# Puppy Imprinting & Inbreeding



## Andy Larrimore

I have bred several litters of Rottweilers over the years focusing mainly on the working traits of the breed. I do a lot of imprinting to help prepare these pups for working enviroments. I was wondering what others do to help imprint their pups prior to going to their new homes. Never to late to learn a new trick.


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## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I wouldn't buy a puppy from a breeder who didn't do early neurological stimulation:

http://www.breedingbetterdogs.com/achiever.html


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## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I do not really care for the early nuro stuff with Rotts, as they already have thresholds that are too high, and in my experience, this raises thresholds.

I used to take them away from their mother a bit early, depending on what lines they were from to encourage them not to be so independant, which the lines that I had had problems with. I would take the pups out and go for walks where they had never been.

That was the one thing that I did the most with, as they were gone by 7 weeks. I do not like the current trend of waiting till ten weeks to send them to their homes, as I do not like to have to "fix" the doggieness that can occur.

Call me weird, but I need to be the center of their universe.


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## Bob Scott

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

My first GSD, Thunder, had all the early neuro stymulation. I don't know if this had anything to do with it but he's the most stable dog I've ever owned, Period!!
I also got both my GSDs at 6 wks. Absolutely no problems.


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## Daryl Ehret

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> I wouldn't buy a puppy from a breeder who didn't do early neurological stimulation:
> 
> http://www.breedingbetterdogs.com/achiever.html


I'd never say never. I've utilized the method with some repeat litters in which the first litter did not receive this treatment, and noticed little difference in the ENS'd repeat. My last litter, I did not do it, and it was one of my best litters of all, every one with good confidence and strong drives.

It appears to me that ENS has become a marketing point for some breeders. It's not yet been scientifically proven to be beneficial, and I suppose my personal experience can't validate that it is, either. My opinion is, greater influence is established in other and later imprinting techniques.


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## Anne Vaini

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Daryl Ehret said:


> I'd never say never. I've utilized the method with some repeat litters in which the first litter did not receive this treatment, and noticed little difference in the ENS'd repeat.



Daryl, You aren't alone on this point of view. From what I understand, a normal home or kennel environment will provide stimulation - lights are turned on and off, there are periods of noise and quiet, periods of higher and lower temperatures, pups are handled to be weighed, moved when the whelping box is cleaned, turned on their backs for nail trimming (and just 'cause they're so cute that way). When there is already that stimulation going on, a bit of added stimulation doesn't seem to make a big difference (IMO).


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## Daryl Ehret

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



> Daryl, You aren't alone on this point of view.


That's very nice to hear  Some people take everything they read as gospel, and it can be very difficult to get your point across if that's the case. "Knowledge is no substitute for experience" right? Good common-sense explanations for unavoidable stimulation scenarios, too.


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## Julie Kinsey

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I am by no means an expert breeder, but I work for one I consider to be. I have had three litters of his, out of an ROH bitch. The first two litters had ENS and produced one environmentally reactive dog in each litter. The third breeding, to a different (but very related) stud dog, was a singleton pup and I added bridge and target methods from the time she was born. Best dog of all, totally fearless, if a bit over the top, similar to what Jeff was talking about with his Rotts.

My friend likes to take whole litters and very young pups everywhere. She has two litters right now, and I believe the 4 week olds have gone tracking and swimming now, and they've been waddling around the parking lot for short periods of time, with their little leashes and collars, checking things out. She got her Sch III UD VST at three weeks and did the same with him.

Julie Kinsey


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## Howard Gaines III

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

If properly done, I see imprinting as a most important part of the training puzzle. Since animals in the wild do it and live to reproduce their own kind, surely K-9 puppy stuff done in a positive manner has to help. It does take more effort and for folks who are too busy or lazy, important foundation work is missed in time periods that require it. If it were a waste of time, why do geese do it, wolves and foxes do it, every living thing teaches the next generation...but man. #-o Man wants short cuts and short cuts are sometimes excuses...IMO!=D>


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## Greg Williams

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I like to move pups and mom from place to place in weekly intervals. Meaning I originlly whelp them outside in a giant rabbit hutch (similar). at about 2 weeks I move them inside the house. At about 4 weeks I'll move them back outside. At 6 weeks I start taking them to new places, i.e. front yard, different sections of the back yard, etc.
At which point I like to put out a lot of environmental distractions that I would use in training (balls, jugs of rocks, etc.) and hide kibble in the middle of the piles of distractions.


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## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I have another question, are you considering puppy imprinting up to the time the breeder sends them off, or just in general ? ? ? ?

If in general, then I imprint all the time. so much easier then just blasting the little ****ers with full on OB.

Lastly, I would love to hear more about the early nuero stuff either way. 

I would love to get three nerve bag males and females, breed them, then get 2 litters foster moms, and do all the nuero stuff on the third with the nerve bag mom, or some combination of the above and see what happens.


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## Anne Vaini

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Jeff Oehlsen said:


> I have another question, are you considering puppy imprinting up to the time the breeder sends them off, or just in general ? ? ? ?
> 
> If in general, then I imprint all the time. so much easier then just blasting the little ****ers with full on OB.
> 
> Lastly, I would love to hear more about the early nuero stuff either way.
> 
> I would love to get three nerve bag males and females, breed them, then get 2 litters foster moms, and do all the nuero stuff on the third with the nerve bag mom, or some combination of the above and see what happens.


Better update your liability insurance first. :lol:


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## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Never said that they would live that long. Thousands of nervebags out there now, so my experiment wouldn't get noticed. Of course if all it took was some neuro and a foster mom..........._I can't imagine what shitters would get bred_


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Interesting thread Jeff. Glad I stopped in. LOL. I count em when they are born and count em when they come out of the whelping box. They are on there own till about 4 weeks with no socialization. When they have their legs under them you can see if the have confidence and nerve because if they don't.....they run away. Took me about 75 to 80 litters to get litters and 10 generations to get a cross that every one had the confidence and nerve to come right up and check me out with no runners. Conditioning maskes what is in the dog. Several have said they wouldn't buy a dog that wasn't yadda yadda. The yadda yadda covers up the dogs true nature .Let's face it, if 1/3 of the litter runs the other way they are not as domesticated as we like to think.....or it is a bad cross. Interestingly, the two crosses that produce this level of confidence are two pairs of bro/sisters....one crossed one way, the other pair crossed the other way. No other cross has done this. If the dogs are solid, they don't need all this extra conditioning.


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## Howard Gaines III

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

So Don are you saying genetics outweighs training? Isn't social interactions or environmental interactions a form of pre-training? :-k What productive goal would there be in creating more nervebags? Kind of like a retard having sex with an ape and then looking to have offspring with the mind of a professor!


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

No Howard, I think they go hand in hand, but if I were the trainer, I would rather start with a dog that has the potential to make me look as good as possible.....even if I wasn't. Example. A guy just completed his triple masters this year. He was a master retriever years ago, then finally got master fur, and now, got master flushing. The retrieving was first by many years because retrieving is not really dependent on desire or drive. It is training dependent like riding a bicycle is. The fur and the flushing require the drive and desire. A big thing was made out of the dog achieving all this. Let's be realistic, the dog is almost 10 yeas old now. Doesn't matter what 10 years of training has done...he is too damned old to use any of it. Had the dog had the goods in the beginning, he could and would have been done between 3 and 4.
When holes are covered by conditioning of young pups, everyone loses because no one can assess what the individules potential is. They all look pretty good.....but covering the holes was the purpose of the conditioning in the first place wasn't it? Can't move em if they run away from everyone.


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I have always considered imprinting as the first one seen when the eyes open are the chosen one. Reading Jeff's posts I have the feeling he is talking about exposing the pups to new and varied environments and circumstances. If this is the case, I can't see as to how it would be anything but beneficial to a dog that has it natuarally. Just makes the pup that much stronger all around. Much of these artificial, confidence bolstering techniques came about merely to shore up the pups that don't have the goods. Makes them appear to be something they are not because when pressure is applied, they are still the same old weak pup.....no matter who is training them. One of the greatest gifts people possess is not the power to reason....it is the power to rationalize. Rationalize that all these enhancement techniques can make a solid dog out of a weak one. JMHO of course. While they certainly won't hurt a solid dog, they do nothing for the weak dog when the chips are down...they are still weak.


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## Howard Gaines III

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Weak is weak and good dogs can be made better...


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

True. Now wouldn't it be nice if you could go look at a litter of pups and tell which have the goods and which don't because the cover up techniques haven't been applied by the breeder. I have to wonder why some have said they wouldn't by a pup that hasn't been exposed to these modern techniques. I would think they would want to see what they are really getting without the window dressing.


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## Daryl Ehret

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Bravo, Don. Sure, imprinting and conditioning for dogs whose training is to be put to use can't be a bad thing. But the idea of reproducing with them just might be. I'd prefer to assess a dog's breeding potential "in the raw", minus the imprinting, conditioning, training, learned habits, masked behaviors etc. while looking beyond the hype of titles and pedigrees. Still, as Jeff and others have said, "imprinting" happens with our without our direct involvement, beyond it's first 8 weeks, and is inevitable in the training process. The ability of the breeder to differentiate what is learned behavior, and what is inherent behavior is then more crucial.


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## Konnie Hein

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Don:
When are you going to start breeding Malinois???


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Daryl Ehret said:


> Bravo, Don. Sure, imprinting and conditioning for dogs whose training is to be put to use can't be a bad thing. But the idea of reproducing with them just might be. I'd prefer to assess a dog's breeding potential "in the raw", minus the imprinting, conditioning, training, learned habits, masked behaviors etc. while looking beyond the hype of titles and pedigrees. Still, as Jeff and others have said, "imprinting" happens with our without our direct involvement, beyond it's first 8 weeks, and is inevitable in the training process. The ability of the breeder to differentiate what is learned behavior, and what is inherent behavior is then more crucial.


I agree Daryl. This is the reason I watch them closely from 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 weeks. They have limited exposure to any outside environment at that point other than the parents, and siblings. From there, the learning curve spikes. the more exposure the better from this point. The 3 1/2 week to 4 1/2 week observation tells me which pups may need the bulk of early attention to make good pets. The top pups seem to do as well without special time with me as they go to anyone and are more than willing to accept new things. When potential pet buyers come, I bring in the top pick and one of the ones I consider a pet. This is usually the first time in the house for both pups and I have a throw rug surrounded by slick floor. I tell the people to sit and watch them for a while. The top pick is going strong from the time it hits the floor and is pulling at the rug, and everything else it can get hold of. The other sits sedately, not moving but looking around. I can tell the pup is uneasy and slowly it will get up and start rubbernecking around. Pet people are looking for a pup that "needs" them. They fall in love with the seeming helplessness of the one dog while the other has been chased out of every room by then and the thought of have that pup loose in their house seems to unnerve them. I knew which pup they would pick before I brought them in. Only working people will see what you or I do in the other pup. The difference between the two is that the one needs to get used to each new situation, the other doesn't. Once that quite pup gets home and used to the house, there isn't much difference.....move the furniture around, he will have to take time and adjust again. Doesn't mean they are bad dogs at all, just not working quality. One needs exposure to each new thing, the other doesn't.


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Konnie Hein said:


> Don:
> When are you going to start breeding Malinois???


Do they hunt?


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## Konnie Hein

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Well, I have a Malinois that hunts for people. He could easily be convinced to hunt deer, chipmunks, squirrels and horses (things he likes to chase here if he gets the chance!).


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## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I am curious if they could hunt as well. LOL

In a few years or less, I should be done ****ing around with this MR3 quest, and am going to start breeding Mals. I am NOT going to be doing all the neuro stuff, and hopefully by then I will have enough sense not to be wiping out entire litters due to not knowing what "should" produce what. My goal will be to have a couple of lines going, and line and inbreed to pop the recessives, and start getting rid of the dumb shit.

I will definately not be breeding for the faint of heart. If there are no takers, then I have contacts elsewhere to send them.


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Jeff, how far are you from the MR3


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## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Well if you have read any of my other posts of Buko's trial "explosions" LOL No, in all seriousness he should get his two this fall/winter barring any disasters, I think he "might" squeek by a three, as we have been working on the call off, which holy cow, at first was really ugly, and then I tried a different way, and is, considering how late I started doing it, looking pretty good. I should know here by fall how he is doing.

The object guard he tends to start doing weird shit, like waiting till the decoy is real close before biting. I need to thank (he says sarcastically) my buddy Sandro for that one.


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## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I have 3 finals in 2 days (pathology, immunology, and bacteriology), but we learned some highly interesting things in regards to the effects of inbreeding on the immune system. I'll write a big long post on the subject when I get done with tests on Tuesday. PS...it's not good.


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## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Maren, it will be interesting to read I'm sure, but I actually have done this before, and the results were good. I had no problems with sick dogs, and they outlived the average age. You have to go past "X" generation, as they are a bit weird, but then you are fine. I did not have the "X" generation in all lines.

"X" is down the line (ie 9th generation) a bit and you are thinking that you have screwed up, but you keep going and the results are stronger than ever.

I did find that some lines extinguish themselves, as they are not strong enough, and have too many genetic problems to withstand that type of breeding program. I guess that reinforces the "shit is shit" theory. LOL


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## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> I have 3 finals in 2 days (pathology, immunology, and bacteriology), but we learned some highly interesting things in regards to the effects of inbreeding on the immune system. I'll write a big long post on the subject when I get done with tests on Tuesday. PS...it's not good.


Aren't inbreeding depression and the loss of immune system diversity kind of old news?

I don't mean solely from a dog-breeding POV, because I'm not a breeder, but these are problems inherent in inbreeding, aren't they? 

I don't mean that there are no positive factors, of course, like homozygosity.

But generally, the more immune systems a mammal inherits, the more immunity it inherits, right?


P.S. Looking forward to the post!


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

There has been no labratory controlled data to substantiate what the effects of inbreeding are one way or the other. Most all the data is a compilation of infor from breeders. If they were successful, the info would be more positive,l because they cannot set aside human emotion, most are failures and this will be reflected in the info given. While it is true, there is inbred depression, there is also many other drawbacks that appear to be gospel to the normal person. The fact is, only a pecentage of the pups get inbred depression. Only a percentage are truly adversley affected by the inbreeding if the lines can handle it. The others get stronger. The major drawback with studies is that they are conducted by humans and many of the conclusions, are not factual. They study all the pups born? The ones that draws their focus IS THE ONES THAT ARE OBVIOUSLY ADVERSLEY AFFECTED. Those are the ones that prove what they want to prove. What they fail to realize is that in a litter of 10 pups, only 10? to 20 % would survive in the wild. That is why mother nature addressed the problem by giving them large litters. Because we have domesticated the dog has not changed that. I see people saving deformed pups, weak pups and the list goes on. Mother nature would have culled these specimens to start with. They do no breed any good, just peoples feelings benefit from saving the weak. The people doing the studies ought to try to concentrate on the strong and write the weak off. It is old news what happens with inbred depression and the rest of the downside of inbreeding. My dogs are fairly tightly bred. I have some out here with a coeficient of a tad over 40% COI. Most of the rest are 25% and up. I only have two dogs out of twenty that have ever been inside of a vets office and they range from 14 years down. The two that have been inside of a vets office were for injuries catching hogs and one is the 14 year old and the other is approaching 11. Even for rabbies shots, the vet comes out to the truck. I have had parvo a number of times, seldom do I lose a pup from it and that is without a vet or special care. Inbred dogs can be much stronger than the vast majority of dogs if the breeder does not save the weak. Jeff is right about the 9th generation. This info does not come from science, they have never bred dogs to 9 generations to find out., It comes from people that have done it. The weakest litters were the mid range litters. May take 2 days to deliver 12 pups because of the weaknesses and dead pups in the canal. Starting with the 9th generation, they could pop 12 out in three hrs and seldom with a loss. Pups are phenomenal. Until those scientist devote 20 or more years with an actual controlled study, the vast majority of info derived at is conjecture. There are lines of hounds around that hvve been subjected to closed breeding for years. They have survived getting passed down through many generations of the family and they are the best hounds around. Misdiagnosis accounts for what, 150,000 deaths in people per year? Still people believe everthing the the dog says.


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## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Until those scientist devote 20 or more years with an actual controlled study, the vast majority of info derived at is conjecture.


Yes. As far as I know, there is no definitive test of an individual's immune system, and no way to eliminate all the factors that are not related to in- or line-breeding.

Sure is interesting, though, to watch the research that IS done.


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## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> ... the effects of inbreeding on the immune system. I'll write a big long post on the subject when I get done with tests on Tuesday. PS...it's not good.



I'm WAITING! :lol:


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## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Jeez guys! Patience, patience! :lol::lol:

I just got back into town after helping Ann get her new GSD up to Nebraska and I spent a few days at the parents. I'll get it done, no worries.


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## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> ... I just got back into town after helping Ann get her new GSD up to Nebraska and I spent a few days at the parents. ...


Well. 

OK.


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Just checking. It is now Tuesday morning.....nada.



Lesson one...never promise the kids something good until you are ready to deliver. They will drive you nuts until they get it. But hey. I think tomorrow makes a week from the tests.


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## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Just checking. It is now Tuesday morning.....nada.
> 
> 
> 
> Lesson one...never promise the kids something good until you are ready to deliver. They will drive you nuts until they get it. But hey. I think tomorrow makes a week from the tests.


