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Old 21-05-2011, 10:55   #1
loco
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Default The price of Populairity.

From the internet ,
http://www.canine-genetics.com/Popular_sires.htm

Consider the hypothetical case of Old Blue, Malthound extraordinaire. Blue was perfect: Sound, healthy and smart. On week days he retrieved malt balls from dawn to dusk. On weekends he sparkled in malt field and obedience trials as well as conformation shows, where he baited to--you guessed it--malt balls.

Everybody had a good reason to breed to Blue, so everybody did. His descendants trotted in his paw-prints on down through their generations. Blue died full of years and full of honor. But what people didn't know was that Old Blue, good as he was, carried a few bad genes. They didn't affect him, nor the vast majority of his immediate descendants. To complicate the matter further, some of those bad genes were linked to genes for important Malthound traits.
A few Malthounds with problems started showing up. They seemed isolated, so everyone assumed it was "just one of those things." A few declared them "no big deal." Those individuals usually had affected dogs. All in all, folks carried on as usual.
Time passed. More problem dogs turned up. People made a point not to mention the problems to others because everyone knows the stud owner always blames the bitch for the bad tings and takes credit for the good. Stud owners knew it best to keep quiet so as not to borrow trouble. Overall, nobody did anything to get to the bottom of the problems, because if they were really significant, everybody would be talking about it, right?
Years passed. Old Blue had long since moldered in his grave. By now, everyone was having problems, from big ones like cataracts, epilepsy or thyroid disease to less specific things like poor-keepers, lack of mothering ability and short life-span. "Where can I go to get away from this?" breeders wondered. The answer was nowhere.
People became angry. "The responsible parties should be punished!" Breeders who felt their programs might be implicated stonewalled. Some quietly decided to shoot, shovel and shut-up. A few brave souls stood up and admitted their dogs had a problem and were hounded out of the breed.
The war raged on, with owners, breeders and rescue workers flinging accusations at each other. Meanwhile everybody carried on as always. After another decade or two the entire Malthound breed collapsed under the weight of its accumulated genetic debris and went extinct.
This drastic little fable is an exaggeration--but not much of one. Here's similar, though less drastic, example from real life: There once was a Quarter Horse stallion named Impressive. The name fit. He sired many foals who also exhibited his desired traits. But when they and their descendants were bred to each other, those offspring sometimes died. Impressive had been the carrier of a lethal single-gene recessive trait. No one knew it was there until they started in-breeding on him. The situation of a single sire having this kind of drastic genetic effect on a breed became known as the "Impressive Syndrome."
Many species and breeds of domestic animals, including dogs, have suffered "Impressive Syndromes" of their own. But cases like that of Impressive are only the tip of the iceberg. A single-gene recessive becomes obvious in just a few generations. But what about more complex traits?
This is not to say that those popular sires we so admire are bad breeding prospects. Their many excellent traits should be utilized, but even the best of them has genes for negative traits.
The problem is not the popular sires, but how we use them. For a century or more, in-breeding has been the name of the game. (For the purposes of this article, "in-breeding" refers to the breeding of dogs related to each other and therefore includes line-breeding.) By breeding related individuals, a breeder increased his odds of producing dogs homozygous for the traits he wanted. Homozygous individuals are much more likely to produce those traits in the next generation.
When a male exhibits a number of positive traits and then proves his ability to produce those traits he may become a popular sire, one that is used by almost everyone breeding during his lifetime, and maybe beyond, thanks to frozen semen.
Since the offspring and grand-offspring and so on are good, breeders start breeding them to each other. If the results continue to be good, additional back-crosses may be made for generations. Sometimes a sire will be so heavily used that, decades hence, breeders may not even be aware of how closely bred their animals are because the dog no longer appears on their pedigrees.
This is the case in Australian Shepherds. Most show-line Aussies trace back, repeatedly, to one or both of two full brothers: Wildhagen's Dutchman of Flintridge and Fieldmaster of Flintridge. These, products of a program of inbreeding, were quality individuals and top-producing sires. They are largely responsible for the over-all quality and uniformity we see in the breed ring today--a uniformity that did not exist before their birth nearly three decades ago.
Working lines have also seen prominent sires, but performance traits are far more complex, genetically and because of the significant impact of environment. They are therefore harder to fix. Performance breeders will in-breed, but are more likely to stress behavioral traits and general soundness than pedigree and conformational minutiae. The best working sires rarely become as ubiquitous as the best show-line sires.
Not every popular sire becomes so because of his ability to produce quality offspring. Some have won major events or are owned by individuals with a knack for promotion. Such dogs may prove to be wash-outs once their get is old enough to evaluate. But a lot of breeders have been using the animal for the few years it takes to figure that out, the damage may already have been done.
Use of even the best popular sires, by its very nature, limits the frequency of some genes in the breed gene pool while simultaneously increasing the frequency of others. Since sons and grandsons of popular sires tend to become popular sires the trend continues, resulting in further decrease and even extinction of some genes while others become homozygous throughout the breed. Some of these traits will be positive, but not all of them.
The owners of Old Blue, the Malthound in the opening fable, and those who owned his most immediate descendants had no idea what was happening under their noses. They were delighted to have superior studs and even more delighted to breed them to as many good bitches as possible.
Dog breeding and promoting is an expensive proposition. One usually winds up in the hole. But owning a popular sire can change that. The situation looks like a winner for everyone--the stud owner finds his financial burden reduced while breeders far and wide get to partake of his dog's golden genes.
No one breeding dogs wants to produce sick dogs. A small minority are callous and short-sighted enough to shrug genetic problems off as the price you pay to get winners, but even they do their best to avoid letting it come to general attention.
We need a total re-thinking of how we utilize stud animals. No single dog, no matter how superior, should dominate the gene pool of its breed. Owners of such sires should give serious consideration to limiting how often that dog is used, annually, through its lifetime and on into the future, if frozen semen is stored. The stud owner should also look not only at the quality of the bitches being presented, but their pedigrees. How much will the level of inbreeding be increased by a particular mating?
The bitch owner also needs to think twice about popular sires. If you breed to the stud of the moment and everyone else is doing the same, where will you go when it comes time to make an outcross?
Finally, the attitude toward genetic disease itself has to change. It must cease being everyone's dirty little secret. It must cease being a brick with which we bludgeon those with the honesty to admit it happened to them. It must become a topic of open, reasoned discussion so owner of stud and bitch alike can make informed breeding decisions. Unless breeders and owners re-think their long-term goals and how they react to hereditary problems, the situation will only get worse.


