There’s a lot of bad information about inbreeding out there, most of it generated by breeders who are grasping at straws to defend the process they have been told is their best and most useful tool to shape their lines. This misinformation campaign is so common that even enlightened scholars on the subject have incorporated some of the lies into their understanding.
Before I tackle some of the most grossly inaccurate propaganda pieces, I want to correct a few minor mistakes in an otherwise excellent analysis on inbreeding and the breeder culture.
The essay you should check out is Joanna Kimball’s Inbreeding and COI post at Ruffly Speaking. Joanna provides a great insight into the mentality of the show breeder and why they want to use inbreeding and how they make it part of the culture. We do it this way because we’ve always done it this way.
The highlights are too numerous to repeat here, so I will instead offer the following minor, but important, corrections.
Line-breeding is still inbreeding, but we give it a different term to show that we’re not just concentrating genetic material randomly (as you would if you bred brother to sister). You’re doing it to try to re-create the aspects you like of a single dog or group of dogs in the pedigree.
While the first part of this statement is true, close breeding isn’t necessarily random, certainly not more random than line-breeding more distant relatives. Selection vs. randomness is a different quality that can be applied to a brother x sister, father x daughter, or more distant pairings. Randomness would imply that we are not selecting, but breeders almost always select. As I wrote about before, inbreeding by itself doesn’t change the frequency of alleles across the offspring, it simply creates more AA and aa individuals versus Aa individuals. It concentrates and separates, but by itself it does not exclude. Breeders using selection do the exclusion; the concentration of alleles makes each individual selection more potent in removing diversity. And no breeders inbreed and then use all the offspring equally, as this would defeat the goals behind the inbreeding.
This would be similar to a brewer distilling a 50% alcohol-water solution into 75% alcohol and then adding the removed water back in. The process of distillation doesn’t destroy water or alcohol, it simply gives us two solutions that become more concentrated alcohol and more pure water. It is the selection of the alcohol and the removal of the water that removes total “diversity.”
Breeding brother to sister is not more random than a great-grand father to great-grand daughter, it’s just more likely to double up a greater percentage of alleles. If we are selecting for the same apparent trait in both cases, say chocolate coat color, the brother x sister pairing will not result in more random results on that trait and all other traits that the two parents share. In fact, we are more likely to see more “randomness” in the non-selected traits in the distant mating than in the close mating because a brother and sister are already expected to share 50% of the same alleles.
I think what Joanna is trying to say is that closer breedings are more likely to double up on genes that the breeder has no desire one way or the other to be doubled up. This is true, and this is why a more distant breeding between dogs that still share the desired traits is safer. In fact, this is what I advocate. If you want to maintain good bone and a long shiny straight coat in your dogs, find an unrelated dog that has both good bone and a long shiny straight coat. This should not be that difficult, and the benefits to keeping the other 99.9% of the genes that we don’t want doubled up on unnecessarily free to be heterozygous is a major benefit.
You can keep pushing COI further and further back, but at some point it becomes less useful because you start hitting the founding dogs of the breed and that can artificially inflate the COI (because those are behind every single dog in that breed). So ten generations is considered pretty standard.
This is not true. Adding more information to a COI calculation is NEVER less useful or less accurate. The truth is the exact opposite: looking at only a few generations can give you the mistaken impression that you are not inbreeding. Taking a COI calculation back to the founders and beyond will never “artificially inflate” the COI. The opposite is true. Once we reach a founding dog (i.e. a dog that we know nothing about its parents) we have created ARTIFICIAL DIVERSITY. The COI calculation assumes that all founding dogs are 100% unique and 100% heterozygous. We know this isn’t true, it’s never true, but it’s an assumption we have to make.
If you only have 8 generations of ancestors, and you take a COI(10) or a COI(100) the answer will be the same. There’s no inflation, no distortion, and no creeping artificiality. The Coefficient of Inbreeding calculation has an exact definition and that definition in no way becomes less accurate the further back you go. COI is both the probability that two alleles in an individual are identical by descent and also the proportional decrease in heterozygosity under inbreeding. The more we know about the ancestors the more accurate and representative the COI calculation is.
Failing to go back as far as you can ARTIFICIALLY DEFLATES the COI calculation. A dog can not be found to be less inbred by finding out more about its ancestors. It can only be found to be more inbred. All the dogs in the Nth generation of a COI(N) are assumed to be unrelated and heterozygous. No additional information can make that any less extreme.
The reason that a COI6,7, or 10 is more “standard” practice in the breeding culture is not accuracy but convenience. The amount of information and the difficulty of calculation doubles each generation requring the use of expensive software and burdensome data acquisition and entry.
It has taken me over 4 years to compile the near-complete pedigrees on my dogs and even then I am stuck at a few dead ends in now-closed registries. It has taken literally thousands of hours of phone calls, letters, faxes, and e-mails and inquiries into online databases and to other breeders to compile copies of pedigrees and information from stud books.
If we count the single dog as the 0 generation, the parents as the first generation, etc., then a 10 generation pedigree will have 2047 potential dogs on it. While one page can hold a 5 generation pedigree with 62 ancestors on it, you’ll need to collect 33 such pedigrees to fill out a 10 generation history.
The worst error, however, comes in the comments to Joanna’s post where a breeder named Todd Chrisman says this:
While I agree with you generally, your take on COI is off. Outcrossing decreases “genetic diversity” by melting all of the strains and family types of a breed into one pot. The problem is you gloss over the negative recessive traits and those traits come back to haunt your breed, you have no repository of “clean” genetics to turn to.
This is bunk. As I noted before, inbreeding or outcrossing by themselves do not increase nor decrease genetic diversity. They only change the degree to which the existing alleles are segregated into like alleles. If we blindly inbred dogs over several generations with no selection other than relatedness, we’d find that the numerous puppies would be highly inbred but that we would have the same representation of alleles as the original founders.
This of this like a deck of cards where every two cards represents and individual. A mostly heterozygous gene pool is a randomly shuffled deck. A mostly inbred and homozygous gene pool would be a deck that is fresh out of the package with almost all the red cards next to red cards and almost all the black cards next to black cards. In both cases, there are 50% red cards and 50% black cards, but under inbreeding we have many many more pairs of cards that match color.
Instead of being well mixed and heterozygous, we would find most alleles paired up and homozygous in the highly inbred lot. For example, if the two founding dogs were Aa x Aa, we’d eventually find that all the puppies would be AA or aa. All those puppies would not be clones, however, as their other genes would be homozygous but not paired equally.
If the parents are Aa Bb x Aa Bb, the offspring would eventually be: AA bb, AA BB, aa BB, aabb. So all the offspring are homozygous, but we still have 50% As, 50% as, 50% Bs and 50% bs.