Oh hi Don -- it's you. I heard fingers tapping over here.....


:lol:


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## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Alright, that darn foster wolf...err...dog of mine kept me up until I finally gave in and fell asleep on the couch, so I got probably a grand total of an hour of sleep, so this will likely not be my best effort, kids. :razz::razz::razz:

Okay, so basically when people think of inbreeding being a problem, it's because we think of diseases (usually simple homozygous recessives, but not necessarily) that get brought to light in a tight cross. And that is certainly true. There's a ton of breed specific diseases like this, so that's all well and good. But then you may say, well, how about if those genes are NOT in my lines? Why would that affect my dogs with a tight line breeding?

In immunology, there are two kinds of defenses: humoral and cell mediated. Cell mediated is your T and B lymphocytes, which includes the cytotoxic "killer" T cells, "helper" T cells, and B cells that make antibody, which is helpful for the system recognizing future invaders. Humoral is your first line of defense that kicks in before your cell mediated immune system kicks in. These are your phagocytic cells like neutrophils, macrophages, and other first line defenders that are also antigen presenting cells. 

The problem is that what your body can recognize in that first line of defense comes from the genetic complement that your father and mother had. In a wide genetic complement, you're covered for more of the baddies than with a narrow genetic complement. So what happens in a highly inbred animal is that they have a much narrower spectrum of humoral immunity that an outbred animal. This is why crossbred dogs have long been called healthier than purebreds. It's not that mixed breed dogs can't get genetic diseases, as absolutely they can, it's that their front line of defense from contractible disease is more diverse than a purebred so they can respond easier. When the humoral immunity kicks in first, it can spare the initiation of cell mediated immunity, which is good as cell mediated immunity can actually be quite dangerous if it can't be turned off. This is what happens when you get autoimmune diseases like systemic lupus erythematosus, immune mediated arthritis, pemphigus, and so on. Could this be why there are more autoimmune diseases in purebred animals because the cell mediated immunity has to pick up the slack? Perhaps.

When they do studies in mice to get a high susceptibility to disease so they have an experimental model of disease, how do they get those strains? They highly inbreed them so that they become closer and closer to homozygous. Some inbred strains are almost but not quite clones of each other. This is helpful when you want to minimize genetic variability, but it also comes at a cost. In grad school, we used a mouse strain called CD-1, which was an outbred strain. These moms were highly maternal, fostering a litter with another mom was pretty easy, and they average 12-14 pups in a litter with as high as 21 that I ever saw. A lab who shared the mouse facility with us used the C57BL/6 strain, which is an inbred strain. They took longer to mature, you were lucky if you got more than 6 pups in a litter, and they weren't especially maternal. They are also much more bitey when you handle them. So basically, inbreeding influences behavior, fecundity (reproductive success), and immune status.

What's interesting to note here is that I typically see the reasons for inbreeding and tight line breeding in dogs to be similar as in the mice in immunology research. You want to get closer to having very, very uniform high performance litters, yes? The problem is that you won't get to total homozygosity, not even with 20 inbred sister/brother pairings. Close, but not quite. In addition, even if you did get to 100% so that within a litter, they are all practically clones, you will still not get 100% homozygosity phenotypically. You don't get this even with cloned (twinned) animals even, especially when you're looking for phenotypically complex things like behavior. For example, when they cloned a top drug sniffer dog, 6 out of 7 pups ended up passing the first round of qualifications. 

http://www.thetechherald.com/articl...ffer-dogs-begin-their-training-in-South-Korea

But why not the 7th? Why was this one left behind? They state they want to improve the pass rate from 30 to 90%. Why not 100%? These animals are genetically identical, right? It's because of epigenetics, or things that happen outside the genome like the environment. This is why cloned animals don't look or act exactly alike and neither do identical twins for that matter. Here's a great little series of clips that I'd encourage all breeders to watch, especially A Tale of Two Mice:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3411/02.html

So my point is that we use inbreeding or line breeding to make our dog lines more homozygous for the traits that we want. The problem is that even if we make them 100% homozygous genetically or even if we clone them, phenotypically, they are NOT all going to be uniform in appearance or behavior. However, inbreeding does come to a cost in terms of reproductive success and immunity. 

If you wish to talk about not having man's influence and working just with the genetic background, I'll bring up the numerous examples of inbreeding on wild populations. Cheetahs have undergone 2 population bottlenecks in the last few thousand years causing severe inbreeding depression. They are extremely difficult to breed in captivity and apparently the sperm count of a cheetah is about 10% of that of a lion or tiger. These are performance animals and the fastest on the planet in running on land. However, they will likely not be able to outrun the possibility they may not make it to the next millennium due to their . Same sort of deal with immunity in the Ngorongoro crater lions. These are about the biggest, strongest lions in the world, but they are highly inbred and are succumbing to parasitic flies.

So my point is with inbreeding is that goal of having a total homozygous litter will not come to pass, even if you cloned them. That darn epigenetics thing kicks in. Plus there are numerous problems that surface with inbreeding that, IMHO, do more harm than good.


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## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

One of the most durable breeds on the planet is the pit bull, and we all see them surviving aweful things on animal planet every week. One of the things that pitbull breeders do, as they do not have the whole sensitivity thing, and are their own uncle as well, is inbreed the living shit out of their lines.


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## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

PLUS, as a side note, look at the general poor health of dogs now. I am not kidding when I say that if I go to the vet more than once for something other than injury to the dog, the second time will be the last.


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## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Jeff Oehlsen said:


> Again, something someone else has written, info gathered(by who???) taken as gospel.


What is, precisely? The info from my immunology class in vet school taught by a DVM PhD who is faculty at RADIL, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) lab animal pathology research facilities in the country? Jeff, they know what inbreeding does to animal populations because they do it intentionally in a lab and there's multiple examples in nature. I don't breed dogs, but I've bred hundreds of litters of mice. The n=1 of "well, I had a female once who did this" is not evidence based science or medicine. Sorry.


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## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Then read the part about the lab people being basically retards that cannot see the sun for the sky.


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## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

All lab studies of dog breeding are irrelevant. It is not the real world. Well, maybe it has become similar to the real world and that is why 99.9% of todays breeders should stay away from inbreeding.
In a lab with mice, all viable, breathing mice are kept and bred for, as Maren said, 100's of generations. The world of breeding is not utopia such as these mice have in a lab. Most would not have survived the first few days are the first week in the real world of mice. A lab is a false setting. What happens in a lab is that the weakest specimens are still breed. Weak begets weak.
Serious dog breeding is not the production of how many pups you can produce. Canines have large litters because out of a litter of 10, only 2 or 3 of the healthiest, strongest, smartest would be expected to survive. What happens in serious inbreeding? All the weak and non viable pups either die or are put down. Only the healthiest and ones with the best vigor are kept. There is a vast difference in 100's of generations of breeding mice as compared to breeding 10 to 20 generations of dogs when the criteria for viable is of the utmost importance in breeding dogs and means nothing in a lab and mice. Labbies want to see 100% viability. Mother Nature doesn't care what anyone wants, the weak and defective are eliminated by her rules. Besides, one outcross will bring an inbred dog back to the status quo.
I was on a Canine Genetics list for a very, very short time. They do not believe in inbreeding. They call what they like "assortive" breeding They say you can breed for performance this way. Sure, maybe one pup out of a litter and that would not be competative with other dogs more than likely. I sat their patiently while they explained to me what inbred depression was, how it affected a pup, yadda yadda. These people are some of the smartest I have ever seen in one group. They have papers puplished in vet jounals and the whole smear. They are German, Swedes, you name it. When they were all done, I asked them how many have actually seen an inbred depressed pup? How many have actually had the opportunity of holding one? You know what the answer was. ZERO!!! But they got there info from other realiable sources that had never seen or studied inbred depressed pups either so it was valid. I told them I have had, in my possession and held probably 100 to 200 inbred depressed pups and should they like any factual info, I would be glad to give it to them. They were not interested. It simply didn't make the case they wanted to make.
One more point Maren,when a breeder is breeding for perfomance, he does not put much stock in phenotypical traits. Your breeding for heart, drive, etc. The first clue to a performance breeder that there is a higher level of homozygosity being attained is when the offspring begin showing an extreme amount of phenotype even though they have never been bred for phenotypical traits. The first link below is to a litter that has 7 generation on the top and 6 or 7 on the bottom. The second is a litter of tenth generation pups. No, they are not clones, but you would have to paint them different colors to know which one you had.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v401/hicntry/TitanIndianMaidpupsr.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v401/hicntry/IMG_2818r.jpg

Concerning the lions In the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania that are succuming to these biting flies. I would like to know how much of the rest of the wildlife in that crater are also dying. Virtually every large animal in that crater is inbred. I strongly doubt that these flies are only having an effect on the lions but it makes the case against inbreeding for those that want to swallow it. There is no large animals in that crater that is not inbred but the people have been championing the lions for some time because they think human intervention is needed.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Maren, apologies for not mentioning the immunity problems concerning inbred animals. I didn't have a clue what was said as I am not a pre med student. The important fact may be is how much inbreeding does it take? Are the autoimmune problems any worse than the generations of dogs that have been getting over vaccinated by the family vet which also results in numerous autoimmune problems? Why is one worse than the other?


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Are the autoimmune problems any worse than the generations of dogs that have been getting over vaccinated by the family vet which also results in numerous autoimmune problems? Why is one worse than the other?


But who said that one is worse than the other? 

Overvaccination triggering autoimmune problems, as well as the shorter-term vaccinosis, have been pretty big topics here.

I'd love to read the POV of a long-time breeder about overvaccination and autoimmune disease.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I have no POV personally. It was just something begging to be mentioned as a comparison. There are just too many breeders breeding for different criteria and with to many breeding methods to realistically lead to the downfall of dogs. I give the first 3 shots and the year and a half booster and never give another shot except for rabies....which they don't need either. The vet comes out to the truck to give rabies shots. Out of 20 dogs, the oldest being 14, only two have ever been inside a vets office and both were for physical injury. I have dogs in the yard that are over 40% COI and most have a COI in the high 20's. All the breeders have had parvo and the whole litter over 40% COI has had parvo and they are still here without seeing a vet. Possibly a weak immune system in an inbred dog means they can get it, but, it just doesn't bother them much when they do. I don't really know. The way I interpretted what Maren said was that the immune system can go crazy and keep destroying the red blood cells. The white cells go berzerk. While discussing things on the Canine Genetics list, I was told that the probability of bad recessive pairing up in assortive breeding was so low that it could be considered 0 probability. They also said, which is something Maren touched upon, that inbreeding greatly increases the risk of bad recessives pairing up. Simply put, I ask if we are comparing the risk to assortive breeding which, essentially has a risk factor or zero, what constitutes "a higher risk" from inbreeding. 1 in 1,000,000, 1 in 100,000, 1 in 10,000? what do you mean by "higher risk"? They said they don't know and took me off the list. I learned a long time ago, everyone has an agenda, and everyones agenda is what they set out to prove. In peoples minds, inbreeding is bad for people, therefore it is bad for everything, but, animals inbreed. Many species have multiple offspring in which few normally survive. Some die from predation, some from disease, some, eventuall die from inbred depression because they are weak and unhealthy. Think back on those wildlife shows where the lion cub is puny and does it's best to keep up with the pride as it moves about. They kept saying it was not doing well The cubs are puny and eventually die on the program. Looked inbred depressed to me. 
If they want to study dogs, then study dogs but, they need a qualified breeder to tell them how to do it. You don't get hung up on the weak, that is a human frailty. It does not work in the animal world. Not for long anyway.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> I give the first 3 shots and the year and a half booster and never give another shot except for rabies....


This protocol is starting to become widespread (and it's about time).

I wonder -- what made you first stop re-vaccinating vaccinated dogs every year? Or did you never do that?



Don Turnipseed said:


> If they want to study dogs, then study dogs but, they need a qualified breeder to tell them how to do it.


That would be excellent. That would be a partnership that I would LOVE to see the findings from.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Connie, I have never been one to medicate, I think it weakens the whole system whether it is people or dogs. It creates a dependency. I used to vaccinate religiously with no ill effect on the dogs but after reading stuff by Jean Dodds years ago, I quit and never looked back and the dogs do well.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> ... after reading stuff by Jean Dodds years ago, I quit and never looked back and the dogs do well.


Me too.

And I link anyone who asks about minimal vaccination to the Dodds protocol.

Amazing how when the big pharma houses are on the other side, it can take decades for updated information to get out.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Jeff Oehlsen said:


> You know how many retards I know that work in labs ? ? ? ?
> 
> Sorry, you know shit about breeding dogs, and that is basically that. Mice are not dogs. Bred dogs and basically I might listen. Until then, I will continue to say your full of shit when it comes to the breeding of dogs.
> 
> If you could read a book and figure it out, then we wouldn't have all these sory dogs, and would have the Disney version everyone wants all the time.
> 
> So quote all the research you want, I know these people you speak of, and wouldn't trust them to be able to figure out how to water a plant.


I'm sorry I missed this when it was posted.

Anyone who puts anything like "You're full of shit" in a post here can be prepared for an edited post. And we don't bother with little deletions of one word any more.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Jeff Oehlsen said:


> You know how many retards I know that work in labs ? ? ? ?
> 
> Sorry, you know shit about breeding dogs, and that is basically that. Mice are not dogs. Bred dogs and basically I might listen. Until then, I will continue to say your full of shit when it comes to the breeding of dogs.
> 
> If you could read a book and figure it out, then we wouldn't have all these sory dogs, and would have the Disney version everyone wants all the time.
> 
> So quote all the research you want, I know these people you speak of, and wouldn't trust them to be able to figure out how to water a plant.


Ah Jeff, I noticed you never mentioned the cloned sniffer dogs. How convenient. With strict linebreeding, the goal is to get a homogenous litter of high performers. Well, you can't get a 100% homozygous animal even with 20 straight brother/sister pairings (which is straight out of my immunology notes...it's like 97% or so if I recall). Even if you could, you can't even guarantee 100% success even with identical twin clones in a working situation as in the case of the cloned sniffer dogs. So Jeff, do please explain for me, since I obviously know nothing, why exactly tight line breeding is any better besides costs? I see a lot of potential drawbacks and not too awful many benefits, none of which are guaranteed. And please, do let me know how many lab researchers you really know, oh great bartender/gas station attendant. :razz::razz::razz:

Don, you mentioned the rabies. I'll be posting another "what they really teach us in vet school" thread about what we are taught about vaccines, but basically the reason why rabies vaccines are different from the distemper/parvo/etc combos is that the rabies vax is a killed virus and the DHPP is a modified live. They can't (or don't) use modified live viruses for rabies because they don't want there to be any possibility of the animal getting the disease from the vaccine. Killed viruses don't stimulate the immune system nearly as much as the modified live vaccines, so they have to use adjuvants to make the immune system angry and give periodic boosters. MLV likely don't need too much in the way of boostering as they should have stimulated a robust enough response to begin with, but killed vaccines do. 

Incidentally, one of the community practice doctors came in to gave us a talk on the protocol used by our veterinary teaching hospital. He loves the vaccine debate and he actually heard a talk at a conference blaming inbreeding by breeders for the reason why we see vaccine reactions. *shrug* I dunno about that, but interesting idea? So everybody likes to blame everybody else. \\/ What else is new? I do the puppy series, wait as long as possible to do the rabies (and never on the same day as other vax), and check titers. I'll recheck them probably every 3-5 years or so and do the rabies every 3 years as by law.

And actually, we definitely don't breed weak mice in the lab. We can't afford to. Keeping them in a lab setting is very costly and we can't afford in either time or money to have screw ups. We put most of the dog breeders to shame for how much we culled. Female kills her pups? She's snake food. Male stud savages the females? He's snake food. Female is a poor producer? She's snake food. Male looks like he's a dud breeder? Snake food. Pups are too small or runty at weaning? Snake food. The strain I worked with was bred to be relatively easy to handle, have large litters and decently large body size (30-35 g for adult females is about right...most other strains average around 5 grams less), have good maternal behavior, and not too much aggression between conspecifics so they can be group housed.

This may be a terminology point, but phenotype is just the manifestation of the genotype. That's anything from how it looks to how it acts to how it produces. So a pair of twins can have identical genotypes but not identical phenotypes due to epigenetics.

In previous classes, we've used the Ngorongoro crater lions as an example of inbreeding depression. As it turns out, quite a few of the ungulates move in and out of the crater during the seasonal migrations (especially the buffalo and zebra apparently), but the lions don't really move and fresh blood is pretty rare.

http://www.rarespecies.org/crater.pdf


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> .... basically the reason why rabies vaccines are different from the distemper/parvo/etc combos is that the rabies vax is a killed virus and the DHPP is a modified live. They can't (or don't) use modified live viruses for rabies because they don't want there to be any possibility of the animal getting the disease from the vaccine. Killed viruses don't stimulate the immune system nearly as much as the modified live vaccines, so they have to use adjuvants to make the immune system angry and give periodic boosters. MLV likely don't need too much in the way of boostering as they should have stimulated a robust enough response to begin with, but killed vaccines do.


This new Dodds rabies booster study -- what will be the likely recommended booster protocol to emerge from it?


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Was that her big study looking at 5-7 years or something similar?


