewi Tweed’s COI6 and got 2.27% More interestingly, I ran Dewi Tweed’s FULL COI calculation where you take his entire known pedigree into account. This is a superior calculation and represents the true degree of theoretical allele concentration due to inbreeding and line-breeding. Before access to genetic programs such calculations were impractical, thus the popularity of more crude measures like a COI6. Dewi Tweed’s full COI is 9.3%
Again, while the recent breeding on Dewi Tweed’s pedigree doesn’t top the charts in gross inbreeding it does not offer us any consolation that a genetic bottleneck does not exist in the Border Collie breed. In fact, his pedigree proves that such a bottleneck does exist.
Dewi Tweed is a typical example of what’s happening breed-wide: a declining interest in breeders using excessive levels of inbreeding (like father-daughter, litter mates, etc) but the overall COI of the breed still rising at an alarming rate. COI6 numbers are falling, but full COI numbers are rising. That fact tells us that we’re past the turning point. There’s no way to out-cross our way out of increasing COIs using only registered dogs or following the same breeding trends we have been, specifically over-breeding the “flavor of the month” trial sire far and wide.
I applaud Luisa for recognizing an amazing dog that was bred and handled by an exceptional handler, but she goes too far to suggest that his pedigree assuages what should be a serious concern over the future genetic health of the Border Collie breed.
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Anton
Christopher
Lawrence Dillard
Lech
Stephanie
Essere
Great analysis.
The fact that genetic influence displays best on a log scale speaks volumes.
Where do you get pedigree data going back N > 5 generations?
The log chart comes from the work done by Teun van den Dool who scanned in all of the ISDS stud books back to the 1940s (the beginning) and digitized them. Unlike the American registries the ISDS publishes their stud books.
The other information in the post comes from my own BC pedigree database which has been compiled over many years.
LOL. Looks like I’m gonna get some more hits from here now!
retrieverman recently posted..The lion at rest
While Border Collies are probably still relatively less inbred than a lot of breeds, being involved in Agility I see a LOT of Border Collies–and I’ve been astounded lately at how many problems I’ve been seeing. Besides a lot of ETS (which the “sheeple” don’t care about or dismiss as simply bad jumping form or bad training–it doesn’t affect herding ability, right?) it seems like there are a lot of seizure disorders, temperament problems, extreme noise sensitivity, and lots of weird-ass stuff that makes me wonder if there are immune problems–like fungal diseases and tick-borne illness, strange (but benign) tumors in young dogs, etc. I know one young dog, not even a year old, who injured his leg and developed a MRSA infection that finally resulted in his having to have his leg amputated.I realize with those last that they could happen to any dog (or person), and of course since I know a lot of people with Border Collies, my perception is likely skewed–but it still strikes me as odd.
Once we got into BCs, and I started looking up pedigrees this did start to concern me.
We’re small beans breeders: a litter every 3-5 years tops, dogs aren’t linebred…but at the rate this is going I am concerned if down the line I can find properly outcrossed dogs to breed mine to — and like Nora, I have started to see some issues that weren’t there even 10 years ago when we got into BCs.
I think we’re fooling ourselves with thinking “this can’t happen here”; never say never.
I’d really be interested in outcrossing to something related but different (English Shepherd or these Farm Collies), but then you run into the problem of “can the pups be registered anyplace”…because people like those purebred dogs…
But needless to say, I am starting to check into that…if I can do an even harder outcross that might even be more beneficial towards producing the type of dog we want to breed (I need pups who can go do dog sport, including but not limited to trialing, work on a farm, or just be nice looking, sweet family pets, possibly out of the same dog, so I don’t want extremes of looks or behavior) and still give any buyers that slip of paper; I’ll do it (and take the hit from some folks who will accuse me of being the infamous backyard breeder baddie who is producing mutts…not like I haven’t gotten sniped at already).
**and heh, yeah, my husband and I joke of producing Bordercoodles…and introducing “the smartest hunden in der welt! so smart they can sign their own names…without opposable thumbs even!”
I don’t see what is so wrong with cross breeding? Why can’t we cross breed the border collie to another compatible breed (something with athleticism and intelligence) or even mongrels to add ‘new blood’ into the border collie gene pool and then breed from the best herders of that F1 generation to other pure BCs (not inbreeding to each other) until we have herding ability in line with the most popular sires but without those sires appearing significantly in the pedigree of the out crossed dogs.
We should IGNORE looks, they aren’t important, and focus only on health and herding ability.
It seems even farmers are loath to out cross their dogs however, why is this? Yes it may dull the herding instincts slightly in the first generation but F2 and later generations may be just as good as purebred dogs (we must “cull” the bad herders out by spaying / neutering them).
If we can do this we can fix many of the problems without losing the breed entirely to weak genetics and inbreeding depression.
There’s nothing wrong with cross breeding. The problem is that the Border Collie establishment is no different than almost all other breeds in terms of their adherence to “blood purity” and closed gene pools. They make it difficult to out cross and few if any people have any sort of planned program to out-cross prophylactically. Border Collie enthusiasts are no different in their arrogance that everything they want in a dog is captured already within the breed and no other breed can offer anything better, so to out-cross would invariably be to damage the breed.
There hasn’t been a significant contribution of non-Border Collie blood since the founding of the stud books. This is just a fact, and since it’s been part of the culture for at least 70 years if not longer, I don’t see anyone sticking their neck out to change it now.
And let us not get too enamored with “herding ability.” Industry isn’t asking for these dogs. Sport trialists are. And they are as much obsessed with winning and the particular demands of their sport as any other professional competitor. Asking them to out-cross is like asking a NASCAR driver to use a street car or maybe some F1 parts. The events are related but there’s not much interest in taking risks or jeopardizing immediate performance.