In practice, breeders breed very few puppies from each litter and continue to inbreed upon them. This throws out genetic diversity as fast as you can. To maintain genetic diversity, one needs to not only breed unrelated dogs, but you also need to use multiple puppies from any give pairing instead of just a few. Any given puppy is only able to preserve half the genes from each parent. The more heterozygous the parents, the harder it is to preserve their complete genome.
The bogus “melting” concept Todd presents has no support in biology. It is just the opposite. A heterozygous dog is able to preserve twice the data than a homozygous one as I have demonstrated in a previous post.
So too is the idea that inbreeding can maintain a repository of “clean” genetics that can be used to save the breed is as well unsupported by any physical means or observationally. Normal genetic drift, let alone consistent and breed wide selection on a few criteria lead to the rapid change in the frequency of gene variants; in other words, the concentration and loss of genetic diversity. In general, alleles drift to loss or fixation [appearing in none of the breed or in all of it], and this happens significantly faster in smaller populations. A frequency of 100% does not mean that genetic drift leads to homozygosity, rather that at least one of the possible two alleles will be the one in question.
This is why, for instance, flat coats and goldens are no longer produced in the same litter, why there are no Dalmatians without spots (or a uric-acid stone problem), and why fluffy corgis are on the way to extinction. The popular sire effect and the selection of only a few sires to produce the vast majority of puppies in breeds has made the notion of truly distinct lines a fantasy.
If there is an inbred pool of “healthy” dogs, it is to be found in another breed, and even then the rules of blood purity have prevented the Dalmatian backcross project from being accepted. And the idea that an outcross needs to be inbred itself is also unsupported and dangerous. One never need turn to this mythical healthy inbred population if breeders would simply outcross and bring in even a little bit of new blood. The maximum benefit will not come in removing disease through inbreeding (this has never been successful), but in managing disease so that it is rare.
It is not a problem that disease exists in dogs, it is a problem that it is so prevalent. Playing the lotto is not stupid because you have a chance at winning a fortune, it is stupid because you have a really really really lousy chance at winning and a very very very good chance at losing your investment.
Negative recessive traits don’t come back to haunt outcrossed breeds. They remain rare and unexpressed. They are harmlessly carried, affecting very few individuals, until normal genetic drift removes them. They only haunt inbred breeds where they are doubled up on and are carried by genetic drift to 100% frequency instead of 0% frequency. This is why sickle cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease are very rare in the greater human genome but highly concentrated within certain ethnic gene ponds.
Todd Chrismann’s analysis is idiocy.
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I’ll continue this series by looking at breeders very different from Joanna, who are actually trying to spread misinformation or whom are expert at convincing themselves of lies that would allow them to continue their time-honored but destructive practices without having to come to terms with reality and the harm they are doing.
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Anton
Christopher
Lawrence Dillard
Lech
Stephanie
Essere
This is good.
Let the games begin.
retrieverman recently posted..Ilhalmiut ethics
I talked to more than a few dog breeders that are not big on reality. This will be fun.
Jess recently posted..Batman Beyond Sketch
Hi –
Breeding full brother to sister IS random, because you’re not choosing a particular ancestor to try to re-create. Think of it like food coloring in water – mother is green, father is yellow. You want to get yellow. If you breed littermates (who are both lime-green, a mixture of green and yellow) all you get is more lime-green, with very little ability to tweak it toward what you want.
Linebreeding is breeding a lime-green back to a yellow to try to get yellow – if you’re doing it very tight, you breed right back to the father. If you’re going looser, you breed back to his brother. A very loose linebreeding would be to try to figure out what makes him a yellow – maybe you can see that his own grandfather seemed to produce a lot of yellow traits – and breeding to a relative of that grandfather.
Inbreeding, which is what show breeders call a breeding that puts together two identical pedigrees – full siblings, in other words; almost anything else is called very tight linebreeding – won’t get you closer to the desirable ancestor. I don’t know anyone who does it to improve their stock in terms of conformation, because it won’t work. You get more of what you’ve already got. Inbreeding is done in order to flush out undesirable traits (it basically “wastes” a breeding in order to check on what you’ve got lurking recessively) and is actually quite uncommon. Back when you could waste breedings because the pet market and the vet market didn’t exist – back in the days of the huge foundation kennels, where if it didn’t stay with you and it wasn’t sold to another breeder it was culled – inbreeding was considered an invaluable tool to “take the temperature” of your stock. Now that we have different sensibilities about culling, it’s very uncommon.
Very few breeders nowadays are trying to increase COI for its own sake – I’ve seen it a little bit in some field breeders who adhere to some of the ancient old German breeding rules but it’s not the way show breeders work.
I am always trying to go for a lower COI within the traits I want to perpetuate or want to bring in from elsewhere, but it is very, very difficult. I WISH it were as easy as “nice long straight coat.” Coat and color are so stinking easy – if we were genuinely breeding for coat or color we’d all own BIS dogs. None of us are breeding for base coat color. Those problems were solved long ago – there’s always a dog that’s the right color, so no need to inbreed to re-create the trait. We’re looking for traits like “longer upper arm,” and you don’t improve those by inbreeding.
I think it can be difficult for performance breeders to understand what show breeders are trying to do, because it takes so many years to even start to get an “eye” for a show dog . Performance breeders look at the decisions we make and think that we must be doing it out of some perversity, because nothing else would explain it; they can’t look at Dog X and realize that he would be COMPLETELY WRONG for Bitch Y but Dog Z would be a viable candidate. They both look like big black dogs (or furry spotted dogs, or whatever). When you’re deep enough into learning what type is, tiny differences are magnified and you stop thinking you have hundreds of stud dogs to choose from and start hoping you can find ONE. in my case I’m praying that he’s not related to her. Some are praying that he is.
Joanna Kimball recently posted..Faking it
It seems to be somewhat of a semantics issue. I would still not use the term random. Breeding siblings is choosing an ancestor, specifically both the father and mother. Or even just one of them.
For instance, if the sire is the only tri-color dog in your gene pool, and we know that tri-color is recessive like it is in Border Collies and other herding breeds, breeding two litter mates who themselves are guaranteed to not show Tri-color but to be carriers (because the father has to have both alleles being Tri-Color to express it), will be expected to produce 25% Tri-Colors, 50% Carriers, and 25% free of Tri-Color.
In our parent dogs, we had 50% Tri color alleles, both in the father, and 50% normal alleles, both in the mother. In the offspring we have the same total expression, but 25% are doubled up and 50% are half and half, still resulting in 50% Tri-color genes and 50% Normal.