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> Was that her big study looking at 5-7 years or something similar?


Yeah.

Unfortunately, it just got going.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Interesting about the rabies vaccine and why it has to be readministered. 
So lets get to some pertinent stuff. You have 100's of generation s test mice. There is one study of 1000 generations of full bro/sis done by the institute for the blind regarding seeing eye dogs I believe. I understand they saw no real downside in 1000 generations. Now, here is were the slope gets slippery. Your side wants to dicourage inbreeding, the dogs for the blind wants to prove otherwise because the inbred dogs make better dogs. Here is the question. We are not dealling with lab mice. We are dealing with dogs for 10 to 20 generations. Not 100's of generations.
How many generations would it take to see the immune problems you wrote about. 3? 5? 10? 20? No one knows because they haven't tested this conclusion? 
What is it that takes place about the 9th generation of inbreeding that causes the inbred depressed pups to magically vanish from the litters?


----------



## ann schnerre

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

here's a question off the top of my head (and i'm sure someone will take my head off for it...), but are human killed virus vaccine protocols that much different than that required for dogs/cats (ie, IDK, like hepatitis, 3 shots, you're done for life)--if a protocol like that's good enough for **** sapiens, why wouldn't it be for the mutt?

i understand that MLV results in a greater immune system response (believe me--cait had extreme fever/seizures fr measles vax), but how about the killed viruses required for children in this country? are humans that much different in immune response than animals? well, you get where i'm going here i hope...

it's extremely possible i'll lose my head for this post, but what the heck, i'm not using it much anyway. no great loss.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> ... What is it that takes place about the 9th generation of inbreeding that causes the inbred depressed pups to magically vanish from the litters?


Does the inbreeding coefficient change in the 9th?


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Interesting about the rabies vaccine and why it has to be readministered.
> So lets get to some pertinent stuff. You have 100's of generation s test mice. There is one study of 1000 generations of full bro/sis done by the institute for the blind regarding seeing eye dogs I believe. I understand they saw no real downside in 1000 generations. Now, here is were the slope gets slippery. Your side wants to dicourage inbreeding, the dogs for the blind wants to prove otherwise *because the inbred dogs make better dogs*. Here is the question. We are not dealling with lab mice. We are dealing with dogs for 10 to 20 generations. Not 100's of generations.
> How many generations would it take to see the immune problems you wrote about. 3? 5? 10? 20? No one knows because they haven't tested this conclusion?
> What is it that takes place about the 9th generation of inbreeding that causes the inbred depressed pups to magically vanish from the litters?


That's the $64,000 question though. Guess it depends on how you define better? 

Mice and dogs are not all that dissimilar in many ways, just like humans aren't (though we try our best to rationalize that we are), but if you're creating a line of immune suppressed mice from scratch for immunology studies, they generally take them out to 20 generations of tight inbreeding to get them to a fairly homogenous population of mice that is more immunocompromised. That's how it was presented to us in class. When I worked with mice in grad school, we looked at endocrine disruption and nutrition, not immunology, so I'm no expert, but that's the number our immunology professor mentioned. Now this isn't to say that the 5th, 10th, or 19th generation will be A OK either. :-k 

In terms of humoral immunity (AKA: the first line of defense against invaders), I don't think there's a line where you can say that necessarily it will be detrimental all the time. You _may_ just be slightly more susceptible to certain infectious agents, especially if they are novel to your area if you've got a closed/inbred population, which _may_ make your cell mediated immune system work harder, which _may_ stimulate a propensity towards immune mediated disease (of which there are many). Because you're continually shrinking your gene pool in terms of humoral immunity with continual inbreeding, that's not something that ever gets better with time unless you start outcrossing again or possibly through mutation (beneficial mutations are a pretty slow process as most are either neutral or harmful).


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



ann freier said:


> here's a question off the top of my head (and i'm sure someone will take my head off for it...), but are human killed virus vaccine protocols that much different than that required for dogs/cats (ie, IDK, like hepatitis, 3 shots, you're done for life)--if a protocol like that's good enough for **** sapiens, why wouldn't it be for the mutt?
> 
> i understand that MLV results in a greater immune system response (believe me--cait had extreme fever/seizures fr measles vax), but how about the killed viruses required for children in this country? are humans that much different in immune response than animals? well, you get where i'm going here i hope...
> 
> it's extremely possible i'll lose my head for this post, but what the heck, i'm not using it much anyway. no great loss.


Almost all that we know about immunology is in mice and humans, mostly mice. We use a human medical textbook for our immunology text. Some things are different, like all the crazy interleukins and whatnot, but the basic pathways of antigen presentation, antibody production, and cell mediated immunity is pretty similar.

Yeah, that's the problem with MLV (good immune burst, but sometimes too much! Fawkes had that same thing last summer and was very sick from it) versus killed (not much immune response, so lots of potentially harmful adjuvant must be added to get the immune system nice and angry). Plus in the rabies vax, they really load up the antigen in there as they want to ensure that in case this is the only vax the animal gets, they get as much in as they can. 

I honestly don't know very much about human vax protocols for kids. But I do know that I'll be wanting single antigen vaccines for my kids, extra needle sticks be darned! I'd probably do them myself if I could.  There's all the scary reports about autism, etc which hasn't been successfully linked, but eh, why take the chance.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> There's all the scary reports about autism, etc ....


http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20070611/court-weighs-autism-vaccine-link

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/government-concedes-vacci_b_88323.html


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Connie Sutherland said:


> So there might be a steady incline from 1 to 20?


Yeah, I suspect there would be an inverse correlation between coefficient of inbreeding and the degree of polymorphism in the humoral immune system to recognize the baddies. There's likely literature on this somewhere, but it's summer for me, dammit! 8)

Now in terms of genetic disease like your classic simple homozygous recessive diseases where you either have it as a homozygous recessive or you don't if you're het (and a carrier) or homozygous dominant, you'll be a lot more likely for those to pop in a closed inbred population a whole lot sooner than the humoral immunity issue. The classic example is the European royal family and hemophilia.

That's interesting with the autism and mercury in vaccines thing. I had heard of it for years and in the church I work for, I know one kid diagnosed with Aspergers and two with autism. That seems like quite a few cases. I may forward that one of my immunology professors who does comparative human/animal vaccine research and see what his opinion is as I know he mentioned in class that he thinks most of it is conspiracy theory stuff. Still, I think if there are sensitive members in the population, we have to think of them in terms of legislative stuff, not just the average kids.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> That's interesting with the autism and mercury in vaccines thing. I had heard of it for years and in the church I work for, I know one kid diagnosed with Aspergers and two with autism. That seems like quite a few cases. I may forward that one of my immunology professors who does comparative human/animal vaccine research and see what his opinion is as I know he mentioned in class that he thinks most of it is conspiracy theory stuff. Still, I think if there are sensitive members in the population, we have to think of them in terms of legislative stuff, not just the average kids.


It's hard to hang onto the conspiracy theory now, with those cases.



Maren Bell Jones said:


> I think if there are sensitive members in the population, we have to think of them in terms of legislative stuff, not just the average kids.


Yes.

P.S. Thanks for posting all this. You too, Don. I have enough trouble wrapping my mind around it on the board; if I had to read this kind of stuff in a book I don't think I'd get it read. :lol:


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

What your saying,Maren, with a lot of words is
Don said:


> No one knows because they haven't tested this conclusion?


Apparently it may not even be that detrimental . Everyone including animals is mjore susceptible to contagenens that are not indiginous to theirm particular environment. 

Maren said:


> Now this isn't to say that the 5th, 10th, or 19th generation will be A OK either.


But then again, there may be no problem for 50 generations

Maren, let's stick to the facts that they can prove. Your dancing around with the answers. I am a breeder. I don't want my science based on 12 may be's and a half a dozen could be's or another dozen probablies. Tell me facts based on dogs. There are hundreds of years of inbreeding dogs that can state facts as to what is going to happen and when. I can guarantee you, if the dogs were not better, they would have quit a hundred years ago. I define better as to better performance and better healthwise. Vets here don't make their living on the healthy dogs for sure. Let me put it this way, Inbred dogs are "probably as" healthy as most dogs today and I would guess "may be" much healthier. But, there "could be" one in a hundred or so that may not be. Tough way to carry on a discussion isn't it.

Maren, breeding isn't new science. There are founders of new breeds that have learned what they know by breeding dogs. For every serious successful breeder, I can tell you he didn't become successful without learning a lot about how it works. Remember this for your professors, Inbreeding and line breeding is "not" about producing a better dog, it is about producing good dogs consistently. Your genetic base is the dogs you start with. Maybe 80% of a litter have the goods instead 10%. If we are to be satisfied with producing the mere 10% capable dogs, it doesn't much matter what inbreeding does because the other side of the coin means producing 90% culls. Breeding is not breeding at that point, it is just producing pups. A science full of may be's, could be's and probablies, has created a population of puppy producers because they have convinced the general population they will get dogs with two heads. Science with a specific agenda has done irreparable harm to dogs because there are few breeders left. But we have a lot of POS dogs roaming the streets.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I almost forgot, Maren, I think you missed the question about the 9th generation and the inbred depression. That would be a good question to put to the professors. I wonder if they are aware of this phenomenon with all this scientific study of mice. Maybe it happens with mice too.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I'm not dancing around the numbers, this is what I said as was said in our immunology class:



Maren Bell Jones said:


> if you're creating a line of immune suppressed mice from scratch for immunology studies, they generally take them out to *20 generations of tight inbreeding to get them to a fairly homogenous population of mice that is more immunocompromised*.


But I doubt there is a magic threshold where you're trucking along just fine and dandy with 19 generations of tight inbreeding before hand and all the sudden you've got a severely immunocompromised individual right at that 20th generation. It just depends what's out in the environment that their first line of defense can handle and recognize as an enemy. If it doesn't recognize it as an enemy, an infection can move into the disease state.



> Maren, breeding isn't new science. There are founders of new breeds that have learned what they know by breeding dogs. For every serious successful breeder, I can tell you he didn't become successful without learning a lot about how it works. Remember this for your professors, Inbreeding and line breeding is "not" about producing a better dog, it is about producing good dogs consistently. Your genetic base is the dogs you start with. Maybe 80% of a litter have the goods instead 10%. If we are to be satisfied with producing the mere 10% capable dogs, it doesn't much matter what inbreeding does because the other side of the coin means producing 90% culls. Breeding is not breeding at that point, it is just producing pups. A science full of may be's, could be's and probablies, has created a population of puppy producers because they have convinced the general population they will get dogs with two heads. Science with a specific agenda has done irreparable harm to dogs because there are few breeders left. But we have a lot of POS dogs roaming the streets.


AH HA! This was, in a way, my roundabout point. In the creation of a new breed or type, you're likely going to have to do some linebreeding or inbreeding. So what you're doing is taking a big population pool, putting it through like sand through a sieve and only letting a tiny fraction pass through of what you want. That little bit of sand is your gene pool for your new breed. So then you let your gene pool get bigger and bigger. Then, since we have some mutations and natural phenotype variation that naturally occurs, even in a relatively closed population, you, in doing another round of inbreeding, put them through another population bottleneck. And that's when you get problems in the natural world for sure (cheetahs, Florida panthers, elephant seals, and so on). Heterozygosity in the natural world is often, but not always, a desirable trait to adapt to change if needed. So the more homozygous a population gets, the more it puts itself at risk to be less likely to change.

I guarantee you that science didn't tell you all the idiot dog breeders out there how to do their thing, as idiotic as most of them are. I've heard some truly god awful rationalization and butchery of basic biology while listening in on conversations at all sorts of dog events. :roll: In fact, most of the herp breeders out there put the dog breeders to shame for actually *gasp* knowing how to do a basic Punnett square for a basic simple autosomal trait. Even though it's taught to 7th graders, most of the adult yahoo dog breeders out there would have no clue how to do one. So let's not knock biology or biology for the idiocracy out there in the dog breeding world. 

When I was researching working dog breeders last spring to get a puppy, I encountered a good number of breeders where the majority of the pups from previous breedings were excellent workers in many venues. I'm sure in the mainstream gene pool of generic, mediocre American dogs, you get a lot of generic, mediocre puppies. Not to say that they're not fine as pets (although many aren't even that), but I didn't really find this to be the case in shopping for a good working breeder for Malinois and Dutchies. The majority I looked at seemed to have a relatively small percentage suitable for (active) pet homes instead of performance homes. I'm sure this wouldn't necessarily be the case if I wanted to branch out into a breed that has lost a lot of its working background these days. In that sense, you perhaps are almost restarting the breed from scratch in a sense of the word if you want to make a renewal of the working lines of the breed.



> Vets here don't make their living on the healthy dogs for sure.


Hey now, as a future holistic vet, I resemble that comment!  I will be much more into keeping our animals healthy from within through good nutrition and so on.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> I almost forgot, Maren, I think you missed the question about the 9th generation and the inbred depression. That would be a good question to put to the professors. I wonder if they are aware of this phenomenon with all this scientific study of mice. Maybe it happens with mice too.


Actually, I wasn't aware of it. Any resources on it would would be most helpful.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> Actually, I wasn't aware of it. Any resources on it would would be most helpful.


That is why I referred to it as a phenomenon Maren. It is just something that happens. I guess from your answer it does not happen with mice. I first heard about it from the old time houndsmen that have had closed lines passed from great, great grandfathers on down through the present. It is just something you learn through breeding but most people don't see it. Takes a lot of years. The second picture of pups I put the link up to is 10th generation. Took the bitch 3 1/2 hours to deliver 12 pups. All pups are still there. Two generations earlier, it would have taken 2 days to deliver because of the dead pups in the birth canal. This is part of my point Maren. It is something you learn from doing not from conjecture or studying mice. Mice being "relatively similar" just doesnt cut it. It is noted among breeders. It does happen and usually on time. I have a 10 gen bitch due to whelp within a day or two. She is bred to a 7th gen male. I expect she will have a big litter with no problems. I will go out and check her in the manana and let you know if she had them and what the status is. Then, iof interested, I will look at them again when they are on their feet and give you an update.

By the way, I am not knocking biology, I love it. I am knocking the fact that so much is set in stone that is simpley no more than conjecture. The quest for knmowledge is admirable but, for my money, they should keep iot to themselves until they can qualify their finding with facts. Much of it is and I believe that part, just can't swallow the rest as being factual as they try to make it sound. I red flag everything that says may be, could be, probably. Like HD "may be" genetic, "could be" a combination of genetic and nutrition and is "probably" multiple genes. I say most of it, "more than likely", is post natal trauma.

By the way, I wasn't aware that any dutchies or mals made good pets for the average person.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> That is why I referred to it as a phenomenon Maren. It is just something that happens. .... It is noted among breeders. It does happen and usually on time.. .


Do you have a theory?


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Ah Connie,"Do I have a theory?" I am a simple person Connie. I won't say I believed it when I first heard about it myself. As the years went by and I saw the drastic change personally, well, I am a believer. It is not shrouded with "maybe's", "could be's", or "probably's". Now, being a simple person, I see no reason to question it and wonder why? It happens and it is a good thing. I leave the wondering why to the scientist, who by the way, pass it of like it is none existent because it mucks up most of their theories. Makes them less sure about what they really know and what is actually fact as opposed to fiction. Game bred pit breeders are all aware of this phenomenon because they inbreed. Old time houndsman all know about it because they inbreed. What is the best way to learn about the ups and downs of inbreeding dogs? It is to inbreed dogs. I am not surprised Maren is not familiar with this phenomenon because it is not mice and it isn't lab work, it is what really happens when you inbreed dogs. Of course, it isn't all a bed of roses. If you start with less than prime stock, they will die out before you ever get to 9 generations. I have mentioned that I got down to a 20% survival rate with some crosses. I bit the bulet and tightened them up again. The survival rate jumped to 60% using the same offspring. Went to 80% with the next offspring. I simply figure that what is happening is that the weaker genes are being overpowered generation after generation. If one keeps eliminating the inbred depressed pups, you are eliminating the ones that have the weaker genetic make up. Eventually, what you have left are the strong and we are then back to what mother nature intended. If you keep the weak and inbred depressed and hand feed them, the line is doomed. It is a double edged sword Connie. Humans are the only species that favor the weak, as a result, inbreeding is a bad thing, not in itself, but, because the people doing the breeding can't sit and watch the weak die. I tried, I couldn't do it either. When I realized that one thing, all the pups went oustside. I count them when they are born and count them when they come out of the whelping box. I don't even check in them until then.
I mentioned that Tashi was due to have her litter sometime soon. I just got back from a small job and saw her still out so I guess she hasn't had them yet. I forgot to look before I left this morning. Dad is in there keeping tabs on her so I guess she will be fine. He will brobably let me know when it is happening anyway. You know, barking his fool head off telling me to come and see what he did. LOL They are just like people you know.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> If you start with less than prime stock, they will die out before you ever get to 9 generations. ..... I simply figure that what is happening is that the weaker genes are being overpowered generation after generation. If one keeps eliminating the inbred depressed pups, you are eliminating the ones that have the weaker genetic make up. ...


Why at around the 9the generation, though?




Don Turnipseed said:


> ... the people doing the breeding can't sit and watch the weak die. I tried, I couldn't do it either. When I realized that one thing, all the pups went oustside. I count them when they are born and count them when they come out of the whelping box. I don't even check in them until then ....