C.A. Sharp is editor of the "Double Helix Network News". This article appeared in Vol. IV, No. 3 (Summer 199. It may be reprinted providing it is not altered and appropriate credit is given.

Groette Martine.
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Last edited by loco; 21-05-2011 at 10:58.
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Old 21-05-2011, 14:28   #2
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Is this about Old Blue or Lance of Fran Jo?
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Old 23-05-2011, 14:54   #3
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Hmm, just a topic for discussion - since how many offsprings a male could be called "popular sire" in a small breed like ours?
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Old 23-05-2011, 15:19   #4
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On the pedigree database Lance had 97 offspring but that's only the people who reigstered their puppies on the site. Right now most American lined GSDs are directly related to him (at least once). He could have easily sired hundreds and maybe even thousands of puppies.

A dog used that much, in any breed, can be very destructive to the breed. It limits the gene pool and all the "little" things start to pop out especially since it starts to get hard to avoid linebreeding. In a gene pool as small as the vlcak breed it could be devastating. What makes a gene pool healthy is diversity of good genetics.

As for numbers - vlcaks have a heat once a year (as far as I know) and their first heat is usually light. We can assume the good breeding years are 2,3,4,5. Maybe 6,7,8 if you push it. If someone is going to push one male this much then we can assume they'll try to get as much out of the female as possible, we'll say 2-7 (6 years inclusive). The average litter is 5 puppies. That's 30 puppies per female. That's a lot.
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Old 23-05-2011, 15:21   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by draggar View Post
As for numbers - vlcaks have a heat once a year (as far as I know) and their first heat is usually light. We can assume the good breeding years are 2,3,4,5. Maybe 6,7,8 if you push it. If someone is going to push one male this much then we can assume they'll try to get as much out of the female as possible, we'll say 2-7 (6 years inclusive). The average litter is 5 puppies. That's 30 puppies per female. That's a lot.
I meant "sire", not "dam" It is totally clear about females, but what about males?
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Old 23-05-2011, 16:18   #6
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I meant "sire", not "dam" It is totally clear about females, but what about males?
I know. I don't think the number of puppies that can be produced is limtied by the sire - he can be bred at any time (given time to replenish his sperm). Say, once a day. If you time it right with the females he could impregnate 2-3 dams a week (assuming at least 2 breedings per femal) and then when he's not in use you could freeze his sperm for even more matings later on. 8 weeks later that's about 15 puppies a week (on average - assuming on aveage 5 puppies epr litter) - 60 a month. I'm not sure how far "spread out" the vlcak heat cycle is but let's assume October (based on when Luna was born) to February = 5 months so 300 puppies a year.