Breeding siblings does accomplish the goal of concentrating genes of an ancestor, just like a line-breeding does. The only difference is that if the parents are otherwise outcrossed, we’re dealing with carrier status in the parents which isn’t VISIBLE often, but it’s still there and breeders have used this. It’s often easier to pay one stud fee to bring in the hot dog and then inbreed your puppies than to get that top dog studded out twice.
“Breeding full brother to sister IS random, because you’re not choosing a particular ancestor to try to re-create. Think of it like food coloring in water – mother is green, father is yellow. You want to get yellow. If you breed littermates (who are both lime-green, a mixture of green and yellow) all you get is more lime-green, with very little ability to tweak it toward what you want.”
that is actually false… looking at dominant/recessive and homozygous and heterozygous genes/alleles. That isn’t how traits are passed on
I had neglected to comment on Todd Chrismann’s comment on Joanna’s post which is really the most outrageous claim on that page. Joanna’s errors are minor, Chrismann’s comment is totally bogus. The post has been updated with that analysis.
Using colour theory as a metaphor for alleles misrepresents the issue. But to try to correct it using such, if you had a homozygous yellow mother and homozygous green father and colour were controlled by a single set of alleles, then yes, all offspring would be lime-green (assuming codominance, incomplete colour expression, or the like). However, if you bred two lime-green siblings to one another the colour probabilities of the offspring are 25% yellow, 25% green, and 50% lime-green.
Smithsonion published an article on this very thing a while back–a multigenerational experimental crossing of Newfoundlands and border collies, if i recall correctly–wherein their F1 offspring were a mix of the two parents’ traits (slight affinity to water, slight herding tendencies), but when they bred siblings together they ended up with F2’s that tended toward the characteristics of just one grandparent. Perhaps i can unearth the article somewhere….
Yes, the geneticist was Jasper Rine at UC Berkeley (hissssssss) and several studies have come out of the Pepper x Gregor cross.
http://genomebiology.com/2000/1/2/research/0004/
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/03/science/study-of-canine-genes-seeks-hints-on-behavior.html?pagewanted=all
Christopher recently posted..The Oven Ate My Turkey
If one believes in the stories of Adam and Eve, as well as Noah’s Ark, well then we’re all just a bunch of inbreds!!! 🙂 Amazes me that so many people fall in line in unquestioning lock-step, no. — Pied Piperesque fashion — touting their belief in whaty sounds to be such an unlikely fable. Amazing how we criticise inbreeding, linebreeding, etc., of our dogs and other companion animals, yet look at us.
You won’t get any biblical explanations for natural phenomenon here. In fact I see many parallels between the various dog-dogmas and religious dogma. Not a lot of independent thinking going on at all, the sanctity of written documents that are given magical powers, a very few select people who declare themselves the priesthood who can speak with the divine and translate it to the poor masses who just don’t understand, significant abuse most of which is covered up only to be revealed years later, fractious infighting, etc. etc.
Any animal can & does carry negative recessive genes whether is it outcrossed or line bred. It is a fact of life. There are a number of useful breeding strategies. Type to type is the one expressed as superior in the above article. If a person works for a long time with a specific group of individuals typically they can predict to some degree what is most likely to be within that group. Generations of genetic testing and breeding will provide a strong basis for breeding intelligently to ensure health. Outcrossing can and will bring in unwanted traits as well as desired traits. What is good comes in and what is bad comes in. If it was as easy as just outcrossing to breed a perfect animal, everyone could do it well. In my opinion, the best strategy for successful breeding is to breed for function first. Breeding for a specific function is the manner in which all breeds were originally developed. As long as function is the guiding star then a breeder will not go too far off track. At its base, breeding is just shaking up a sack of genes and pouring them out. God is the one in control of all results ultimately. Only knowledge of the individuals involved over generations can stack the deck for the best results regardless of the strategy employed. I find everyone is an instant expert these days with no real foundation of knowledge except what they’ve read. Reading is a good thing but the information is only as valuable as the knowledge of the person that wrote the article. Go to a plumber for plumbing and a gardener for gardening. After you’ve tried to breed the most beautiful, healthiest, most functional animal possible within a specific breed for 3 decades I’d be interested in your opinion.
This is true and pointless. Are you suggesting we act defeatist and claim that because we can not achieve perfection we must settle for mediocrity? One day the dogs we create will die, and so shall we, so it doesn’t matter what we do anyway?
Do you seriously suggest that because outcrossing has a small chance of disaster and inbreeding has a huge chance of disaster that it’s all just the same? Why are you unable to think in measured terms instead of pointless absolutes? Are you capable of making a choice based upon weighing two (or more) imperfect options?
They provide no such basis. This is why dog breeds are a mess, a veritable disease super market for researchers. The number of DNA tests vs. the number of actual diseases is a pathetic number. Don’t pretend you have any clue about the true health when the science isn’t even there yet. 2-3 DNA tests does not a robust testing regime make and as long as you’re unwilling to admit just how ignorant we are, the dogs will continue to suffer from your false bravado.
After you’ve slept with your brother and then your resulting child will I be interested in your opinion on inbreeding then, or perhaps your ancestors have already done this so you are now an expert example of the benefits of such a scheme?
I don’t understand how you can come to the conclusion from reading my comments that settling for mediocrity is anyone’s breeding goal. It is a fact that no matter if you inbreed, outcross or line breed there are defects hidden in the genes of every living animal that may or may not express. Outcrossing isn’t a magic formula for ensuring success. There are no safe short cuts. You run risks of disappointments with any breeding strategy especially if it is improperly employed. It takes a decade to understand what can express from the animals you are breeding today as you watch their offspring produce offspring. With outcrossing your risk is that you bring in unwanted traits and defects along with desired traits.
Animals only express those traits they possess. Line breeding can make what is present express more quickly be it good or bad. Outcrossing can mask what is there but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate it. It is just genetic russian roulette.
I’m not advocating any specific strategy for breeding one way or the other. They are all useful strategies when properly employed. But saying one is superior because it makes healthier dogs is myopic. There are risks and benefits to every different strategy.
P.S. Vulgarity doesn’t increase the validity of an argument.
I’m reducing your argument to its logical conclusion. You are peddling a false equivalence fallacy.
You are falsely equating inbreeding with outcrossing without taking into account the substantive differences which make the comparison of the two invalid.
It is as if you are saying “It is a fact that drinking water in excess and drinking hemlock in excess can kill you!”
“Drinking water is not a magic formula for success.”
“There are no safe drinks.”
“You run the risk of disappointment with any type of drink.”
“It takes a decade to understand that drinking water and drinking hemlock can both kill you.”
“Glasses only posses what liquids you pour in them.”
“Drinking water risks infection with Naegleria fowleri and that kills you just like hemlock!”
“Distillation can make what is present express more quickly be it good or bad.”