Aha!


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Well, I said it was a human weakness. LOL And I never let anybody witness me laying on the ground with dogs all over me either. It is just the wrong image for me.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> And I never let anybody witness me laying on the ground with dogs all over me either...


Ah yes... the old "dog blanket" thing. :lol:


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Why 9 generations? I don't know. Nor do I care as long as it happens. There is enough people that don't breed that love to figure why stuff happens....just not this particular phenomenon. They are usually looking for a downside. I could probably tell you why if I had a punnett's square. I am sure that is where the answer lies. The big question is, "What in the hell is a punnett's square?" I know, I know I could look it up on the net. I think it has something to do with autosomal immunities.

I mentioned parvo a few times Connie, It is in the environment we live in. I spent a lot of time bleaching big yards since I don't keep the dogs in kennels except at night or when I am gone. Just by observing what happens, I have noticed that the pups never get sick as long as they are nursing. If they are going to get sick, it is usually about 3 to 4 weeks after they quit nursing. I used to give the first shot at 12 weeks, now I give them as soon as I see mom not wanting them to nurse. Warner to hot weather is when it seems to hit them the hardest and I didn't have a clue that they had parvo. I sat and watched what was going on and studied each event and could not figure out why the dogs did so well with it and never saw a vet. I heard horror stories about how bad it was. There are times one can't see the forrest for the trees because one is just totally used to seeing the same thing daily. Bingo, it hit me, all my puppy pens are heavily misted to the point there are certain areas that are actually mud holes and the other end is dry to damp. Guess where the sick pups spent a lot of time. On the muddy end. While I might like to think the inbreeding has just made them stronger all the way around. I am sure keeping them wet and cool both keeps the temp down and hydrates them as well. One can study a myriad of things in a lab and get a lot of info, but, there is just a lot of things, very unscientific things, that can only be learned by doing. What do sick and snake bit animals do in the wild? They go lay in the mud where it is cool. So much is right in front of us for the taking. People tend to make it more complicated than it was ever meant to be. Why? Because they have to know why? By the way, it is 112 degrees outside and I am not going out except in short bursts.


----------



## Bob Scott

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Breeds of dogs were developed, accidentally or ortherwise because of inbreeding. 
For example, many of the terriers carry the name of where they developed. Scottihhs terrier, Kerry Blue terrier, Manchester terrier, Border terrier, Lakeland terrier, etc, etc.
People either bred to the best herding/hunting/etc dog in the town simply because they didn't travel as we do today and the breeding pool in a give area was small. The other factor is that dogs were often left to roam the town and the most dominant male was the one that did most of the breeding. 
Either way, the dogs from certain areas became know as Border terriers, because they were common in the Border area between Scotland and England. The Manchaster terrier because they were common ratters in the Manchester area. The Lackland terrier because it was common in the Northern Lake district. The JRT was nothing more then a strain of fox terrier that was bred by John (Jack) Russell. "Hey, I want one of Jack Russell's terriers". 
Other breeds; The Collie was named after a particular type of sheep. There are rough coated cCollies, smooth coated Collies, Border Collies, Bearded Collies, etc.
ALL these dogs became breeds because of a dominant roamer in the town or were bred to because "His dog's work" "I'm gonna take my bitch to him next time around". No studies were done> I doubt there was even a lot of though about it. The survivors that worked were bred to. 
Now the catchr today is, as Don commented, to many save the sick, weak, usless pups. In the beginning these dogs were eithe weeded out by nature or shot as useless. It wasn't untill the Victorian era that people started breed ing for pets. It's gone down hill for the working breeds ever since. 
I tube fed a weak pup for weeks because my daughter "wanted that tiny one". IF I ever breed agan, it wont happen again.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Ah Connie,"Do I have a theory?" I am a simple person Connie. I won't say I believed it when I first heard about it myself. As the years went by and I saw the drastic change personally, well, I am a believer. It is not shrouded with "maybe's", "could be's", or "probably's". Now, being a simple person, I see no reason to question it and wonder why? It happens and it is a good thing. I leave the wondering why to the scientist, who by the way, pass it of like it is none existent because it mucks up most of their theories. Makes them less sure about what they really know and what is actually fact as opposed to fiction. Game bred pit breeders are all aware of this phenomenon because they inbreed. Old time houndsman all know about it because they inbreed. What is the best way to learn about the ups and downs of inbreeding dogs? It is to inbreed dogs. I am not surprised Maren is not familiar with this phenomenon because it is not mice and it isn't lab work, it is what really happens when you inbreed dogs. Of course, it isn't all a bed of roses. If you start with less than prime stock, they will die out before you ever get to 9 generations. I have mentioned that I got down to a 20% survival rate with some crosses. I bit the bulet and tightened them up again. The survival rate jumped to 60% using the same offspring. Went to 80% with the next offspring. I simply figure that what is happening is that the weaker genes are being overpowered generation after generation. If one keeps eliminating the inbred depressed pups, you are eliminating the ones that have the weaker genetic make up. Eventually, what you have left are the strong and *we are then back to what mother nature intended*. If you keep the weak and inbred depressed and hand feed them, the line is doomed. It is a double edged sword Connie. Humans are the only species that favor the weak, as a result, inbreeding is a bad thing, not in itself, but, because the people doing the breeding can't sit and watch the weak die. I tried, I couldn't do it either. When I realized that one thing, all the pups went oustside. I count them when they are born and count them when they come out of the whelping box. I don't even check in them until then.
> I mentioned that Tashi was due to have her litter sometime soon. I just got back from a small job and saw her still out so I guess she hasn't had them yet. I forgot to look before I left this morning. Dad is in there keeping tabs on her so I guess she will be fine. He will brobably let me know when it is happening anyway. You know, barking his fool head off telling me to come and see what he did. LOL They are just like people you know.


Well, Don, I still haven't really seen the cloned sniffer dog issue addressed. This dog was considered the best of the best in a working situation (otherwise they probably wouldn't have spent the money to clone it), but even with clones, you still don't get 100% success. Why would heavily inbreeding them to get higher homozygosity be any more advantageous than very high quality breeders who look for matching or complementary traits between sire and dam rather than matching with a high inbreeding coefficiency? 80% survival of the pups still isn't what I'd like to see, though I don't know where you are in your overall breeding goals. Narrowing the pool of humoral immunity (which is also called innate immunity, implying that you either have it or you don't from your genetic complement) isn't something I'd mess with either.

Most of population biology that studies gene flow, founder effect, population bottleneck, genetic drift, and so on is not done in a lab with mice. It's done with real populations "in the wild." And you like mentioning doing it like Mother Nature intended. Well, mix in Mother Nature with multiple population bottlenecks where only a very few survive (survival of the fittest at its best) and you end up with a lot of examples of species heading towards extinction like the Florida panther and the cheetah.  It's very difficult to adapt and survive if you don't have a diverse genetic complement in your gene pool. Nature generally (being the keyword) favors heterozygosity in populations for adaptive traits. Seemed like half the examples we talked about in my behavioral biology class in grad school covered these kinds of trends, which I can give examples of if you like. There's good reason for the young in most social animals to disperse to some degree at maturity. 



> I mentioned parvo a few times Connie, It is in the environment we live in. I spent a lot of time bleaching big yards since I don't keep the dogs in kennels except at night or when I am gone. Just by observing what happens, I have noticed that the pups never get sick as long as they are nursing. If they are going to get sick, it is usually about 3 to 4 weeks after they quit nursing. I used to give the first shot at 12 weeks, now I give them as soon as I see mom not wanting them to nurse.


They're typically covered by their mother's immunity from the antibodies in the colostrum. Horses and cattle are even more dependent on it than dogs, which are more dependent than humans. It has to do with the types of placenta that horses and cattle have versus dogs and versus humans. If foals or calves (or puppies or kittens) fail to receive the proper antibodies in colostrum, it's called failure of passive transfer of antibodies and the calves and foals in particular tend to die. Once they are weaned, the immunity wanes and their own immune system has to sink or swim at that point. Typically, they recommend parvo vax only around 5-6 weeks if it is highly endemic to the area and then the DHPP at 8 or 9 weeks and every 3-4 weeks after until 16 weeks.



> Warner to hot weather is when it seems to hit them the hardest and I didn't have a clue that they had parvo. I sat and watched what was going on and studied each event and could not figure out why the dogs did so well with it and never saw a vet. I heard horror stories about how bad it was.


What were the signs you saw if they weren't tested at the vet with an ELISA? How did you treat the pups?


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Bob Scott said:


> Breeds of dogs were developed, accidentally or ortherwise because of inbreeding.


Yes, Bob, I do know that. :wink: 

And that's exactly how different subspecies develop from founder events and that sort of thing. The big problem is when you take a population that looks like this in terms of traits (each letter, with a color, represents a single different phenotype, be it a physical or physiologic trait or a behavior or whatever):

*ABCDEFGHIJK**ABCDEFGHIJK*
*
*and then run it through via selection (either artificial or natural selection, take your pick) so it looks like this with just a handful of individuals getting to reproduce:

*DEFG
*
and then build it back up again so your whole population looks like this:

*DEFG**DEFG**DEFG**DEFG**DEFG

*So fair enough, that doesn't look so bad. Through a single selection event, you've got the best of both worlds: a good bit of variety left but you've got a reasonably defined "type" (be it either a species/subspecies or a defined "breed"). But then run it through another population bottleneck once again where it all looks like this:*

**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D*
*
*So what happens if all the sudden there is some event (be it a natural disaster, a new predator, a genetic disease, an acquired disease, etc) that doesn't jive with *D*? You're screwed as a population, even if your population size right now is the same level as the original heterogeneous population, just much much less variety. This is precisely what is happening right now with the cheetah and Florida panther and what biologists are predicting will likely happen to populations like the Northern elephant seal, even though their current numbers aren't too bad. Is this making sense to anyone? 
*
*


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Bob Scott said:


> It wasn't untill the Victorian era that people started breed ing for pets. It's gone down hill for the working breeds ever since.


Well, that's not strictly so. The lap dogs have been around for quite some time, longer than 150 years. However, it's been argued by some authors (like Stephen Budiansky in _The Truth About Dogs_) is that the concept of "breed" wasn't even around during the Victorian era and was a ploy by the middle class and upper class to establish "pure blood" even if they themselves were mongrel Americans (or Europeans or whatever). There was type, yes. If it herded, it was a shepherd. If it hunted in packs or coursed game it was a scent or sight hound. If it was a large guardian breed, it was a mastiff. But this "it must weigh this much with x amount of white on its chest and be this tall" was all a silly product of that era and we're still dealing with the consequences of that mentality today. Or so says Budiansky. :-D


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> Yes, Bob, I do know that. :wink:
> 
> And that's exactly how different subspecies develop from founder events and that sort of thing. The big problem is when you take a population that looks like this in terms of traits (each letter, with a color, represents a single different phenotype, be it a physical or physiologic trait or a behavior or whatever):
> 
> *ABCDEFGHIJK**ABCDEFGHIJK*
> *
> *and then run it through via selection (either artificial or natural selection, take your pick) so it looks like this with just a handful of individuals getting to reproduce:
> 
> *DEFG
> *
> and then build it back up again so your whole population looks like this:
> 
> *DEFG**DEFG**DEFG**DEFG**DEFG
> 
> *So fair enough, that doesn't look so bad. Through a single selection event, you've got the best of both worlds: a good bit of variety left but you've got a reasonably defined "type" (be it either a species/subspecies or a defined "breed"). But then run it through another population bottleneck once again where it all looks like this:*
> 
> **D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D**D*
> *
> *So what happens if all the sudden there is some event (be it a natural disaster, a new predator, a genetic disease, an acquired disease, etc) that doesn't jive with *D*? You're screwed as a population, even if your population size right now is the same level as the original heterogeneous population, just much much less variety. This is precisely what is happening right now with the cheetah and Florida panther and what biologists are predicting will likely happen to populations like the Northern elephant seal, even though their current numbers aren't too bad. Is this making sense to anyone?
> *
> *


So what does all this have to do with the breeding of dogs? We live in a relatively controled environment. Dogs live in a relatively controled environment. If something happens to that environment that is disasterous for the dogs, my guess is that we are in bigger trouble ourselves. We are now dealing with domesticated stock whose survival more or less depends on our survival. Elephant seals and cheetahs have no bearing. Population genetics has no bearing on domesticated dogs.


----------



## Daryl Ehret

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

When you're _selectively_ linebreeding, and suppose you select for 10 or 20 phenotypical traits to create homozygous alleles, the recombination of _the remaining yet unseen thousands genotypes that are not physically or easily expressed in appearance are in all probability inversely proportionately pulling away from a state of homozygosity._ What we see in phenotype can be such a small portion of genetic makeup. Inbreeding a 2-2 is a naturally 12.5% probable like-to-like genotype if it were simply random, but 100% for what you are selecting for (without compromise), and a lesser chance for what you are _not selecting for_, because of either ambivalence or unawareness.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> Well, Don, I still haven't really seen the cloned sniffer dog issue addressed. This dog was considered the best of the best in a working situation (otherwise they probably wouldn't have spent the money to clone it), but even with clones, you still don't get 100% success. Why would heavily inbreeding them to get higher homozygosity be any more advantageous than very high quality breeders who look for matching or complementary traits between sire and dam rather than matching with a high inbreeding coefficiency? 80% survival of the pups still isn't what I'd like to see, though I don't know where you are in your overall breeding goals. Narrowing the pool of humoral immunity (which is also called innate immunity, implying that you either have it or you don't from your genetic complement) isn't something I'd mess with either.
> 
> Most of population biology that studies gene flow, founder effect, population bottleneck, genetic drift, and so on is not done in a lab with mice. It's done with real populations "in the wild." And you like mentioning doing it like Mother Nature intended. Well, mix in Mother Nature with multiple population bottlenecks where only a very few survive (survival of the fittest at its best) and you end up with a lot of examples of species heading towards extinction like the Florida panther and the cheetah.  It's very difficult to adapt and survive if you don't have a diverse genetic complement in your gene pool. Nature generally (being the keyword) favors heterozygosity in populations for adaptive traits. Seemed like half the examples we talked about in my behavioral biology class in grad school covered these kinds of trends, which I can give examples of if you like. There's good reason for the young in most social animals to disperse to some degree at maturity.
> 
> 
> 
> They're typically covered by their mother's immunity from the antibodies in the colostrum. Horses and cattle are even more dependent on it than dogs, which are more dependent than humans. It has to do with the types of placenta that horses and cattle have versus dogs and versus humans. If foals or calves (or puppies or kittens) fail to receive the proper antibodies in colostrum, it's called failure of passive transfer of antibodies and the calves and foals in particular tend to die. Once they are weaned, the immunity wanes and their own immune system has to sink or swim at that point. Typically, they recommend parvo vax only around 5-6 weeks if it is highly endemic to the area and then the DHPP at 8 or 9 weeks and every 3-4 weeks after until 16 weeks.
> 
> 
> 
> What were the signs you saw if they weren't tested at the vet with an ELISA? How did you treat the pups?


Maren, as far as the parvo, I don't treat them. I was owed a pup by another breeder. I put the pup in with a litter of mine of the same age. Ten days later she was in a bad way. I took her to the vet. Two tests said she was positive for parvo. I went home and brought one of my pups back to the vet. He was running around and playing. He tested positive for parvo. Since they are so inbred and since I had probably had 100 pups with it with no losses , the vet suggest that I call UC Davis which I did. I explained everthing to them and, they said so what, they are more immune than others.

Let's cut to the chase Maren, I inbreed tightly to get dogs that produce in the neighborhood of 80% viable dogs. What I consider viable. Bringing population genetics, and scientific therory is not going to change the fact that if things go astray, my twenty dogs are the ones that will be the losers. Science cannot say within so many generation squat will happen because they don't know. Why, they won't even acknowledge that it takes 9 generations to clear the inbred depression from a line of inbred dogs because they know nothing about it. Let's assume for a minute that my next generation of dogs, the 12th, loses their total immune system. It will affect my 20 dogs. No one elses. This is like the Henny Penny syndrome, "The sky is falling in, the sky is falling in". There are no sky's falling in. My dogs may cease to exist but the 1000's of other airedales will continue. If my dogs have been bred to opthers along the way, it is beneficial to the breed and all the inbreeding is brought back to a status quo any way. Most of what you are carrying on about is what...."soft science"? Most of it is conjecture based on studies of mice. If it was hard science, you would have been aware that it is takes approximately 9 generations to rid a line of inbred depression. Your professors would have been aware of it. Don't get me wrong, I think science is necessary,but, I was young and more gullible once myself. Then I got old enough to realise there is a lot more half truths than whole truths in the world. Just depends on what someone is out to prove.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Maren. let's take another approach. First off, I think I know what you were explaining about inbreeding compromising the immune system. Let's lay some ground work before we shashay back and forth . Let's say inbreeding indeed does cause a compromised immune system. 

Question 1) Can dogs develope a compromised immune system that have never been inbred?

Question 2) Will every dog that is inbred develope these problems or does it depend on the genetic makeup of the original foundation stock?

Question 3) Was more than one strain of mice used or were several unrelated strains used to come to the conclusion that it is going to affect inbred dogs.