Plus, a male could breed for a lot longer than a female - some GSD males are bred past 10 and can start to be bred at a year.

Assuming you just breed and breed and breed and breed you could be looking at 3,000 puppies over the lifespan of a male (the number can vary greatly depending on a large variety of factors) - and that's not including any frozen semen.
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Old 23-05-2011, 16:27   #7
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Originally Posted by draggar View Post
I know. I don't think the number of puppies that can be produced is limtied by the sire - he can be bred at any time (given time to replenish his sperm).
Seems like we do not understand each other. I am able to count myself, thanks
I am just interested when a male could be considered "popular sire" in our breed. When he has 5 litters? 10? 15?
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Old 23-05-2011, 16:52   #8
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Yep, we didn't sorry. I'm a math geek at times.

I also wonder when the "popular" will turn into "damaging to the gene pool".
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Old 23-05-2011, 18:47   #9
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I also wonder when the "popular" will turn into "damaging to the gene pool".
Yes, this is exactly what interests me. The danger of damaging the gene pool is big, but on the other hand in our breed one can often meet a problem, when interested in some popular stud, who is no longer alive: if there is information about his offsprings, then you take the list of them, remove the ones, who come from dams, that do not suit your interests, then remove the ones without HD, then the ones, that did not attend any shows/bonitation (simply have no breeding rights) and... you have like one or two males from a "very popular stud"... So what numbers are considered "still worth using a stud", and what are "it's enought"?
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Old 23-05-2011, 18:58   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaiva View Post
So what numbers are considered "still worth using a stud", and what are "it's enought"?
I'm not a breeder, nor a stud owner, but relying on the common sense I'd think it depends on the.... quailty of the stud: his beauty, health and brains.
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Old 23-05-2011, 19:06   #11
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I'm not a breeder, nor a stud owner, but relying on the common sense I'd think it depends on the.... quailty of the stud: his beauty, health and brains.
Well, sure, but mostly most popular studs are nice dogs, with good character and good reproducing "skills"
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Old 23-05-2011, 21:12   #12
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I don't think the issue is overuse of a stud, though. The issues appear when all the tiny little recessive genes start to pop up. With a diverse gene pool these genes are still there but the chances are of having two lines with them get smaller and smaller. But when you line breed and have the same ancestor appear more than once it greatly increases these chances. The more they appear and the closer they are to the puppy will make it even that more likely.

So say one stud sires litters from 25% of the vlcaks out there. While this is a lot (understatement?) if then those puppies are carefully bred to qualifying dogs of the other 75% then you reduce the chances.

"Over" use of a stud is not an issue if done carefully. I mentioned Lance of Fran Jo earlier. He is "blamed" (for the lack of a better term) for what the American line GSD has become. I feel bad for Lance. It wasn't his fault and I'm sure he wasn't bred to a huge percentage of the GSDs un the USA at the time. The issue arrived is when people started to line breed and breed puppies with close ancestors (I'm sure many have him as two grandparents). Then, these dogs got bred to other dogs with Lance in their lines and within a few generations you have hundreds to thousands of dogs who have him several times in their background. This is what needs to be avoided.

So, I think even with one stud affecting 50% of a generation you still have another 50% to work with. While it would cut it close a few generations down, it's still manageable (just not easy).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaiva View Post
Well, sure, but mostly most popular studs are nice dogs, with good character and good reproducing "skills"
Even the best dogs in the world have pesky little recessive genes that can pop up.
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Old 25-05-2011, 01:54   #13
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Actually our breed does have a "popular sire" - Rep z PS. Show me a pedigree WITHOUT Rep in it...
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Old 25-05-2011, 16:08   #14
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I am just interested when a male could be considered "popular sire" in our breed. When he has 5 litters? 10? 15?

A genetic doctor ones did answer that question on another topic...

For are breed he did say 45 offspring for a male dog, more offspring’s than that would probably do more damage than good, even if the stud was a very good and healthy dog.

Best regards / Mikael
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Old 25-05-2011, 18:31   #15
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So what's the difference between "popular sire" and "foundation sire"? Are all foundation sires by default popular sires, but not all popular sires are foundation sires?
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