“Diluting water can mask what is there but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate it.”
“It is just genetic russian roulette.”
Let’s do an experiment. I’ll drink the tap water and you drink the hemlock of unknown concentration. Let’s see if those “risks and benefits” are the same in both cases.
And, it’s not vulgarity, it’s exactly what you’re advocating. Why is it magically different when applied to humans than when applied to dogs?
Plus, it’s a logical fallacy of the appeal nature. Only when you’ve done something for X years will the sky open up and it make perfect sense? Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it?
Russian roulette with 3 bullets in a chamber of 6 results in many worse outcomes than the same game played with 1 bullet in a chamber of 50. I’ll leave it to you to tell me how many pulls of the later scenario it would take to ~equal one pull of the former scenario.
Drinking water has nothing to do with breeding strategies which is the topic at hand. The water analogy is mental m@sturb@tion.
You have your opinion and will hold it in the face of any fact regardless. It reminds me of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. “Never recognize any fact that doesn’t support your agenda” What is your agenda?
You feel that animals outcrossed continually are genetically free of all defects? It flies in the face of all scentific facts but believe it if it makes you happy. Just don’t pontificate it to others as fact because it’s incorrect.
“You feel that animals outcrossed continually are genetically free of all defects? It flies in the face of all scentific facts but believe it if it makes you happy. Just don’t pontificate it to others as fact because it’s incorrect.”
I have never seen Christopher state such nonsense as this, and I’ve been reading his blog for years.
Jess recently posted..Royal Worcester Afghan
The water analogy is meant to break you of your mental block and absolutist thinking. You keep saying that outcrossing and inbreeding both have A CHANCE of disease, but you don’t acknowledge that it’s not the same chance. Bill Gates and I both have at least $1. Does this mean we’re in the same income bracket? No. Does the huge difference in our wealth matter? Sometimes. If we’re talking about access to modern health care, food, and transportation, the difference is not that significant between Bill and I. Someone from, say Bangladesh, the difference would be massive. But if we’re looking at say, the ability effect massive change in the world, to start businesses and to experience the most expensive entertainments, Bill’s massive wealth is clearly significant.
My point? Everything has to be looked at in a measured way and when we compare to different things it is best to use multiple metrics and to weigh our judgments against our values. This is the complete opposite of what you’re advocating. You seem to be saying everything is the same and you keep speaking in absolutist terms “free of all defects” etc. The difference between outcrossing and inbreeding is not that one is 100% fatal and the other is 100% defect free and you’ll find nowhere in any of my writings (and please do read the rest of the inbred mistakes posts) where I even hint at such.
God, Chris, I didn’t know you were in with Saul Alinsky and were involved in trying to destroy capitalism.
Retrieverman recently posted..Did Cheetah die at the age of 80?
Maggie, Regarding your comment that “It is a fact that no matter if you inbreed, outcross or line breed there are defects hidden in the genes of every living animal that may or may not express,” do you not get that the likelihood of defects expressing is infinitely higher if you are inbreeding? Honestly, it sounds to me as though you have a very poor understanding of genetics. I am going to re-post the article Jess posted the other day on this blog. Please read it. With all due respect, I doubt you can be much of a dog breeder if you can’t grasp these simple concepts.
http://www.seppalakennels.com/articles/population-genetics-in-practice.htm
I know a number of people with lurchers and longdogs that will throw anything that seems interesting into the pot, and still produce functional dogs that are not riddled with disease.
This is where you fall down:
“After you’ve tried to breed the most beautiful, healthiest, most functional animal possible within a specific breed for 3 decades I’d be interested in your opinion.”
I wouldn’t be interested in the opinion of anyone who even *thinks* that you can breed the extrasuperbestest dog. There’s no such thing, and striving for the impossible is what has driven the gene loss that is the hallmark of purebred dogs.
Jess recently posted..Afghan Postcards from Germany, 1956
So your friends breeding luchers don’t hope to breed the best animal possible by their choosen crosses? PS I have a lurcher
There you go with that word again, ‘best.’ People who actively USE their animals and don’t COMPETE with them (compete implying there is a winner, and thus a ‘best’) are concerned with animals that *can do the job.*
Take, for example, a friend of mind who lives in Scotland, and runs purebred Salukis over some very rough ground. He wants dogs that will do the job, namely, catching rabbits, lamping, and ferreting, *to his satisfaction.* The dogs he keeps are the best dogs *to him.* Most people who don’t compete think that way. Does this dog do what I want it to do? There is no ‘best’ involved. It is a different way of thinking.
In regards to breeding, those who breed for the ‘best’, the competition winner, are shutting out a massive numbers of dogs from the gene pool, by leaving out the mediocre dogs, the ones that are just competent.
I find it very interesting to contrast the talk of the highly competitive OFC coursers with the talk of people who just take their dogs out to hunter and are happy if the dog performs to expectations.
Jeffrey Bragg talks about excessive artificial selection here (breeding the best to the best) http://www.seppalakennels.com/articles/population-genetics-in-practice.htm:
“We hear endless discussion about inbreeding and its evils, and rightly so; yet we hear very little about the dangers of sustained extremes of artificial selection, which are if anything yet more dangerous than inbreeding. Together these two factors become an engine for the destruction of genetic diversity. People’s constant obsession with having the “best” dog and with “breeding only the best to the best,” whether in dog-show terms, in dogsled racing, or whatever, creates a situation in which the best is definitely the enemy of the good. The endless repetition of the inbreeding/selection cycle in the quest for a dog that is better than last year’s best, has systematically stripped away most of the healthy genetic diversity from today’s purebred dogs. Stringent, sustained selection for cosmetic ideals (shape, number and intensity of the Dalmatian’s spots; shape and chiselling of the poodle’s muzzle; subtleties of colour and markings in an endless series of breeds) or narrow ideals of performance or athleticism (top sprinting speed in racing greyhounds or racing sleddogs) have for many decades taken absolute precedence over breeding to provide the kind of “genetic outfit” that will allow the dog to be healthy and hardy.”
Jess recently posted..Royal Worcester Afghan
I think we are agreeing. I said in my original post that breeding for function should be the guiding star, regardless of the strategies employed.
I breed what is “best for me”, every breeder does. What breeder hopes to produce sh#t? No one has to like my animals except me. I want functional animals. Dogs with correct structure are beautiful and more functional. The best workers have the best structure.
Just because a person likes to compete their animals in various venues, it doesn’t make them bad people. As long as they’re feeding the animal should it be anyone else’s business?