Question 4) Will every pup in a litter have a compromised immune system, or, will it only affect specific individuals as does inbred depression.

Question 5) Since ibred depression only affects specific induviduals would they likely be the ones that display a compromised immune system.

Question 6) Is it probably that this depressed immune system is part of the reason specific pups actually have inbred depression which result in weake, smaller, lethargic pups.


----------



## Kristen Cabe

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



> basically the reason why rabies vaccines are different from the distemper/parvo/etc combos is that the rabies vax is a killed virus and the DHPP is a modified live. They can't (or don't) use modified live viruses for rabies because they don't want there to be any possibility of the animal getting the disease from the vaccine.


I've somehow missed this thread since last week, so forgive me for responding to something that was said a couple of days ago and buried in page 2, but I'd like to know why don't more vets use a recombinant rabies vaccine? From what I've read, they work just as well and there is no need for adjuvants (a plus because adjuvants are one of the things that lead to an increased risk of reactions and cancers, correct?), yet there is still no risk of the animal contracting the disease from the recombinant vaccine. 



On a slightly different note,_ I've_ followed Dr. Dodds' protocol since I got my first dog 6 years ago. She has not received any vax other than rabies since she was just over a year old. I had the vet do a titer test last year, and she still had a strong response. I don't remember the brand name(s) of the vaccines that she received (probably Ft. Dodge when she was at the shelter), but I administered her last puppy shot and her final 'booster' with whatever 5-way brand Tractor Supply Co. carried at the time (now it's Spectra, but I don't know what it was 5 years ago). 

It's only been recently that I learned about adjuvants and such, and from here on out, I plan on using only non-adjvanted, high titer shots for my pups, more specifically Progard, by Intervet. Maren, thoughts?

*Edit:* Since you say you plan on becoming a homeopathic vet, what are your opinions of nosodes? You can PM me if you would rather.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Question 1) Can dogs develope a compromised immune system that have never been inbred?

Yes, though whether or not they have *ever* been inbred is a matter of degrees as most dog breeds were at some point likely to have been to establish type. I don't believe there is a canine version of AIDS, but there is a feline and non-human primate version of it. That would be an acquired compromised immune system unrelated to inbreeding (that we know of).

Question 2) Will every dog that is inbred develope these problems or does it depend on the genetic makeup of the original foundation stock?

Because of the effect of environment (which cannot be understated!!!), your mileage may vary. There's never a perfect or even close to perfect foundation stock. I heard something like we each carry something like 10 potentially lethal alleles?

Question 3) Was more than one strain of mice used or were several unrelated strains used to come to the conclusion that it is going to affect inbred dogs.

I think you're fixating on the mouse thing a bit much as there are plenty of examples in other species of inbreeding depression affecting fitness. But to answer your question, there are multiple strains of mice used for many different purposes. Some are inbred strains, some are outbreds. The Jackson Laboratory and Charles River Laboratories are where many mouse strains come from (ours came from Charles River, which we then maintained as an outbred colony):

http://phenome.jax.org/pub-cgi/phenome/mpdcgi?rtn=docs/home
http://www.criver.com/research_models_and_services/research_models/mice_a_b.html

Question 4) Will every pup in a litter have a compromised immune system, or, will it only affect specific individuals as does inbred depression.

If you have an outcrossed litter A and compared their MHC (major histocompatibility complex, which is the first line of defense and what recognizes invaders as friend, neutral, or foe) with a highly inbred litter B, litter A will have a broader complement in which to recognize foreign pathogens and litter B would be more susceptible to disease from a novel pathogen. Both litter A and B would probably get infected, but litter B would be more likely for the infection to progress to disease. That will be true of all the litter to some degree. I would suspect that whether or not it causes a problem depends mostly on the environment. 

As an example of the role of the MHC on populations, take small pox in humans. Europeans were around it all the time and while it wasn't a picnic to the Europeans, it was incredibly devastating when brought over to the Americas to the natives, who likely had no recognition of the small pox virus in their MHC. 

Question 5) Since ibred depression only affects specific induviduals would they likely be the ones that display a compromised immune system.

Well, it affects that which you can see. Until you map their genome, you just don't know. Even ones that look phenotypically normal will still have a reduced complement of what their MHC can recognize than an outcrossed animal, so novel pathogens could be potentially very problematic.

Question 6) Is it probably that this depressed immune system is part of the reason specific pups actually have inbred depression which result in weake, smaller, lethargic pups.

Not necessarily, but I doubt it helps. There are many many factors which can contribute or cause to small, weak pups. Perhaps they did not get as much nutrients and blood supply in utero. Perhaps they had major chromosomal abnormalities or lethal conditions not necessarily related to inbreeding. Between 50 and 60% of the pregnancies in humans likely fail before the woman even realizes she is pregnant due to chromosomal abnormalities. This has to do with a lot of mechanisms, some that we don't understand, including exposure to teratogenic chemicals, the age of the oocytes, and so on. Not just inbreeding.

On terms of the immune system, if they had a smaller genetic complement on their major histocompatability complex, it *may* only be an issue with novel pathogens. Or you have something like SCID horses (especially common in Arabian foals), dogs (Jack Russell terriers), cats (often called fading kitten syndrome), or humans (the "bubble boy" syndrome) which is a genetic condition where the animal has no T or B lymphocytes. They appear normal at birth and through lactation, but become sick and die once the antibodies in the colostrum wane. Or you can have an acquired immune deficiency like HIV in humans or FIV in cats or SIV in non-human primates. 



Don Turnipseed said:


> Maren, as far as the parvo, I don't treat them. I was owed a pup by another breeder. I put the pup in with a litter of mine of the same age. Ten days later she was in a bad way. I took her to the vet. Two tests said she was positive for parvo. I went home and brought one of my pups back to the vet. He was running around and playing. He tested positive for parvo. Since they are so inbred and since I had probably had 100 pups with it with no losses , the vet suggest that I call UC Davis which I did. I explained everthing to them and, they said so what, they are more immune than others.


How old was the pup you received and how old was the pup of yours that tested positive? Were either of them previously vaccinated for parvo? There could be a couple scenarios. The new pup had it and two tests probably have a pretty good positive predictive value of that being so. Your original pup:

-tested positive, but didn't actually have the virus (not unusual, depending on the specificity of the tests)
-had the virus, but didn't have a high enough virus load to cause disease
-had the virus, but was still protected by mom's antibodies (they wane over the course of up to 20 weeks of age, it's really hard to say when)

I enjoy these kinds of scenarios, gets me thinking.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



> Let's cut to the chase Maren, I inbreed tightly to get dogs that produce in the neighborhood of 80% viable dogs. What I consider viable. Bringing population genetics, and scientific therory is not going to change the fact that if things go astray, my twenty dogs are the ones that will be the losers. Science cannot say within so many generation squat will happen because they don't know. Why, they won't even acknowledge that it takes 9 generations to clear the inbred depression from a line of inbred dogs because they know nothing about it. Let's assume for a minute that my next generation of dogs, the 12th, loses their total immune system. It will affect my 20 dogs. No one elses. This is like the Henny Penny syndrome, "The sky is falling in, the sky is falling in". There are no sky's falling in. My dogs may cease to exist but the 1000's of other airedales will continue. If my dogs have been bred to opthers along the way, it is beneficial to the breed and all the inbreeding is brought back to a status quo any way. Most of what you are carrying on about is what...."soft science"? Most of it is conjecture based on studies of mice. If it was hard science, you would have been aware that it is takes approximately 9 generations to rid a line of inbred depression. Your professors would have been aware of it. Don't get me wrong, I think science is necessary,but, I was young and more gullible once myself. Then I got old enough to realise there is a lot more half truths than whole truths in the world. Just depends on what someone is out to prove.


Soft science? Do you actually know what soft science is? Political science, history, non-experimental psychology, and other social sciences are soft science. I can tell you from 8 years of post high school education in training as both a biologist and a veterinary doctor that doing field work observing wild populations or lab work with real animals is NOT soft science. [-X

Go ahead and try to get your 9 inbreeding generations phenomenon in a well-known, peer-reviewed scientific journal. Unfortunately, that's not possible by getting a couple of breeders together over drinks and offering their opinions. That's called anectodotal evidence at best. "In my experience" is not evidence based science or medicine. And your "awww, you're young and gullible" comments don't really augment your argument, sorry. I am also well aware that not everything falls neatly within science. I also have a bachelors in religious studies after all. O 

Incidentally, there is indeed literature on immunity and inbreeding, and not just in lab mice. Here's a quick PubMed search (the Major Histocompatibility Complex or MHC is what I was talking about is used in recognizing pathogens and that's what declines in inbreeding):

Proc Biol Sci. 2003 Oct 22;270(1529):2151-7. 
*Inbreeding depresses immune response in song sparrows (Melospiza melodia): direct and inter-generational effects.*

Reid JM, Arcese P, Keller LF.
Centre for Applied Conservation Research, Forest Sciences, 2424 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 1Z4, Canada. [email protected]
A thorough knowledge of relationships between host genotype and immunity to parasitic infection is required to understand parasite-mediated mechanisms of genetic and population change. It has been suggested that immunity may decline with inbreeding. However, the relationship between inbreeding level and a host's response to a novel immune challenge has not been investigated in a natural population. We used the pedigreed population of song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) inhabiting Mandarte Island, Canada, to test the hypothesis that a sparrow's cell-mediated immune response (CMI) to an experimental challenge would decline with individual or parental inbreeding. *CMI in 6-day-old chicks declined significantly with their mother's coefficient of inbreeding, demonstrating an inter-generational effect of maternal inbreeding on offspring immunity*. In fledged juveniles and adult sparrows, CMI declined markedly with an individual's own coefficient of inbreeding, but not its mother's. This relationship was consistent across seasons, and was not attributable solely to heterosis in offspring of immigrant breeders. *CMI also declined with age and increased with body condition in adult sparrows, but inbreeding explained 37% of the total variation. We emphasize the implications of this dramatic inbreeding depression in cell-mediated immunity for theories of parasite-mediated evolution and the susceptibility of small, inbred populations.*
Evolution. 2000 Dec;54(6):2145-51.
*Major histocompatibility complex variation in the Arabian oryx.*

Hedrick PW, Parker KM, Gutiérrez-Espeleta GA, Rattink A, Lievers K.
Department of Biology, Arizona State University, Tempe 95287, USA. [email protected]
In the 1960s, the Arabian oryx was one of the most endangered species in the world, extinct in the wild and surviving in only a few captive herds. The present day population of over 2000 descends from a small number of founders and may have restricted genetic variation for important adaptive genes. We have examined the amount of genetic variation for a class II gene in the *major histocompatibility complex thought to be the most important genetic basis for pathogen resistance in vertebrates*. We found three very divergent alleles, which on average, differed by 24 nucleotides and 15 amino acids in the 236-bp fragment we examined. Using single-strand conformation polymorphism, we found that in a sample of 57 animals, the alleles were in Hardy-Weinberg proportions, although one allele was found only in four heterozygous individuals. The average heterozygosity for the 22 amino acid positions involved in antigen binding was 0.165, three times as high as that for the 56 amino acids not involved with antigen binding. *Because the three alleles have such divergent sequences, it is likely that they may recognize peptides from quite different pathogens. As a result, maintenance of these variants should be considered as a goal in the captive breeding program of the Arabian oryx*.


Anyways Don, I give examples of lab animals and that's too controlled for you. I give examples from out "in the wild" in the natural world and that's not good enough either. Hell, I give examples of cloning a working dog and its "offspring" still not being 100% up to snuff and that still won't work. So as I believe we're at an impasse.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Kristen Cabe said:


> I've somehow missed this thread since last week, so forgive me for responding to something that was said a couple of days ago and buried in page 2, but I'd like to know why don't more vets use a recombinant rabies vaccine? From what I've read, they work just as well and there is no need for adjuvants (a plus because adjuvants are one of the things that lead to an increased risk of reactions and cancers, correct?), yet there is still no risk of the animal contracting the disease from the recombinant vaccine.
> 
> On a slightly different note,_ I've_ followed Dr. Dodds' protocol since I got my first dog 6 years ago. She has not received any vax other than rabies since she was just over a year old. I had the vet do a titer test last year, and she still had a strong response. I don't remember the brand name(s) of the vaccines that she received (probably Ft. Dodge when she was at the shelter), but I administered her last puppy shot and her final 'booster' with whatever 5-way brand Tractor Supply Co. carried at the time (now it's Spectra, but I don't know what it was 5 years ago).
> 
> It's only been recently that I learned about adjuvants and such, and from here on out, I plan on using only non-adjvanted, high titer shots for my pups, more specifically Progard, by Intervet. Maren, thoughts?


Yeah, the adjuvants seem to be a big issue, I agree. That's where you are getting the sarcomas at the injection sites for cats and autoimmune hemolytic anemia for dogs (probably cats too). Recombinant and DNA vaccines are mostly still in development so far in humans. I saw someone on VIN post that adjuvants are "sooooo last century." :lol: So hopefully we'll be seeing more. MLV are good for getting a strong immune system response, but they can also be too strong, like what happened to Fawkes last summer with his DHPP. So darned if you do, darned if you don't. #-o

Anyways, I'm just giving the 3 year rabies to my guys and girl and checking their distemper parvo titers. It's cool because they can do them in house at the teaching hospital and it's not too unreasonably priced (about $25 for each).

The problem is for Lily the therapy dog, they want additional vaccines, especially the lepto which is zoonotic and endemic to the area. I'm surprised no one's thrown a hissy fit about salmonella and her eating a raw diet. Yet. I'm rather worried about MRSA staph infections myself, but anywho.



> *Edit:* Since you say you plan on becoming a homeopathic vet, what are your opinions of nosodes? You can PM me if you would rather.


Homeopathy is something I'm not really swayed by myself. I don't mind using a bit of Bach's Rescue Remedy, but that's about as far as I go. Holistic? Yes. Homeopathy and flower and crystal essences and all that? Eh, not so much. :wink: 

But yes, nosodes. I personally don't think I'd mess with nosodes with rabies. Rabies is just too much of a zoonotic risk and a scary, scary one at that so I'd want it done the tried and true way. I didn't necessarily feel that way until I saw a video of a little kid from Thailand dying of rabies. * It takes a strong stomach to watch it, so* *view discretion is advised*:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dScdr8Dly4g


----------



## Kristen Cabe

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I wasn't referring to nosodes for rabies. I should have clarified better, since that's what the beginning of my post was about. I was talking about for parvo & distemper.


----------



## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Quote: Well, Don, I still haven't really seen the cloned sniffer dog issue addressed. This dog was considered the best of the best in a working situation

Cloning has nothing to do with breeding. Training is the biggest factor in this case. DUHHHHHHH.   They couldn't recreate the training.

One of the things that I found out beautiful girl is this, the science of genetics means **** all when it comes to breeding. It just doesn't apply. As far as herp people they are trying to get pretty colors.......kind of like show people. If genetisists really knew **** all about anything, they would be breeding something and doing well.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Maren said;



> Anyways Don, I give examples of lab animals and that's too controlled for you. I give examples from out "in the wild" in the natural world and that's not good enough either. Hell, I give examples of cloning a working dog and its "offspring" still not being 100% up to snuff and that still won't work. So as I believe we're at an impasse.


Maren, realistically speaking, we were at somewhat of an impasse before we started this discourse. Maybe you expected, knowing my stand on inbreeding, I was going to say, "Maren, I totally aggree with everything you said." That would lead to a real interesting discussion wouldn't it. I have to tell you, I have f9ormed some varied opinions from this discussion. I have even learned something about killed viruse versus MLV. I always learns something form a good discussion, just have to separarate the wheat from the chaffe.

It is, and has been common knowledge for eons, that inbreeding affects the immune system. Everyone that inbreeds knoiws it and I am not refuting that fact. Everyone that has inbred enough generations of dogs know he has to get past the 9th generation. Bull dogs have been inbred forever. It was a bull dog breeder that told me you see the same problem in butch female bulldogs. They are crap producers but it is those bulldogs that win in conformation. I looked forward to seeing, in more detail, how it affect the immune system. But, I want to know which parts are pertinent to me as a breeder. Population genetics and bottlenecks have little interest for me because it does not have any relevance to todays dogs and the very controlled society they live in. I am glad we crossed one threshold concerning "novel pathogens". Seems to me they have been respocible for wiping out whole civilizations pretty much even if they were not inbred. Even having a good MHC, as with the native americans, is no guarantee is it? Out of curiosity, what constitutes a lower MHC in an inbred dog as opposed to an outbred dog? I suppose it will vary from the most minute figure that would make little or no difference to a devastating difference. What was the normal difference in mice? After how many generations? 

Maren said;


> If you have an outcrossed litter A and compared their MHC (major histocompatibility complex, which is the first line of defense and what recognizes invaders as friend, neutral, or foe) with a highly inbred litter B, litter A will have a broader complement in which to recognize foreign pathogens and litter B would be more susceptible to disease from a novel pathogen. Both litter A and B would probably get infected, but litter B would be more likely for the infection to progress to disease. That will be true of all the litter to some degree. I would suspect that whether or not it causes a problem depends mostly on the environment.


Maren, what if the parents of outcrossed litter A were used as the foundation stock for inbred line B? Or, what if sibs from the outcrossed litter A formed the foundation stock for inbred litter B?