There are, however, plenty of us outside of the sheep trial circuit who wouldn’t be harmed by experimentation and innovation and breeding for realistic concerns that are more important to us than trial ability, but we’re the declared enemy of the trialists as much as the show folks are, so we’re not welcome to mix our dogs even among purebred Border Collies, let alone other breeds.
And thus much of the message of this blog. Give us the tools and the freedom to do what we think is best instead of standing in the way and throwing up road blocks.
Heh, yeah, I’d just like to be able to breed my dogs to a nice AKC Border (just for the genetic variability — they are both Borders), but we both know what that means: the herding folks wouldn’t accept the pups, literally, because “Barbie dogs!”, and the AKC folks (who might be a bit more flexible, maybe, possibly a teeny weenie bit more) wouldn’t really accept them because “coyotes!”. Their ears might not be perfect; their coats the wrong consistency, they’re noses too pointy/not pointy enough; their markings and size all wrong. The AKC has a deservedly bad reputation for getting way too fussy and flakey, nitpicking over fads in looks which have nothing to do with the dog’s ability to work or even be a happy, healthy pet…so they kinda scare me off a bit; not that the ABCA is doing much better at this point, but it’s all I’ve got at the moment.
I highly doubt that they’d lose that much herding ability, nor do I think they’d lose much in the looks department, pretty sure the health would remain the same too (although the long term outlook would be much greater — genetic variability is a marvelous thing) — and it might be a good cross in regards to a dog, more amenable to families and beginners that still keeps a lot of working potential, as well as possibly being a bit prettier (let’s be honest: looks aren’t everything, but owning a good looking dog is like owning a good looking horse…it makes you smile when you see their face in the morning…rather than wince, and correct conformation does equate into better performance). It certainly would be a boon for breeders
But, if one would do that, one had better be ready to get the “Shun, shun the non-believer!” treatment…and your dogs might wind up getting shunned too (hence the need for independent wealth, so one can tell them to “sod off!”).
**right now there are no dogs in my area, a big area with a rather small population, that are full BC that aren’t pretty much heavily related to my dogs, even with this outcross female in the mix, everything is a first cousin or closer to our old dog…I’m not into cousin marryin’! So…now what? I’ve got about 3 years to figure out a plan of action, which is fine, but the roadblocks are a pain in the tuckus. The dilemna is pretty easy to see.
Been there. Done that.
Salute! Prost! Cheers!
I can give the reason why my family (small time, farm type dog breeders) are loathe to outcross:
1) the “purebred cachet” — try actually selling a crossbred, even if the cross is sensible to the task/breeding goal (no Border x Peke, for instance)…you’d essentially be placing yourself in the same marketplace as the “free to good home” Craigslist and shelter dogs (and the shelters around here have extremely low adoption fees, because the new owners get the expense of taking the dog to the vet…this is a pro/con situation, which belongs to another day) — part of this is also one of the reasons, beyond insane eugenicists within the breeding ranks, that registries are loathe to open up the studbook (revolt from within and without, resulting in less money for them, scares the bejeesus out of any registry, horse or dog, I’ve ever come across…although the warmblood horse world has managed to head that off a bit)
2. the “rescue moralization” — how dare you essentially bring mutt pups into an overpopulated world! You monster! You freak! (ok, I over dramatize, but it’s the social stigma of even breeding purebred dogs — unless you’re somebody going to Westminster, and are part of the dog world glitterati — is pretty big; everyone should adopt from the shelters, nobody should breed…especially some insane rebel who dares to breed crossbred “mutts”, no matter how sensible the cross may be; again, it comes down to: good luck selling those pups
A lot of the actual farm dogs around here are BC x Heeler and/or Aussie, but most of those pups aren’t raised in the best of conditions, and health guarantees, what are those? (which leads to other problems, pros/cons left for another time). They are by and large, not half bad dogs…but the largest market for them is the twice monthly livestock auction — and if they don’t get sold there, well, I don’t think they have a safe future many of them.
I’m not cool with going into that market, not cool at all — so…unless I can hit the lotto (and thus be independently wealthy enough to experiment at least a little): a litter every 4 years or so, and they’ll be purebred.
[even if I think I could create a better herding/sport/family dog in the long run if allowed to outcross to other collie type breeds, and probably a pretty cool versatile working/family dog by creating a new designer breed (like Borderdoodles or even a Labrador Collies — that would likely be an awesome potential service dog right there]
The tragedy is nobody studies pedigrees anymore. I have asked some present day triallists how their dogs are bred only to be told they haven’t got a clue.I have had the same family of dogs well over 40 yrs, bringing in out crosses where possible. When people take their bitches to a trial winning dog they don’t appear to care what the dog looks like, works like – they just want one that will win trials. Never in a million years would I go to a white dog with pink pigment. A wall-eyed (blue) a sure sign of in/close-breeding is an absolute NO NO. Wall eyes are a fault as far as I’m concerned – we have a responsibility not to breed them in.I have had dogs that due to a lack of pigment close their eyes in bright sunlight. Everything that was carefully bred into the Border collie by shepherds seeking to improve the breed both physically and mentally is slowly being eroded for the sake of winning trials.
Hi Chris: I have considered for some time how the bobtail was eliminated in both Border Collies and Rough Collies. The Aussie’s foundations could have been exclusively at one time directly coming down from the Bob tail English Shepard.
The tip of the tail in Rough and Smooth Collies was carefully checks to be at least the length to the top of the hock. It would seem Breeders of days gone by found a problem? Likewise, we were to assume that the longer tail tipped in white made it easier for a Shepard to see his dog in high grasses?
The Bob Tailed Welsh Sheepdog.
http://www.bordercolliemuseum.org/BCCousins/ExtinctBreeds/ExtinctBreeds.html
http://www.englishshepherdhome.com/standard.htm