You hear endless discussion about the evils of inbreeding/line breeding. But from whom do you hear these things? The same people that want to villify show breeders want to stop you from hunting & herding. It’s divide and conquer. If you fall for the divide and conquer tactic then when the show breeders are gone, who will support your desire to breed a dog for a function? There are way fewer of folks like you than there are of those involved in the show fancy. You’ll be steamrolled with the new “big lie” that will be invented to eliminate your passion. (Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – 1st create a big lie. Then repeat it over and over till it is believed)Sometimes in order to have our freedoms we have to allow others to be free and that’s a good thing.
There are people poorly out crossing dogs, line breeding dogs, and breeding them for a specific function. There are people that beat their children too but that doesn’t mean no one should be allowed have children. Not all people involved with dogs are bad people or poorly employing breeding techniques. That’s the “big lie” designed to fuel social change for a radical animal rights agenda.
The only “Them” and “Us” are those that want to take away your right to own and use animals in any form.
These are good books about genetics. “Control of Canine Genetic Diseases” by George A. Padgett & “Genetics of the Dog” by Malcolm B. Willis
I’m done. I wish you both every success except for success in the promotion of the radical animal rights agenda.
Genetic diversity is alive and well. The sheer numbers of animals being bred by humans ensures diversity.
Some folks breed dogs I wouldn’t feed here. What I want may not be what they would feed either and I’m fine with that.
Dogs have an amazing amount of diversity, this is true. But only as “DOGS” not as breeds. Within breeds, genetic diversity has been thrown away by breeding strategies and desire for conformity. Dogs are lucky in this respect because other breeds are a store for fresh genetic material, many species are no so lucky. But dogs being diverse doesn’t help you if your dog is an inbred purebred, but it might help that dog’s offspring if an outcross takes place.
Fact: Every living thing has 30 or more genetic issues which may be a simple as a mole or as devastating as MS. Nature does this to ensure the future of the species. So sickle cell anemia is not good for the individual life span, but it keeps the species alive long enough to have and care for the next generation. But when you get rid of the mosquitoes that deliver malaria, then the genetic issue of sickle cell is not a positive but a negative. Line breeding, inbreeding and outcrossing all have their place in this world as does testing breeding stock. Pushing one over the other is foolishness. If you have two genetic issue free dogs and they happen to be brother and sister then of course you would want to keep their genes intact. Old time breeders who use to cull did so to find out what was hidden in their lines. Culling is the only way you can know what is hidden. The idea that recessives can stay hidden or non functional by outcrossing is false. Especially since many genetic issues cross breed lines. Study genetics and do the best matching you can for functionality and health of the animal. Some look for type because that type has a long history of functionality and health, as well as, meeting the standards set for that breed. Out crossing can bring in more problems or it can bring in better qualities or both. You don’t know until you test it. If dogs only had one gene this would be so easy, but they don’t. What works for one does not always work for another unless the situations are exactly the same. If I have an inbred purebred who is perfect for conformation and function and has no genetic issues then it would be foolish to not continue that line purity. Just having diversity does not ensure an animal or its offspring will be healthy.
Jeez Louise, are you really a vet? Have you heard of the MHC??
http://www.lhasaapso.org/articles/mhc.html
Dog breeds are of interest to science because they have a slew of expressed inbred diseases which are otherwise rare. There are crippling diseases in dogs which reach levels that are unheard of in humans by a factor of 10 or 100 or more. Even between breeds the examples are abundant:
Do you not realize that a Doberman is 36 times more likely to present with DCM than an outcrossed dog?
And that’s just by measuring the non sub-clinical DCM cases at any given point. When you look at Dobes over a longer time span than a single shot, the incidence of this disease is much greater than 5.8%.
Do you not understand that this is just one example of what inbreeding does? It’s not just that Dobermans are specifically inbred as much as the extended use of the same inbreeding that separated Dobes as a breed has so distilled this disease in their gene pool. And you’ll be hard pressed to find any example of where anyone has tried to fix this DCM in Dobes with an outcross.
Breeding strategies are not all equal and it’s certainly true that breeders are not using them all equally. I can point to thousands of instances of excessive and continued inbreeding and allele diversity loss, but there are but a handful of purpose oriented outcrosses. It’s amazing to me that you’d get so huffy about me extolling the virtues of genetic diversity and pointing out the ills of inbreeding when the application of these strategies is currently and for the last two centuries been so focused on inbreeding. Are you really that threatened that the pendulum is rightfully swinging away from that paradigm?
Are you a Druid? Do you think there’s intelligent design at work? Some Nature goddess does these things on purpose? This is not how Science looks at evolution at all. There are many elements of our morphology, genes, and health that are not optimally designed in any sense of the term.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdm5he_richard-dawkins-demonstrates-laryng_tech
Please watch that video, it’s an interesting example of just how natural selection works and how very odd the results often are.
Dog breeding within closed registries is a whack-a-mole game. You breed out one disease, and you double down on another. The only stats I’ve seen in which this sort of thing has increased life expectancy have done so only marginally– usually not even in such as way as to be called statistically significant.
Jeffrey Bragg has far better knowledge of population genetics than this vet.
http://www.seppalakennels.com/
And seeing as the guy races sled dogs, I don’t think I’d call him an AR loony.
Retrieverman recently posted..Black serval
Let’s see, so everything is just the same so we never need to make a choice ever, never need to get informed, because whatever we do is just equal? That’s just stupid.
You’ll never find two genetic issue free dogs, such things don’t exist.
You clearly know nothing about the MHC. Diversity in genetics isn’t just benefical to cover recessives with healthy alleles, it’s also crucial in the pro-active immune system. The offspring if your hypothetical ideal brother and sister would actually have less diversity than the brother and sister.
Let’s pretend that their immune system is composed of two possible genes. The brother and sister are AB. Their offspring would be 25% AA and 25% BB, so half of their children would have LESS diversity than their parents. The other 50% would have AB which is the same. So, it only gets worse, it doesn’t get better, with inbreeding.
Everything that is wrong with dogs is described in this article:
http://www.seppalakennels.com/articles/thought-experiment-registry.htm
And no crossbreeding doesn’t create dogs that have all the diseases of both breeds. And you can’t inbreed and select out all the bad recessives. You might be able to with rats or mice.
Dogs will fall apart first.
Retrieverman recently posted..Black serval
“The offspring if your hypothetical ideal brother and sister would actually have less diversity than the brother and sister.”
Every time you do a breeding that has a higher COI than the parents, you will lose genes. EVERY TIME. You have no control over which genes are lost. They might be crucial, they might not. You will not know until you’ve done the breeding and the pups have grown up.
We cannot know how and when inbreeding depression will show up. It’s variable, it can be gradual, it can be sudden, there’s no handy charts in the breeding books outlining how much close breeding you can do before you need to outcross.