----------



## Jeff Oehlsen

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I love this shit. :grin: :grin: :grin:


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

By the way, cloning, the products of cloning have nothing to do with breeding. I know squat about sniffing dogs so I did not reply. I am pretty sure though, that even identicle twins do not have an identicle genetic makeup.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> Homeopathy is something I'm not really swayed by myself. I don't mind using a bit of Bach's Rescue Remedy, but that's about as far as I go. Holistic? Yes. Homeopathy and flower and crystal essences and all that? Eh, not so much. :wink:


This is a terminology problem that pops up constantly. 

And yes, for me, holistic is hard to argue with and homeopathic is WAY over in the "we'll see" category. :lol:


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> ... I have to tell you, I have formed some varied opinions from this discussion. I have even learned something about killed viruse versus MLV. I always learns something form a good discussion, just have to separarate the wheat from the chaffe....


Me too. From both of you. Putting this stuff into detailed posts like this is great.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

What's up with being a holistic vet Maren. I thought you had your sight set on research.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Maren said;

Question 1) Can dogs develope a compromised immune system that have never been inbred?

Maren said;


> Yes, though whether or not they have *ever* been inbred is a matter of degrees as most dog breeds were at some point likely to have been to establish type.


Are you saying that all pedigreed dogs, since they were inbred heavily to develope the breed, already have a compromised immune system if the MHC is compared to a mutt?


----------



## tracey schneider

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Wow you guys need to rename this thread.......Ive been ignoring the "puppy imprinting" thread since the first two pages........but this is a really interesting read.

I gotta say, Im partial to Don..........and Don your really holding your own =D> 

For one night this is all way too much to take in ......started fading by page 6........however

Maren you make some good points...........esp early on as I dont know enough about the immunity/ cell theory.....would like more on that please  

However you lost me completely when you brought up the florida panthers and other natural societies. these societies CAN NOT be compared to dog breeding in that there is nothing selective about them. I hope that wasnt what you were implying and Ill assume you werent. I also have to wonder how "selective" the mouse thing is.......Im having a hard time believing it is as selective as a GOOD dog breeder would be.......can you give more info other than aggression and size.

t


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Thanks Tracey. I think inbreeding has gotten a bad rap for years and feel that people should be exposed to both sides because it scares people today but some of the best dogs I have ever seen were inbred.

Maren, I put this together for you so you could see why inbreeding has been around for so long. Bulldogs and hounds have been inbred for so long they should have ceased to exist if it were that detrimental to the breed. You had mentioned that it depended on what the interpretation of "better" was in regards to inbred being better. Most of the dogs have a COI(which I consider a useless number) of close to 30% and some are slightly over 40%.
Every one of the pups was randomly picked, different crosses, all out of the same lines., over a period of multiple years. This does not take into account the 2007 Airedale Field Nationals in Oh, obedience titles, UD titles or all the dogs used just for hunting. Basically why you do it is to produce consistency....or you can just produce pups."

JIm Beam...HC Winchester/HC Blaze









Jaki....HC Titan/HC Indian Maid









HC Curtis(8mo old)...HC Hunter/HC Bailey(Went on to be an assistance dog for the blind"









HC Winchester...HC Reminton









HC Hunter...HC Titan...HC Geronimo









Buck...HC Winchester/HC Bailey









Buck...HC Winchester/HC Bailey









Dino Cert. Therapy dog...HC Geronimo/HC Bailey(Mother to son)









Jinjar Cert Therapy dog...HC Titan/HC Indian Maid









HC Odin(right) 2007 National Master Fur dog HC Titan/HC Bailey. Three other HC dogs took fur titles in 2007 accounting for almost half the fur titles.


----------



## Anne Vaini

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

I gotta say this thread is fascinating. Carry on... :lol:


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Anne, since this is about puppy imprinting, I should point out that none of these dogs or any dogs I have have ever been handled before they are 4 weeks old. They are born and raised outside by both parents and usually an auntie or two. I only check them out when they are up and walking.
Normally I don't spend all day at the computer but it was just shy of 115 degrees today and I am not going out and work.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Anne Vaini said:


> I gotta say this thread is fascinating. Carry on... :lol:


It IS fascinating.

Nice that in a forum like this one we can present anecdotal and personal evidence, too.*

Watching a "match" between lab science and on-the-ground results between people who know what they're talking about is something that not everyone gets to experience on their friendly neighborhood forum. * 


*
*and great photo-essays!


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Anne, since this is about puppy imprinting, I should point out that none of these dogs or any dogs I have have ever been handled before they are 4 weeks old. They are born and raised outside by both parents and usually an auntie or two. I only check them out when they are up and walking.


Do you think that the results would have been better/worse/similar with ENS? (I went back to read the post about ENS possibly masking the dog's true nature ("Conditioning masks what is in the dog. Several have said they wouldn't buy a dog that wasn't yadda yadda. The yadda yadda covers up the dogs true nature."). If that wasn't a factor, then would ENS be something that you would do?

Or are you pretty much indifferent about it, period?


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Connie Sutherland said:


> Do you think that the results would have been better/worse/similar with ENS? (I went back to read the post about ENS possibly masking the dog's true nature ("Conditioning masks what is in the dog. Several have said they wouldn't buy a dog that wasn't yadda yadda. The yadda yadda covers up the dogs true nature."). If that wasn't a factor, then would ENS be something that you would do?
> 
> Or are you pretty much indifferent about it, period?


ENS??? I am assuming it is a type of conditioning or exposing the dog to different environments? The only reasons I don't handle them is so I can judge what the dog is made of. I do it when they are starting to come out because I don't want to much exposure to their new environment. I also want them in with the older dogs so I can see how the older dogs are with them and it socializes the pups by being raised with big dogs. White Fang may have been the only dog book I have ever read Connie but I know what I want to see in a dog. Some of the stupid stuff that made sense at the time has backfired big time over the years. I used to have big pits dug in the kennel doors so the adults could get in and out but the pups were contained. I would judge their independence and smarts by which navigated the hole and over the rocks and logs to freedom. I ended up with a yard full of pack bonded dogs I couldn't catch. What a nightmare. Since I normally pick the dogs according to what people want to do with them, I have to see their natural self. I would not change now because anything, including handling alters what I see. I also do it this way because I want them to know they are dogs and I want them to act like dogs otherwise, it makes it harder to work with IMHO. How do you know for sure what to do with a dog that has been trated like a kid all his life. He doesn't know how to act like a dog.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> ENS??? I am assuming it is a type of conditioning or exposing the dog to different environments?


That's what other people called early neurological stimulation early in the thread. 

It was a new nickname to me. Now here I go and use it to sound cool and it backfires. :lol:


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Some of the stupid stuff that made sense at the time has backfired big time over the years. I used to have big pits dug in the kennel doors so the adults could get in and out but the pups were contained. I would judge their independence and smarts by which navigated the hole and over the rocks and logs to freedom. I ended up with a yard full of pack bonded dogs I couldn't catch. What a nightmare.....


OK, _that_ is an _excellent_ description. :lol:


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

They are not handled at all until four weeks or so, then?


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Then I go out and see who comes over to me and stays. They basically are the ones I watch for trained venues because of the confidence and dependence. The ones that come up and look me over and go exploring are looking for something they would rather do make the best fur dogs because of the independence. The ones that wait until they see if I eat the first ones are the toughest to figure because they may just be showing a degree of caution which isn't all that bad if they come right away. The ones that go the other way are the ones that need handling and conditioning for pets. The rest of them don't need that much interaction if they are placed quickly. Now, I have created another Catch 22. It seems no matter what you do, you make obstacles as fast as you eliminate them. Now that I have crosses where all the pups come to me, I know there are still some "better" than the rest even if the difference is minor. This is not simplified by the fact that they are almost carbon copies of each other, I don't even know which one I am looking at one moment to the next. I may have to see if I can get tiny collars in 12 colors or something. At best, there will be two distinct groups of pups in a litter. I used to note a white blaze on the chest or a white toe but now, if there is a bvalze, most of them have it The different colored collars will solve individual ID but I am not sure how to control 12 pups when they all run after me. This part was much simple when there were not so many pups in a litter. 

It is going to be a real learning experience with the litter that is due. Tashi is a 10th generation dog. Titan is a 7th gen dog and he is also her grandfather. He throws the most phenotypical pups of all the males and Tashi and Titan are very close in appearance. I am only doing this cross because I have two people interested in possibly showing and these two are the ones I would put my money on . I haven't had any of the dogs in conformation yet and that would cause a real stir with the breed club. Actually, that is the only reason I would consider it and both are tough dogs but the smallest in the yard. Even being the smallest, Titan is close to 20 lbs over what they want but I think I will see some smaller in the cross.It is interesting to me because the tighter I go, they are moving in reverse. For years they got bigger. Since the line was started with two fifty conformation dogs, the continual tightening has multiplied the conformation lines in the back to the point I think it is come back to haunt me. I think she will whelp tonight or early tomorrow.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Well, having just read this last post, I think that a few people will be waiting for a post four weeks or so from now about this litter. :lol:


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Maren, I hope you are not quitting the thread at this point. Because of the previous discussion, and the fact that inbreeding does infact compromise the immune system, I have some questions that are pertinent to those that do inbreed. More specific in nature as to "how".
Maybe one clarification at a time will simplife this because I am sure other thoughts will come up as we proceed. A good place to start is with this question I previously asked. There are several points that would be beneficial from a breeding standpoint.



> Maren said;
> 
> Quote:
> If you have an outcrossed litter A and compared their MHC (major histocompatibility complex, which is the first line of defense and what recognizes invaders as friend, neutral, or foe) with a highly inbred litter B, litter A will have a broader complement in which to recognize foreign pathogens and litter B would be more susceptible to disease from a novel pathogen. Both litter A and B would probably get infected, but litter B would be more likely for the infection to progress to disease. That will be true of all the litter to some degree. I would suspect that whether or not it causes a problem depends mostly on the environment.
> 
> Maren, what if the parents of outcrossed litter A were used as the foundation stock for inbred line B? Or, what if sibs from the outcrossed litter A formed the foundation stock for inbred litter B?


Obviously, the immunities and MHC are passed from the sire and dam. Litter A should possess their immunities. If siblings from litter A are bred together, won't the offspring also carry the same immunities and MHC? I am asking because I am trying to determine if all dogs concerned have basically been from the same enviromnent and parentage, they should pretty much possess the same immunities and MHC. Example: My environment is approximately 1 1/2 to 2 acres with loose dogs. Since they are loose, the whole area is contaminated with parvo. Heavy bleaching normally keeps things in check and within tolerable levels. Pups that get it have the runs, and all the classic signs and they are sick but normally survive. Some, even though exposed to the sick ones, show little to no effect. While inbreeding compromises the immune system and makes it weaker, can exposure to specific environments make that MHC stronger, rather than weaker to certain viruses than the MHC of a dog that is not inbred? Of a healthy outcrossed dog that has not been exposed to Parvo? After a number of generations, will these dogs develope a total immunity to parvo?


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Maren, I hope you are not quitting the thread at this point.


Haha, no, my husband's birthday was yesterday. It would be rather cruel of me to be pottering about on the computer instead of taking the dogs out for a nice bike ride and spending time with me. No worries, I'll be combing through the posts again, seems like I missed a question from Daryl! Be with you all shortly...


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Daryl Ehret said:


> When you're _selectively_ linebreeding, and suppose you select for 10 or 20 phenotypical traits to create homozygous alleles, the recombination of _the remaining yet unseen thousands genotypes that are not physically or easily expressed in appearance are in all probability inversely proportionately pulling away from a state of homozygosity._ What we see in phenotype can be such a small portion of genetic makeup. Inbreeding a 2-2 is a naturally 12.5% probable like-to-like genotype if it were simply random, but 100% for what you are selecting for (without compromise), and a lesser chance for what you are _not selecting for_, because of either ambivalence or unawareness.


That'd be hard to say, Daryl. A priori, the percentages sound good, but they don't come out that cleanly in practice, unfortunately. You'd have to some extensive mapping of the various markers to really find that out. The reason for this is because of haplotypes, or genes that have a tendency to be passed on together, either because they are on the same chromosome and their loci are in close proximity or because of other reasons. 

In addition, you sometimes (not all the time) need multiple genes for something to really click on and off and for proteins to be up and down regulated and so on. Like most cancers need 5 to 8 genes to go wrong in the pathway before the progression of cancer can really take off. In pedigree research, you can also get incomplete penetrance and codominance and all sorts of other things that don't make it always super clear cut. Sooooo...it may be more, it may be less. This is why I actually rather dislike a lot of genetics and molecular biology. :razz::razz::razz::razz:


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Are haplotypes predictable even if they are not haplotypes because they are on the same chromosome ("other reasons")?


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Jeff Oehlsen said:


> Quote: Well, Don, I still haven't really seen the cloned sniffer dog issue addressed. This dog was considered the best of the best in a working situation
> 
> Cloning has nothing to do with breeding. Training is the biggest factor in this case. DUHHHHHHH.   They couldn't recreate the training.
> 
> One of the things that I found out beautiful girl is this, the science of genetics means **** all when it comes to breeding. It just doesn't apply. As far as herp people they are trying to get pretty colors.......kind of like show people. If genetisists really knew **** all about anything, they would be breeding something and doing well.


Cloning has everything to do with breeding. I suspect you have very little if any knowledge of what precisely cloning is, nor any of the rest of what I've been saying. I've said it before, so I'll say it again in small words so maybe you'll understand them this time, big boy: 

-the point of inbreeding is to make a litter of puppies, kittens, baby mice, whatever as genetically identical as possible in the same way that identical twins are identical
-if you clone an animal (or human), the clone is genetically identical to the donor in the same way identical twins are genetically identical
-when they cloned their top sniffer dog, close, but not all, the pups were up to snuff in a working situation. They eventually hope for up to 90% success, but not 100%
-ergo, even clones or identical twins, which are even more identically similar than even highly inbred dogs, you're not guaranteed them to be 100% successful

Jeff, it's clear that you like responding with derision and defensiveness when you don't understand something. It's okay to admit it. 

MOD NOTE:

I think that many forum members are following this thread. THANK YOU to the 99% who keep it on the grown-up level.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Connie Sutherland said:


> Are haplotypes predictable even if they are not haplotypes because they are on the same chromosome ("other reasons")?


As far as I know, they are somewhat predictable, but not always. There are various ways and metrics they can plot them using satellite markers (basically a marker that will track a sequence of code in how it is passed on). Interestingly, our genomics professor has worked on a couple different dog projects of this nature, like Fanconi syndrome in Basenjis. He didn't really share too much of the results though, but that's basically how you test for markers for various genetic diseases, like Fanconi in Basenjis, von Willebrand in Dobermans and poodles, and so on.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Are you saying that all pedigreed dogs, since they were inbred heavily to develope the breed, already have a compromised immune system if the MHC is compared to a mutt?


Yes, that's what most people call "hybrid vigor," even though they are not technically hybrids since they are the same species. The "designer hybrid" label drives me nuts! :evil: Many people think the hybrid vigor comes from less deleterious recessives coming through with an outcross of two very unrelated members of the same breed or of two different breeds comes from. That's true to an extent, but if you've got a lab crossed with a mini poodle to make a labradoodle *shudders* and mom has crappy genes for luxating patella and dad has crappy genes for hip dysplasia, that doesn't necessarily make their offspring any better either in terms of those traits. It may, but it may make the offspring have both. Ooops...on the other hand, the MHC will likely be more varied than either of the purebreds, especially if the sire and dam were fairly heavily inbred.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



tracey delin said:


> Maren you make some good points...........esp early on as I dont know enough about the immunity/ cell theory.....would like more on that please
> 
> However you lost me completely when you brought up the florida panthers and other natural societies. these societies CAN NOT be compared to dog breeding in that there is nothing selective about them. I hope that wasnt what you were implying and Ill assume you werent. I also have to wonder how "selective" the mouse thing is.......Im having a hard time believing it is as selective as a GOOD dog breeder would be.......can you give more info other than aggression and size.
> 
> t


I can't help too awful much more than what I've said enough. If you think your head is spinning now... :-o

There's nothing selective about natural selection? Erm, that was kind of Don's point. There is nothing more potent than natural selection. Do or die. We live in a very privileged society where we can sit on ivory towers and discuss this. Not too long in our distant past, this was not the case. When cholera and smallpox ran rampant in this country, some people didn't even name their kids until they were past a certain age with the high probability that they would die from it. Whether its artificial or natural selection makes little difference. The more population bottlenecks that you put a population through, the less adaptable they become and the more susceptible the population could be to extinction. 

Btw, when I say a novel pathogen in reference to the MHC, it doesn't necessarily mean a totally new organism. It can simply mean a different strain than what the population is used to. Many pathogens are perpetually evolving, which is why there are new flu vaccines every year trying to keep up.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> Yes, that's what most people call "hybrid vigor," even though they are not technically hybrids since they are the same species. ....


What DO you call the advantage to the mutt of more immune systems in the family tree?


