Quote:
Originally Posted by buidelwolf
Many dogs, born in the last years, seem to have increasingly low COI, measured on five (or eight) generations. This seems to be a positive development, but .... those appearances are a little bit deceiving, as the real coi reveals in fact on all generations, not only on 5 or even 8 generations.
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Yes, this is a problem in some way. We are working with a closed group of animals, which therefore are all related to each other to some degree. On the other hand, that's (if you take all generations) true for all breeds and actually all species as well. So one thing is, how far in the number of generations, is it sensible to go.
On the other hand, although the animals from for example one litter are very related, they nevertheless have different genes, different expression levels of the same genes etc. Plus there are always changes in the genome in the form of mutations, deletions, duplications etc. So after some number of generations these changes may have larger effect than the relatedness of the animals. So that's another reason why taking into account all generations is not sensible.
So, in breeding it is good to take into account the COI and AVK coefficients, but not use them as the only leading tool - because you can get them closer to ideal values by just breeding a lot with young animals therefore increasing the number of generation in certain time interval, while it is important to select which animals to use according to their health, character and exterior.