Considering that the very type of breeding that ‘responsible’ breeders do results in gene loss anyways (breeding very few dogs in a litter, line-breeding to ‘maintain type’, breeding only the ‘best to the best’) why the hell would you want to deliberately accelerate the process by inbreeding? Especially since you DON’T KNOW which genes you are losing and how important they may be.
Jess recently posted..Royal Worcester Afghan
Breeds in domestic animals are no different, in fact, from nationality and ethnicity in the human species, are they? The greatest threat to genetic health and diversity in domestic animals is laws which arbitrarily impose strict limits on numbers owned by breeders, thereby creating genetic bottlenecks. The most effective advocates for breed genetic diversity are those breeders who support research through organizations such as the AKC Canine Health Foundation and make use of their findings.
This isn’t true. You won’t find any support for legislation here, no AR, no AW, no HSUS backed bills, nothing. But legislation is not the major force, and in plenty of places now it’s not even a force at all, in limiting genetic diversity in dog breeds.
It might be in the future and there is plenty of legislation that idiot politicians keep trying to get passed that will be harmful if it does come into law. But again, this is a future problem, it is not what has driven the genetic loss we see in dogs.
The real culprit is the notion of purity. The false notion. If you could wave a magic wand right now to change one institution’s methods with the goal of increasing genetic diversity and health, it would NOT be to erase legislation from governments, it would be this: Open the stud books, create an appendix registry, and encourage their use by breeders. Change the culture from continual “improvement” of no real merit using successively smaller gene pools to tinker with increasingly obtuse physical characteristics to continually creating healthy and useful dogs from an on-going amalgam of many gene pools.
From my experience, show breeders in the AKC are lazy and uninspired. For example, when the AKC allowed the Border Collie to be shown in conformation, no one took up the challenge of creating conformation worthy dogs out of the existing American gene pool. Rather, they universally imported already “improved” dogs from Australia especially and some from the UK and just continued to inbreed on those lines.
This I don’t have much faith in the short attention span and get-results-quick minded people I already see dominating the AKC, why would I think they are up to the challenge of something even greater like continually playing a balancing game of outcrossing and restoring breed type?
You forgot continuing to line breed in order to ‘set type’ long after type should’ve been set. (Hint: if you are still needing to ‘set type’ after 75 years in a closed registry, you’re doing something wrong.)
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
Ahhhh! The great divide between the theoreticians, who never step away from their chalkboards, and those who actually apply the knowledge through good, everyday use in the trenches!
I guess my comment about being lazy and uninspired really cut deep Mark since I think I hit a nerve which would suggest that you come from another “we imported it already fancified from the Country of Origin” breed.
Why don’t you regale us with photo documentation and some pedigrees of the rough-hewn working dogs you meticulously modeled into fancy dogs over many generations while preserving their skill and improving them in documented ways.
Also: Appeal to Common Practice fallacy, Appeal to suspect Authority fallacy, Appeal to Ridicule fallacy.
Appeal to Authority is my absolute FAVORITE!
Respect mah authority!
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
You would then advocate following the practices of the AQHA over the Jockey Club? Are Quarter Horses demonstrated to be demonstrably healthier than Thoroughbreds?
Or perhaps the propagation of Dingos and Pariah dogs is the preferred goal?
Maintaining type, as opposed to “fixing” it is the appropriate goal of todays breeder of purebred animals.
The simple algorithm to follow ought to be this: in breeding, select the mate which best represents the qualities desired and which is the least closely related.
Prostrating oneself before the low COI altar can be just as disastrous as completely turning inward on your own stock.
Choosing the time to boldly breakout as well as knowing when to tread lightly is the earmark of a wise breeder.
“Or perhaps the propagation of Dingos and Pariah dogs is the preferred goal?”
By playing the ‘you must want all dogs to be mutts card’ you just lost ANY credibility. Especially since you’re stupid enough to slap it down on a BORDER COLLIE blog. Christopher doesn’t breed mutts. I do.
“Maintaining type, as opposed to “fixing” it is the appropriate goal of todays breeder of purebred animals.”
It’s really too bad that so many dog breeders are completely ignorant of genetics and biology. ‘Breed’ (appearance and function) is defined by frequency of alleles. Once a breed has been standardized, within a closed system, it is FIXED for those alleles which define it’s ‘type.’ If you still need to breed closely in order to maintain type, you are doing something wrong.
I own not one but THREE breeds that have country of origin populations that are bred without the benefit of registries, dog shows, or standards. All sorts of breeding systems are used. And yet these native breeders still manage to maintain type. How can that be? ALLELE FREQUENCY. How do you think Boxer type was regained after crossing to a Corgi?
Of course if things like ears set at an exact angle, eyes of a certain specific shape, markings that are just so, are your definition of ‘maintaining type,’ and you are willing to sacrifice genes in the pursuit of these things, then you have another problem. Perhaps a psychotherapist might be in order.
“The simple algorithm to follow ought to be this: in breeding, select the mate which best represents the qualities desired and which is the least closely related.
Prostrating oneself before the low COI altar can be just as disastrous as completely turning inward on your own stock.”
These two statements contradict themselves. If you are breeding the least closely related animals, you will produce a COI lower than the parents. And I’d like you to prove that last statement. Both Cattanach and Armstrong have done analysis that show that a higher COI (linebred) does not correlate to getting a championship.
http://www.canine-genetics.com/inbreed.htm
http://www.steynmere.com/ARTICLES8.html
Whoops. There goes your ‘maintaining type’ argument.
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
That’s a real broad comparison, whereas I would prefer specifics. But this element of the AQHA is very appealing:
I’d actually prefer if it was not just Thoroughbred blood that was allowed in but also Standardbred, Morgan Horse, Arabian, any horse really. Let the chips fall based on merit, not sanctity of pedigree. It’s better to judge the results than the process, unless of course you’re in a religion and then results are not needed and ritual is everything.
Oh, you’re acting like one of those simpletons who thinks that if you outcross your dog once it’s going turn your breed into a Dingo. Never mind that we’ve never seen this happen even once, the idea is preposterous, and the pendulum between totally inbred and totally outcrossed has swung so far into isolated phenotypes sequestered into breeds with an eye toward limited variability and clone like
results that evoking the opposite extreme is obnoxious and specious.
No one is asking you to over-dose on antibiotics in response to an infection, to wrap your wounds so tightly with bandages the limbs fall off, to starve as a response to obesity. Moderation, Mark, is not the horrible concept you clearly think it to be.
But that’s not really a surprise. Extremism and unique trappings is the bread and butter of the conformation world. It doesn’t matter if things are functionally different, they just need to look different.
Dingoes are derived from domestic dogs. It’s true, and they are quite like their Middle Eastern wolf ancestors.