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Don Turnipseed said:


> Thanks Tracey. I think inbreeding has gotten a bad rap for years and feel that people should be exposed to both sides because it scares people today but some of the best dogs I have ever seen were inbred.
> 
> Maren, I put this together for you so you could see why inbreeding has been around for so long. Bulldogs and hounds have been inbred for so long they should have ceased to exist if it were that detrimental to the breed. You had mentioned that it depended on what the interpretation of "better" was in regards to inbred being better. Most of the dogs have a COI(which I consider a useless number) of close to 30% and some are slightly over 40%.
> Every one of the pups was randomly picked, different crosses, all out of the same lines., over a period of multiple years. This does not take into account the 2007 Airedale Field Nationals in Oh, obedience titles, UD titles or all the dogs used just for hunting. Basically why you do it is to produce consistency....or you can just produce pups."


Well, English bulldogs might as well cease to exist with all their many, many health problems and the pit bull dogs might if people don't get their act together. And I've long acknowledged that most dog breeds came to be through at least some amount of inbreeding. I understand that. That's not the issue. It's the _continual_ process of making the population genetically more and more alike that I warn is not so beneficial. Jeff asked why aren't there more geneticists out there who are breeders. Good question. They're probably off stuck in a lab somewhere not allowed to move from their bench top. :roll: They probably can't hardly have time to do much dog sport at all, let alone the big responsibility of breeding. 

But *if* I was to breed, knowing what I know, I would probably select two animals with complementary traits (or similar, depending what I was looking for) and do all the genetic and health screening tests that I could. Do some careful pedigree analysis and trace it back as far as I could. Getting back to the puppy imprinting thing, I would do early neurological stimulation on them, certainly, plus a careful vaccination protocol after weighing risks and benefits, filtered water, and a wholesome, home prepared diet (organic when possible) with supplemented with a very high quality commercial diet and probiotics. I'd have the pups in the house and get to see lots of interesting things (kids, other pets, livestock, crates, agility equipment, etc). 

The reason that I would want a puppy either from a breeding of my own or someone else to have the early neuro stuff done is because I have a bit of a different purpose for my dogs, Don. They are not hunters that live in the dog yard. Malinois and shepherds in general are pretty owner/handler sensitive dogs. Probably a bit different flavor than your Airedales. As I want a house dog, I would wish them raised in a house, not a kennel or dog yard. Some Mals can do okay in a kennel or backyard situation if they are worked, exercised, and interacted frequently for several hours a day, but I don't think it would be a setup that would work for me. So the lack of early neuro stimulation may suit your purposes just fine, but it doesn't mesh with my particular needs. Sorry! :-D But if that suits the needs of your puppy buyers and you feel it works, that is certainly your prerogative. You have nice looking pups though, no doubt, and thanks for the pics.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Connie Sutherland said:


> What DO you call the advantage to the mutt of more immune systems in the family tree?


Not sure, outcross vigor? Hybrid vigor usually has been designated for mules and various crops. Any more questions, Connie, or can I go for the afternoon? :mrgreen::mrgreen::mrgreen: I'm about all typed out.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> Not sure, outcross vigor? Hybrid vigor usually has been designated for mules and various crops. Any more questions, Connie, or can I go for the afternoon? :mrgreen::mrgreen::mrgreen: I'm about all typed out.



Lemme check my notes ..... OK, you can take a break. :lol:


----------



## tracey schneider

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> There is nothing more potent than natural selection. Do or die.
> 
> Whether its artificial or natural selection makes little difference.


 
I have to disagree here. Are you mixing in the "general population pet home breeder" with "educated and determined to make better dogs breeders"? If we narrow the it down to just the latter there is NO comparison of a good breeder to natural selection. 

I absolutely agree with you that a haphazardly inbred dogs are going to be compromised........I would imagine everyone would agree with that and that in the "mutts" haphazard matings dont show the effects quite as pronounced.......because of the obvious.

In the wild as long as an animal can survive long enough to get bred it will be bred. It is not so cut and dry as a Do or Die. They can be compromised in a variety of ways and still "do" and "do" well enough to reproduce. THIS is what compromises these isolated natural societies so quickly and so prevalently.......which is not the equivalent or more selected than a GOOD breeder..... Although I respect your opinion, I have to disagree on this just from my basic study of the Florida Panther.

t


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



tracey delin said:


> In the wild as long as an animal can survive long enough to get bred it will be bred. It is not so cut and dry as a Do or Die. They can be compromised in a variety of ways and still "do" and "do" well enough to reproduce. THIS is what compromises these isolated natural societies so quickly and so prevalently......
> t


Meaning that lack of "outcross vigor" plays no part?


----------



## tracey schneider

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Not saying it doesnt play a part at all........not sure that even makes sense.......but is that part rooted in compromised selection........ or not?........I guess it all depends on what you believe..........does the lack of "outcross vigor" create problems in and of itself or is it created and rooted in compromised selection?

Personally Im somewhere in the middle as Id believe in tightly bred dogs outcrossed to other tightly bred dogs of balanced matching as opposed inbred breedings with absolutely NO outcrosses ever............and I dont think the latter is the norm.

t


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Figures I would be out in the dog yards when all the action is going on. 
No pups yet. I think the date I wrote down may have been when I first noticed he was trying to mount he ....which she put a stop to. She may not be do for a few more days. Here is the expectant couple.
Titan








Natasha


----------



## Connie Sutherland

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Got any pics of Titan's face, and Natasha standing up?

Just for future reference when those puppies are photograph-able.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> Well, English bulldogs might as well cease to exist with all their many, many health problems and the pit bull dogs might if people don't get their act together. And I've long acknowledged that most dog breeds came to be through at least some amount of inbreeding. I understand that. That's not the issue. It's the _continual_ process of making the population genetically more and more alike that I warn is not so beneficial. Jeff asked why aren't there more geneticists out there who are breeders. Good question. They're probably off stuck in a lab somewhere not allowed to move from their bench top. :roll: They probably can't hardly have time to do much dog sport at all, let alone the big responsibility of breeding.
> 
> But *if* I was to breed, knowing what I know, I would probably select two animals with complementary traits (or similar, depending what I was looking for) and do all the genetic and health screening tests that I could. Do some careful pedigree analysis and trace it back as far as I could. Getting back to the puppy imprinting thing, I would do early neurological stimulation on them, certainly, plus a careful vaccination protocol after weighing risks and benefits, filtered water, and a wholesome, home prepared diet (organic when possible) with supplemented with a very high quality commercial diet and probiotics. I'd have the pups in the house and get to see lots of interesting things (kids, other pets, livestock, crates, agility equipment, etc).
> 
> The reason that I would want a puppy either from a breeding of my own or someone else to have the early neuro stuff done is because I have a bit of a different purpose for my dogs, Don. They are not hunters that live in the dog yard. Malinois and shepherds in general are pretty owner/handler sensitive dogs. Probably a bit different flavor than your Airedales. As I want a house dog, I would wish them raised in a house, not a kennel or dog yard. Some Mals can do okay in a kennel or backyard situation if they are worked, exercised, and interacted frequently for several hours a day, but I don't think it would be a setup that would work for me. So the lack of early neuro stimulation may suit your purposes just fine, but it doesn't mesh with my particular needs. Sorry! :-D But if that suits the needs of your puppy buyers and you feel it works, that is certainly your prerogative. You have nice looking pups though, no doubt, and thanks for the pics.


Myself, I don't see why there would be a need to push it any farther than I have. I got the dogs I want in the tenth. I knew it when I saw them. I have spent the last 3 years putting together 3 sisters for each of the crosses( One of which is Goldie who I think is going to suck as a producer). Got the two males and these are the dog I was looking for and I am staying with(but I may dabble a taste). Here is a picture of Magnum, a 10th generation dog at 8 mo. He has it all. By the way, Natasha and Magnum are littermates.









I find part of your post amusing Maren. In the picture of Natasha in the previous post, you may have noticed she is in the house. LOL She is there only because I picked her up so she wouldn't have to go to rescue. The lady I sold her to was from Bulgaria and she died of TB. Her BF got her because he had a male they had planned on breeding but, he was murdered las Nov. She is in the house only till I could she how she was going to work in the yard with the older dogs. She went out and set them straight right off and has been an outside dog ever since. As far as you wanting a dog that has all the ENS and all the other magical treatment, that's great. You referred to my dogs as "hunting dogs" there fore they may not need all this extra mumbo jumbo. Do those dogs sitting in the classrooms look like hunting dogs. State certified not AKC stuff. They spend 3 days a week in schools(different schools) and there are several others. They were picked right out in the dog yards sitting right there with the "huntin dawgs". Solid dogs have the ability to roll with the flow....less than solid, yes, they need the mumbo jumbo because they don't roll with the flow so well. I think trainers refer to something similar as "confidence building"


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Connie Sutherland said:


> Got any pics of Titan's face, and Natasha standing up?
> 
> Just for future reference when those puppies are photograph-able.



Natasha








Titan


----------



## Michelle Reusser

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Great thread guys. I agree it needs a better suited name. I assumed it was about something else entirely. Glad I finally noticed how popular it was and looked. 

Don how long have you been breeding now? My hats off to you. I wish more people would breed in this manner or at least select their puppies for placement like you explained.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Two wives ago. Didn't even have to fight for the dogs. I think they were the reason. LOL


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Seriously Michelle, going on 20 years. The first 2/3's of that time was spent trying methods that could possibly work. I finally settled on the fact that the only way to see what a dog is made of is to leave it alone until it can show you. I started to realize I had seen this before. My grandads hounds whelped under the porch...or stoop. He never even looked at them once until they started coming out looking at the world. He went out and sat on the steps and picked up the first to come to him depending on the sex he wanted. He went into the house and called his friends and told them to come and pick whatever they wanted. He always had top hounds. See, the breeding was there. If the breeding is there, it is a matter of picking the one that is confident enough to do what it takes. If the breeding is in a litter, it used to be a buyer could pick the first dog to come to him because it wasn't customary to condition the pups. Now that this is common practice, the first pup to you may just be better conditioned. Solid dogs do just as well without constant handling, actually I think they do better.


----------



## Daryl Ehret

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> That'd be hard to say, Daryl. A priori, the percentages sound good, but they don't come out that cleanly in practice, unfortunately. You'd have to some extensive mapping of the various markers to really find that out. The reason for this is because of haplotypes, or genes that have a tendency to be passed on together, either because they are on the same chromosome and their loci are in close proximity or because of other reasons.
> 
> In addition, you sometimes (not all the time) need multiple genes for something to really click on and off and for proteins to be up and down regulated and so on. Like most cancers need 5 to 8 genes to go wrong in the pathway before the progression of cancer can really take off. In pedigree research, you can also get incomplete penetrance and codominance and all sorts of other things that don't make it always super clear cut. Sooooo...it may be more, it may be less. This is why I actually rather dislike a lot of genetics and molecular biology. :razz::razz::razz::razz:


I wondered as I was submitting that comment on those very things; linked traits, incomplete dominance and codominance, and how they would affect the overall heterosis of genes not selected for. I appreciate the thoughtful response to the idea I proposed, I was near certain you'd overlook or not consider them.

But wouldn't the same rules apply against possible detrimental effects anyway? What contributions from a prepotent parent are known to simultaneously carry adverse affects from genetically linked segments of DNA that are paired homogenously? Are there any examples in working breeds that illustrate this, at least that are conseqential features to working ability and desired temperament?


----------



## Michelle Reusser

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Don, I feel ya about fighting over the dogs. One relationship down over that and my new Bo just told me he hates my dogs, "they are crazy and not right in the head". I said thanks, they are perfect working line dogs, not your spoiled, fat ass lab, that sleeps on your bed when you leave the house. :-# Apparently dogs are suppossed to sit still and shut up. Who knew? 

The last one was the expert on everything and wanted my male so bad he could taste it. I said no more dog guys, but going totally in the other direction sucks too. At least the clueless one doesn't Natzify training and feeding time. Relaxed is good, I just wish he wasn't so "PET" person.


----------



## ann schnerre

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

truly a great thread and an interesting discussion. the only thing i have to add, FWIW, is that the best dog i've ever had (Tessa), i picked based simply on her confidence as an 8-wk old pup: she was first to come check things (me) out, and she wasn't going to let littermates get in her way once they caught up.

a dominant bitch til she met me, then she got to be"beta" bitch, but we had a BLAST. she was also the only dog i ever actually picked as a pup--the rest were rescue/shelter grown dogs, and Brix was picked by his breeder as suitable. and he was.


----------



## Jeff Oehlsen

Maren, I am not looking for the exact same dog, I am looking to get a bit better, so cloning has nothing to do with breeding. Nice try though, I like the small words bit, I am really rusty on all my genetic terminology, as I still think it is bullshit. Kinda like how dogs came from wolves. I would love to see someone get a mastiff from a wolf. Don't see it happening.

The big reason for me to inbreed is not just to produce the super dog, it is to get rid of unwanted genetic BS that continues to crop up, and to identify whether or not I want to use that dog as a stud.

As far as your little cloning experiment, it really is a simple answer. Genetics plays a role in what a dog becomes, but so does environment. Unless you could duplicate the super sniffers life and training exactly, you are bound to get different results. I have definately done a better job of training one dog over the next for whatever the reason, which are greatly varied as well.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

One of my favorites is" Genetics determines what a dog "can" be but, Environment determines what it "will" be.


----------



## Howard Gaines III

Don Turnipseed said:


> One of my favorites is" Genetics determines what a dog "can" be but, Environment determines what it "will" be.


Tell me more!:-$


----------



## Don Turnipseed

Jeff has touched upon something that has not been mentioned. There was a time when serious breeders inbred the dogs for a few generations just to see what hidden recessive there were. Today, most breeders don't have a clue what baggage their dogs are carrying around and passing to every dog bred to it. So what if a few things pop up in a litter occassionally. This is the reason I am more comfortable breeding dogs I know inside and out that to take a chance outcrossing regardless how good the dog appears to be. They all have baggage, but it would be noice to at least have an idea of what that baggage is and if it can be dealt with.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

Howard Gaines III said:


> Tell me more!:-$


Uh...Uh..."Love is not blind, it see's more,not less
But, because it see's more
It is willing to see less."

It was the only thing I could think of.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*

Originally Posted by Don Turnipseed 
Are you saying that all pedigreed dogs, since they were inbred heavily to develope the breed, already have a compromised immune system if the MHC is compared to a mutt?




Maren Bell Jones said:


> Yes, that's what most people call "hybrid vigor," even though they are not technically hybrids since they are the same species. The "designer hybrid" label drives me nuts! :evil: Many people think the hybrid vigor comes from less deleterious recessives coming through with an outcross of two very unrelated members of the same breed or of two different breeds comes from. That's true to an extent, but if you've got a lab crossed with a mini poodle to make a labradoodle *shudders* and mom has crappy genes for luxating patella and dad has crappy genes for hip dysplasia, that doesn't necessarily make their offspring any better either in terms of those traits. It may, but it may make the offspring have both. Ooops...on the other hand, the MHC will likely be more varied than either of the purebreds, especially if the sire and dam were fairly heavily inbred.



I have read and re read this post Maren. I can't even come close to making sense out of it. While I do agree, it is not "hybrid vigor" I simply refer to it as vigor. The ultimate F1 cross with in a breed is "normally" produced by a tightly bred line crossed to a complementary, but, unrelated line. After the first cross, all future litter start progressively reverting back the the norm. No one in his right mind would take inbred lines and cross to dogs with luxating anything. The F1 litter, by in large, produces the super dogs and is generally the only time you may produce better dogs than the foundation dogs. Vigor, to myself and most breeders I know, are referring to the boost in energy, endurance and often size. The crossing refreshes the whole system of the offspring with new genes. If you cross a tightly bred dog to another that isn't withing the same breed, you won't see as much vigor because one side was not repressed. You will see much more vigor outbreeding and when two out bred lines are tight it can be striking. I bred one of my dogs to an extremely tight line of staghounds. The guy that had the staghound and the pups got almost all of them back because people couldn't handle them. His mistake, because he had to get rid of them, was letting pet people have them as house dogs. He had to give them to hog hunter and bear hunters to place them. Now these guys are trying to get him to do another cross because they are outdoing the hound on the bears and the hog hunter has been offered a grand a piece for the ones he got. These dogs had some vigor as I know it.

On another point in regards to cloning. You stated that inbreeding was done to create the same dog like cloning which does not recreate the dog 100%. No body inbreeding even considers he will recreate the same dog. The purpose for inbreeding is to lock in "certain valued traits" so the dogs are consistent in what you are breeding for. Maybe showbreeders are trying to reproduce the same dog but in breeding working dogs, the breeder is trying to produce a litter that is consistently better than can be done by other methods.


----------



## Ian Forbes

*Re: Puppy Imprinting*



Maren Bell Jones said:


> Well, English bulldogs might as well cease to exist with all their many, many health problems


Just to add that many of the health problems of the English Bulldog are not caused by inbreeding per se, but rather the selection for conformation criteria which are directly opposed to that of a healthy canine.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

Don Turnipseed said:


> Jeff has touched upon something that has not been mentioned. There was a time when serious breeders inbred the dogs for a few generations just to see what hidden recessive there were. Today, most breeders don't have a clue what baggage their dogs are carrying around and passing to every dog bred to it. So what if a few things pop up in a litter occassionally. This is the reason I am more comfortable breeding dogs I know inside and out that to take a chance outcrossing regardless how good the dog appears to be. They all have baggage, but it would be noice to at least have an idea of what that baggage is and if it can be dealt with.