However, if you breed all the dogs back, you won’t necessarily get a dingo or a dog that looks like a wolf.
Dingoes became like Middle Eastern wolves because they were forced to live in the wild and become like Middle Eastern wolves again– because Australia is like the Middle East.
There is no evidence that if you bred all the dogs together that you’d get a dingo or Middle Eastern wolf. Eastern European random-breds are usually pretty large dogs that look like German shepherds with various ear carriages.
It’s a commonly held assertion that all dogs will evolve back to a middle sized dingo-type dog if allowed to breed randomly. In Eastern Europe, they don’t exist like that, and they’ve been freely breeding, in the case of Romania, since Ceauşescu forced urbanites to move onto collective farms in the late 60’s and early 70’s. No dingoes in Romania.
That’s partly because dingoes evolved without massive garbage dumps to live off of, but the Eastern European dogs did. So the Eastern European dogs remained doggish, and the dingoes became more like wolves. Further, most pariah dogs that are studied are in tropical or subtropical countries, which puts a selection pressure on the dogs to become smaller. Those in Russia and Eastern Europe aren’t that small.
The reason why you don’t re-evolve the wolf if you just crossbreed is really simple: Dollo’s law of irreversibility. Once a trait has been lost in a population it cannot be recreated using the exact same genetic mechanisms. It can come back, but it will never be the same, which why dingoes aren’t exactly like the Arabian wolves from which they descend.
Retrieverman recently posted..William Stratton and the brindle retriever
Then why does the Fancy suck so bad at this? Countless breeds look NOTHING like they did 20, 40, 100 years ago.
And what about Health and Genetic Diversity, and god forbid Function? Why has there been so little “Maintaining” of those, too?
Bogus! Breeders aren’t using any findings or research or tests to increase or preserve genetic diversity! Rather it’s exactly the opposite, they are throwing away genetic diversity in their rush to purge the few (in most cases minor or rare) simple recessive diseases that anyone has made a test for. Purging a breed of a disease is just like purging a breed of a conformation trait, like color. Breeders have historically rushed to do this as fast as possible and along with the one or two genes they want diversity stripped from, they strip huge chunks of other genes with them.
Pedigree study and empirical gene research confirm this.
Supporting research is fab. I’m a huge fan of research. Putting it to use is the problem. (CKCS MVD breeding protocol, I’m looking at you.)
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
Breeders want the CHF to find tests for specific genetic diseases as a sort of bandaid for the problem of the declining health of purebred dogs–to allow them to continue inbreeding. Genetic health testing and the subsequent elimination of carriers from the gene pool does nothing but cause a further decrease in genetic diversity.
Not so. Knowing which combinations of mates WILL NOT produce an animal subject to an affliction, sorting out pups for worthiness to continue the breed and being able to select AGAINST propagation of an undesirable trait even when carried in a heterozygous state, is a great boon.
In an unfortunate display of impatience born of ignorance, there seem to be those who demand, that individuals within a breed identified as “carriers” of potential maladies yet exhibiting many other good and desirable traits, that these representatives be expunged immediately from the gene pool. A mistake.
It’s unfortunate that those who are prone to shoot theirselves in the foot can acquire automatic weaponry.
I have to say I agree with everything you wrote. But many breeders as I am sure you realize take it too far and eliminate all heterozygous dogs from their breeding programs. Many others choose not to avail themselves of the available health testing because they simply don’t want to know!
Although some may see this as elitist, I’ll proceed with my comment.
There are many different sorts who are lumped under the label of “breeder” and their characteristics range from altruistic to tolerable, to mercenary, and beyond to downright disgusting, if not in fact illegal.
I am aware that there are people within my preferred breed ranks who have utilised available and advantageous DNA tests to produce dogs which will test as only normal/clear status for a particular affliction.
They will not reintroduce the mutation into their stock if only to avoid paying the fee to retest subsequent generations. They are severely myopic with regards to the breeds welfare.
Although I treat them cordially on a social basis, I shun them and their opinions on behalf of the breeds welfare.
I will repeat a claim from one of my earlier posts, that overly restrictive laws (and mis-guided, ill-informed public opinions) contribute to the generation of genetic bottlenecks.
Animal Welfare law in my state of residence has, for over 40 years, made it illegal to transfer possession of an animal which has been diagnosed (dx’d) as affected by disease.
This was probably appropriate to demand when the primary concerns were rabies, distemper, and parvo virus. An “affected” animal had to be retained till death, whether natural or euth’d. The advent of molecular genetics has added a new and profound dimension to that consideration.
The typical pronouncement from a DNA evaluation is “normal/clear”, “carrier”, or “affected”. I think the implications of status is clear enough from those terms.
What is coming to light, however, is that perhaps that set of terminology is not perfectly representative of reality. The old Mendelian concept and expression known as “penetrance” is interfering with research claims of absolute certainty.
Perhaps some genetic reports should state “at risk” until a clinical diagnosis confirms “affliction”.
Continuing further on the effects of such inaccurate labeling, consider that the ASPCA website states unequivocally that a “responsible breeder” would never breed an “affected” animal.
I ask “how can that statement be logically defended?” If the “affected” (and not “afflicted”) animal is bred to a “normal/clear” animal the resulting offspring are?
A ninth grade introduction to Mendelian genetics should suffice to reason past that ASPCA logic fallacy.
Moral opinions, societal norms, scientific theory and everyday reality are in need of a re-sync.
Fortunately some breeders are trying to reconcile their practices with all that needs to be considered.
Mark,
You are a moron if you think this is an AR rag.
You are exactly the same kind of person who is feeding these AR lunatics. If you keep ignoring facts about inbreeding and health issues, these AR shits are going to destroy dogs for everyone.
Every time you people use your creationist logic on what the science actually says, you feed the animal rights monster.
Denialism is going to get us the qualzucht laws like they have in Germany and Austria, and if those things are ever enforced, many breeds will cease to exist.
You can deny, deny, deny.
But if you can’t see what’s happen, you are utterly blind.
Chris and Jess have a very clear understanding of what is happening.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Retrieverman recently posted..William Stratton and the brindle retriever
The laws that we are seeing now are the direct result of at least a decade of ‘responsible’ breeder rhetoric.
“Responsible breeders show or otherwise compete with their dogs,” gets us mandatory spay/neuter laws where the only exceptions are show dogs. Got a nice dog that hates to show? Too bad. Have working crosses? Too bad. Breed pets? Too bad.
“Responsible breeders only keep x number of dogs.” Limit laws. This one actually does reduce genetic diversity, but not nearly as much as common ‘responsible’ breeding practices. It also discourages any type of experimental breeding where it’s a necessity to keep more than just a few dogs.
“Responsible breeders don’t breed to supply the pet market, and don’t make any money,” gets you limit laws on the amount of litters produced, or puppies sold, or laws restricting how much you can charge, and most definitely laws severely restricting breeding on a commercially viable level.
“Responsible breeders sell all their pet puppies on spay/neuter contracts,” results in mandatory spay/neuter laws.
“Responsible breeders NEVER cross-breed,” you know how I feel about that one. It is now illegal to cross-breed in El Paso and Los Angeles, as well as breeding unregistered dogs.
I could go on. All of these things also foster a culture wherein it is permissible and encouraged to attack people who don’t toe the line.
As you sow, so shall you reap. You’ve made your bed, now lie in it. You’ve dug your own grave. Pick your platitude.
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
What Jess said.
I agree with this. I do not advocate the swift expulsion of minor diseases simply because there is a test. Especially because breeders have been shown again and again to throw away tens of thousands of genes worth of diversity along with the single bad gene.
But this doesn’t mean that I agree with most of the people in the fancy who are supporting a backlash against testing either. I see too many in those ranks who simply don’t want to be bothered to stop inbreeding for type.
What I see very little of is people who speak about breed welfare and actually support breeding strategies that will not optimize the number of ribbons they will receive given the effort they put out.
It’s a lot easier to just buy someone else’s winning stock and reuse it than to create winning stock from “scratch” yourself. So we see kennel blindness and popular sires.
It’s a lot easier to march in the PureBloodBrigade Parade than to forge your own path.
People want quick results, there is no patience, and there is no long term vision. There is also very little honest evaluation of where we are right now and if our dogs really measure up. I mean, who looks at a Neo and says “this is a masterpiece” and really thinks that?
I also see many more breeders who would maintain a disease load in their stock, not for greater breed welfare by having patience in rooting it out, but because they simply value winning ribbons in the ring and there are plenty of diseases that don’t hurt those chances.
You will be hard pressed to find even a single call for legislation anywhere on this blog from me.
This law you speak of sounds nasty, but um, can you provide even a single instance where it was unjustly applied to dog breeding? If it were actually enforced based upon a slew of genetic disorders instead of infectious diseases (there is a difference here, you can’t “catch” genetic disorders), I think I would have heard about it by now.
What about a puppy being sold with worms? Or an ingrown claw nail? Or the sniffles? Has this law ever been enforced against you? Or are you just speaking out of some abundance of caution?
Because I wonder why you think this law or others like it are more significant than say, most dogs being trapped in closed registries which is an issue that is enforced against tens of thousands of breeders, all the time.
Again, I’m defending no law here, I just wonder why you’re fixated on potential threats from hypothetical laws or the expectation that existing laws will be enforced in manners that they have not actually been enforced versus the endemic and systematic culture of pure blood seen in the fancy. I have a very small breeding program but I have had hundreds of interactions with registries. I’ve never so much as had a phone call from some state or nationally run enforcement arm based on some law.
It is far easier to look outside your own culture for villains. By looking inward and saying, “this is not viable in the long term” or even just changing your practices based on new information, you are admitting that your culture, and by extension yourself, has faults. IOW, time to change.
This why people accuse you and me and Scottie of hating purebreds or wanting all dogs to be mutts. Or they try to lay every problem in purebred dogs at the feet of ‘puppy mills’ or ‘backyard breeders’, you know, those *other people.*
Dog culture is not big on introspection or self-examination.
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
Not to mention peer pressure and low self-esteem issues, need for approval.
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
So it’s like high school but with a lot more candor about the sex? 🙂
Keep reading the Saluki groups if you want to see high school behavior. I imagine it goes on in other breeds as well.
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
I’d like to know why people still think dogs are derived from dingoes or pariah dogs.
Actually, pariahs and dingoes are derived from domestic dogs, and domestic dogs are derived from wolves. They are all part of one species, Canis lupus.
The wolves that contributed most to all domestic dogs, dingoes, and pariahs is the Middle Eastern wolves, Canis lupus arabs and Canis lupus pallipes (which is not, as one flawed study suggested, a unique species).
Dingoes have all been traced to East Asian domestic dogs. They are not the missing link between dogs and wolves. They are not the ancestors of domestic dogs. They are actually domestic dogs that have been forced by environmental factors to develop wolf-like behavior and phenotype. The behavior is not always like that of a wolf. Some dingoes breed without pair-bonding, and even if it were, they regularly cross with domestic dogs.
Retrieverman recently posted..William Stratton and the brindle retriever
Is there any data on founder population size for dingoes?
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/33/12387.full
Take this with a grain of salt. This is Savolainen, the mtDNA guy and the guy who still argues for an East Asian origin for domestic dogs despite the large genome-wide study that implicated the Middle Eastern wolves as the most important ancestors of the domestic dog.
He claims it’s a small population size.
Retrieverman recently posted..William Stratton and the brindle retriever
I am just curious because Dingoes fit into the breed category; they are ‘fixed’ for type. This is easier with a small founding population of similar types.
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
Fixed for type. They really aren’t.
Interestingly, they come in several different varieties, even if they come from a small population.
Those from the Snowy Mountains are fluffy and stout compared to those that live in the North and the interior.
Mark Derr actually thinks the dingo had a larger founding population than these studies suggest.
They also don’t come in only tawny. Black and tan and cream/white have been seen in dingoes, as has solid black. Brindle may have been in the population, too.
The thing is that for thousands of years dogs were being brought to Australia from Indonesia. I find it a little hard to believe they came from such a small founding population– though they may have.
Retrieverman recently posted..William Stratton and the brindle retriever
That’s not what I meant. You don’t see dingoes with floppy ears or short coats. Gross type, not natural variation. Salukis come in a lot of different sizes and variations on substance, but you aren’t going to see any with fluffy wolf coats or ears that stand up.
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
My guess is nature selects against floppy ears, or they may have arrived in Australia with erect ears. Many of the street dogs in Indonesia are prick-eared.
Retrieverman recently posted..William Stratton and the brindle retriever
There is some evidence that ships from Indonesia introduced cats before the Europeans came, too.
Retrieverman recently posted..William Stratton and the brindle retriever
I love the way the dog fancy holds as tight as barnacles to a ship to the various turds it pulls from the Victorian intellectual sewer.
Every time one of these people spouts nonsense about the purity cult that is the modern dog fancy, it feeds the animal rights monster.
Accept facts. Make reforms.
Don’t feed the monster.
Retrieverman recently posted..William Stratton and the brindle retriever
My recent ah…conversations…with Saluki people remind me strongly of debating with young earth creationists. Imagine them sitting in front of their computers with their hands over their eyes, going lalalalalala!
Jess recently posted..Tazis, Tazis, Everywhere
(russian language)