One fortunate thing is the development of markers for genetic conditions, which good breeders do use. Especially since the entire dog genome has been sequenced. I think that we'll see a lot more of that in the upcoming years so that you won't have to do the experimental breeding. The problem with using experimental crosses is that for some conditions, the bad trait doesn't show up until later in adulthood past the time when the dog's already been bred and the damage has been done. Plus there's still people who hide their head in the sand and refuse to test their breeding stock though in both show and working line stock. Ignorance won't make it go away! [-X


----------



## Don Turnipseed

People hide their heads in the sand by not "TESTING" their dogs in show!!!! I can't believe you said that. The show ring has been the downfall of every working breed it has touched. While you have all the technical terminology down pat, I think you should learn how much of it is really pertinent and actually applies to real life Maren. This all started with inbreeding causes supressed immune systems. Then you said most all pedigreed dogs were inbred therefore have somewhat of a depressed immune system. The we find that even a mutt can develope a suppressed immune system. Then it is more crucial to novel pathogens which will have a very adverse effect on anything not exposed to it, inbred or not. The inbred lions of Ngorongoro are dying from a blackfly plague. Sounds good to make your point but, tell me, blackflies are biting flies. Bloodsuckers. The important part you left out was how many other species of animals are also dying from blackflies. I don't believe they discriminate on who they are biting. If I recall, it isn't all that uncommon in Africa. I lost half a litter right here due to biting flies. Can't put anything toxic on the pups because mom will lick it off. I solved the problem by heavy misters around the whelping pens because they won't fly in it. But, I still lost 1/2 the litter before I found a suitable solution. Google blackflies and you will find that lions are one of many species that die because of blackflies.
In my mind, the approach is similar to the media's approach to the "tomato crisis" right now. Make a few comments in the papers and tv and a multi million dollar industry is in the toilet. They wouldn't dare tell people to wash the tomatos. There selling news.


----------



## Sam Trinh

she said "show and working line stock" -- referring to show people and working people -- not testing in show and testing in work.


----------



## Connie Sutherland

Maren Bell Jones said:


> there's still people who hide their head in the sand and refuse to test their breeding stock .... in both show and working line stock. ...





Don Turnipseed said:


> People hide their heads in the sand by not "TESTING" their dogs in show!!!! I can't believe you said that. The show ring has been the downfall of every working breed it has touched.



I didn't read it the way you did, Don.



p.s. Sam was posting while I was typing.


----------



## Don Turnipseed

Ok, after reading it several times I'll concede. I forget how many profess to have working stock that don't test them. Testing show stock "may" have clouded my judgement.


----------



## Maren Bell Jones

Yeah, I meant health testing for stuff like von Willebrand disease, which there are good genetic tests for. Not testing for working ability. Show folks get a bad rap for not testing for health stuff, but without naming names, I was pretty dismayed last spring when I was calling around and e-mailing Dutch shepherd and Malinois breeders about puppies and there were folks who still don't believe in testing hips and elbows, but go on and on about breeding better dogs. Do we really want the Malinois to go the way of the GSD in terms of hips? With its increase in popularity, the possibility exists. Ignoring or pretending genetic disease or diseases like hip dysplasia with both genetic and environmental components or whatever else doesn't exist doesn't help anyone. [-(


----------



## Don Turnipseed

That clears that up, thank you. I don't test for hips and elbos. I run the dogs in multiples. Dogs that can't keep up are gotten rid of. I have always been amused by hip tests, Dog has a good hipand a fair hip or is rated at fair at two years old and most people will rationalize that the dog is special and breed them anyway. What good does the test do? I had someone that wanted to breed to Titan. One necessary criteria that his hips be tested. I said he didn't need it because he moved way to easily. He rated good on both sides with no sign of artheritis or HD. He was 6 1/2 at the time, not two. He was also 7th generation and had most all of the dogs before him in the pot. I don't test for eyes, they run through the forrest at night and they don't run into trees or anything else after this many years, I figure they must be OK.


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## Maren Bell Jones

I haven't had radiology yet, but I believe the basic idea is if they haven't shown signs of CHD by around 2 years of age, they likely won't as adults. Old age osteoarthritis is a bit different though. No guarantees, but I'd still rather take my chances with parents (and grandparents and other relatives if possible) with good or excellent hips and passing elbows and keeping than lean than rolling a dice. 

CHD is a hard one because there's certainly both genetic and environmental factors. Load that pup up with tons of calories until he's a pudge ball and yeah, a good chance he'll get it, even with OFA Excellent parents. Von Willebrand is a different one as that's pretty much all genetic though. If someone gets a Doberman pup from parents who don't test for it, can't say I didn't warn ya... :-\"

Oh yeah, forgot to add...according to my bacteriology professor, washing tomatoes or spinach or whatever else doesn't help the salmonella or E. coli. He stated it comes from cow or chicken manure contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 or salmonella and the bacteria actually end up in the plant. I haven't personally investigated this myself, so I dunno. All I know is my own tomato plants are teasing me with their not yet red fruit. I should be over run with tomatoes in about two weeks!


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## Guest

Don Turnipseed said:


> That clears that up, thank you. I don't test for hips and elbos. I run the dogs in multiples. Dogs that can't keep up are gotten rid of. I have always been amused by hip tests, Dog has a good hipand a fair hip or is rated at fair at two years old and most people will rationalize that the dog is special and breed them anyway. What good does the test do? I had someone that wanted to breed to Titan. One necessary criteria that his hips be tested. I said he didn't need it because he moved way to easily. He rated good on both sides with no sign of artheritis or HD. He was 6 1/2 at the time, not two. He was also 7th generation and had most all of the dogs before him in the pot. I don't test for eyes, they run through the forrest at night and they don't run into trees or anything else after this many years, I figure they must be OK.


Somehow that just makes too much sense. 

Someone else around here was suggesting that maybe the lack of a physical performance standard related to demonstrable ass-integrity (palisade?) is more to blame for the GSDs than a _lack of x-rays._


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## Connie Sutherland

Maren Bell Jones said:


> CHD is a hard one because there's certainly both genetic and environmental factors. Load that pup up with tons of calories until he's a pudge ball and yeah, a good chance he'll get it,


I thought that HD was genetic, but that environmental factors would/could influence the extent of its effects on the dog.


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## Maren Bell Jones

Steven, the x-rays are just a sign that the hip and femur bones ain't right. Especially if you're new to working dogs, especially when you're getting puppies from across the country sight unseen, how smart is it to trust a breeder, even a good one, that there's not a problem? (no personal offense intended, Don) I'm from Missouri, so don't just tell me there's no problem with the parents, show me there's no problem.  Are we breeding better dogs or do we think we are?

If anyone gets a high dollar puppy from a high dollar litter, especially breeds like GSDs, labs, and Rotties, but they didn't look to see if the parents really did get hips and elbows tested or not...well, good luck with that. It may be fine, but if you're spending a lot on what is supposedly a good solid puppy, why take extra chances? Caveat emptor, I always say. Of course, it's probably equally foolish to go put a ton of weight on a pup or badly overwork them when they're young, even if their hips were good to begin with.


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## Maren Bell Jones

Connie Sutherland said:


> I thought that HD was genetic, but that environmental factors would/could influence the extent of its effects on the dog.


Yes, but even dogs from nice parents can go wrong with overfeeding, incorrect nutrition (the "I heard about the raw diet, so I just gave them raw hamburger" kind of folks), or overworking. I saw that happen with a puppy (a Leerburg grand daughter, or so they said) in my first Schutzhund club. Pup was overweight and on a mediocre food (IAMS, I think?), even though I warned them. Sure enough, started limping at around 8 months and didn't appear to be pano. They kind of disappeared before I got a chance to really ask them about it or see how the parents' hips were. :-(


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## Don Turnipseed

> Maren said
> Load that pup up with tons of calories until he's a pudge ball and yeah, a good chance he'll get it, even with OFA Excellent parents.


I free feed all my pups from the get go. Some get pretty chunky. There food intake drops way off at about 14 mo because the growing spike has leveled out and they may be just a tad more settled and burn less. I free feed because you can always take a pup off of free feeding and go to portions but I have never seen a dog go from portions to free feeding that wouldn't try to eat it all. I don't feed a high $ food by any means. Used Diamond for a while but they did better on Farmers Best. I uded Natures Recipe foir a good while and the got some bad wheat and I notice my dogs dropping weiight and barking a lot more. I checked their feeders and they were still full. They just wouldn't eat the food. I had 10 more bags of the stuff but the would only reimburse me for 2 bags.That was the last bag of that stuff. Used Breeder's Choice for a while. This was before they had puppy chow for large breeds. 9 out of 10 pups ended up with pano. Learned enough to know 9 out of 10 vets will call it bad elbos, HD, and progressive bone disease. People calling and ragging on me because the vets literally pushed them over the edge with the voice of doom. Cornell used to charge $75 buck to evaluate a set of exrays. I had a number of people get the exrays from the vet and send them to Cornell. They always sent me the copies and they all said the dog had pano as it clearly show on an exray. I told them to send the vet a bill then find a new one. It just dawned on me Maren. I bet it is all this experience that has driven me to continually separate the wheat from the chaffe. I still think HD is 90% post natal trauma. I have seen so many moms step on a piups hips, lay on their back end pinching it all while they were laying on a flat surface. 16 ounce pup vs moms weight....thus...one bad hip....the one that was on the flat surface.


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## Connie Sutherland

Maren Bell Jones said:


> Yes, but even dogs from nice parents can go wrong with overfeeding, incorrect nutrition (the "I heard about the raw diet, so I just gave them raw hamburger" kind of folks), or overworking. I saw that happen with a puppy (a Leerburg grand daughter, or so they said) in my first Schutzhund club. Pup was overweight and on a mediocre food (IAMS, I think?), even though I warned them. Sure enough, started limping at around 8 months and didn't appear to be pano. They kind of disappeared before I got a chance to really ask them about it or see how the parents' hips were. :-(


Right, but I meant that the HD was there before they overfed the dog and affected the HD's effect on the dog.


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## Guest

> Steven, the x-rays are just a sign that the hip and femur bones ain't right. Especially if you're new to working dogs, especially when you're getting puppies from across the country sight unseen, how smart is it to trust a breeder, even a good one, that there's not a problem?


That's a seperate issue, and I don't disagree with your rhetorical question.

But when confronted with the bigger picture of breed worthiness, a logical thing to do would be to enforce a standard of performance which is simply incompatible with X physical trait...or a series of physical traits.

EXAMPLE:

Temple Grandin and her slaughterhouse reforms.

Her thing was paper audits vs. real audits.

Paper audit: Going to a slaughterhouse and making sure loading ramps are a certain steepness. Making sure there's a certain kind of flooring, lighting, heating, fencing, killing devices etc etc.

Real audit: Looking at the bottom line. Are actually cows limping? Are they slipping? Are people using prods on every other animal? Is the meat _actually_ bruised?

The point of the audit is animal welfare. 

The point of non-slip flooring is that animals don't slip. The actual flooring material is meaningless if animals continue to slip.

The point of appropriate lighting is that animals don't spook. The kind of bulbs are, or amount of lumens is irelevant if they spooking because of light issues.

That point of certain fencing is that animals don't snag and get inured. The material is irrelevant.

The point of maintained killing equipment is that animals die. If the devices are immaculate, but animals are surviving into the following process, the point has been missed.

So on and so forth.

She found 100-point paper audits could be passed, while animsals are still stressed and injured.

Makes me think of the hip x-ray. OFA Excellents...ooo...ahhhh. Now can the dog jump a 9 foot wall? #-o 

Just thinking out loud. Don't project credibility onto me. :grin:


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## Connie Sutherland

Steven Lepic said:


> Just thinking out loud. Don't project credibility onto me. :grin:


No, that was a good analogy, IMHO.



(Grandin's book is a great one, BTW, IMHO; kudos to her and to Storey Publishing.)


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## Connie Sutherland

Steven Lepic said:


> Makes me think of the hip x-ray. OFA Excellents...ooo...ahhhh. Now can the dog jump a 9 foot wall? #-o
> 
> :grin:


Would there be a potential problem with dogs who pass a test with flying colors while not displaying pain and damage? 

Or would the x-rays happen first, indicating that the dog is most likely physically able?


Edit: Ah, I see below that Don says "even if it tested excellent."


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## Don Turnipseed

> Steven said:
> Makes me think of the hip x-ray. OFA Excellents...ooo...ahhhh. Now can the dog jump a 9 foot wall?


Excellent point Steven. What the hip test has obviously proven is that a dog can get up from a sitting or laying position without looking like he is in pain. So how do working people, hunters, or whatever test dogs? They take the "whole' dog out in the field and test it to make sure "all the parts, even if they tested excellent, work well with the rest of the parts. Might not be scientific but damn, it is logical.


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## Guest

Connie Sutherland said:


> Would there be a potential problem with dogs who pass a test with flying colors while not displaying pain and damage?
> 
> Or would the x-rays happen first, indicating that the dog is most likely physically able?


I'm just saying form follows function. That's about as factual and uncontroversial as it gets.

It's like breeding monkeys for gripping ability and precisely measuring the depths of the ridges and valleys and using that as breeding criteria.

Or...

How about ya just have the specimens hold onto slippery stuff and see who does best?

Arab horses. Were they measuring shoulders and hips and croupes and necks and tails with protractors and tape measures back then? Or, as legend has it, did they run a bunch of stallions in the dessert til most of them died?


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## Connie Sutherland

Steven Lepic said:


> I'm just saying form follows function. That's about as factual and uncontroversial as it gets. ... Arab horses. Were they measuring shoulders and hips and croupes and necks and tails with protractors and tape measures back then? Or, as legend has it, did they run a bunch of stallions in the dessert til most of them died?


Well, I was thinking less of "disposability" in testing and more of the tendency of dogs not to display pain, weakness, etc. Wouldn't lots of dogs be able to muster their all for a test and never tell anyone that the test rendered them unable to ever run again (to take it to extremes for the sake of argument)?

A contrived test, right? As opposed to the test of working the dog and seeing how he does? A test like this:



Don Turnipseed said:


> They take the "whole' dog out in the field and test it to make sure "all the parts, even if they tested excellent, work well with the rest of the parts.


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## Don Turnipseed

An OFA test tells you the dog has a good hip or a bad hip, nothing more. Doesn't tell you if the dog is worth a spit.


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## Connie Sutherland

Don Turnipseed said:


> An OFA test tells you the dog has a good hip or a bad hip, nothing more. Doesn't tell you if the dog is worth a spit.


Oh, I'm not quarreling at all with what you said about the field being the real test.

Just wondering about dogs who pass such a test without batting an eye versus dogs who muster every straining muscle to do it.

Just thinking out loud, really.


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## Connie Sutherland

Don Turnipseed said:


> An OFA test tells you the dog has a good hip or a bad hip, nothing more. Doesn't tell you if the dog is worth a spit.


So you'd want both, then, right?


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## Guest

Connie Sutherland said:


> Well, I was thinking less of "disposability" in testing and more of the tendency of dogs not to display pain, weakness, etc. Wouldn't lots of dogs be able to muster their all for a test and never tell anyone that the test rendered them unable to ever run again (to take it to extremes for the sake of argument)?
> 
> A contrived test, right? As opposed to the test of working the dog and seeing how he does? A test like this:


I can't comment much further without talking out my ass.

OFA tells you X. Fine.

It's a paper audit and I assume it does correspond to a resistance to being demonstrably crippled. Probably. Useful for buying an adult dog? I assume so. I have no experience with it. 

The questions is, how/why did it get that Excellent rating? Where did it come from?

By strictly breeding to a standard of performance which is inherently incompatible with weak hips? 

Or was it based on X-rays of anscestors which indicate only that the hips are round and deep? 

Do my monkeys come from a long line of demonstrably great grippers? Or do am I_ inferring_ gripping ability by the depth of their fingerprints?

Why'd I choose monkeys anyway? :?:


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## Don Turnipseed

Connie Sutherland said:


> Oh, I'm not quarreling at all with what you said about the field being the real test.
> 
> Just wondering about dogs who pass such a test without batting an eye versus dogs who muster every straining muscle to do it.
> 
> Just thinking out loud, really.


Your wonmdering about the dogs straining to pass the field test giving it their all? Connie, the test doesn't stop when you load them into the truck at the end of the day. They are sitting there in the yard with the other dogs. Just watch them, If you run them in front of the truck for 10 to 20 miles the day before, just sit in the house and watch them. If they are having trouble getting up and moving around, you better watch them. Few dogs can hide it for long. Maybe endurance is the problem they are laging behind, the next day when they get up with no problem you could have just eliminated the hips as being the source. Maybe it is the feet and they look to be walking on eggshells the next day. Observation in the field will tell you most of what you need to know.


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## Connie Sutherland

Don Turnipseed said:


> .... the test doesn't stop when you load them into the truck at the end of the day. .... you better watch them. Few dogs can hide it for long. Maybe endurance is the problem they are laging behind, the next day when they get up with no problem you could have just eliminated the hips as being the source. Maybe it is the feet and they look to be walking on eggshells the next day. Observation in the field will tell you most of what you need to know.


Gotcha.


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## Michelle Reusser

I agree with your methods Don, it's just getting every owner to see their dogs in a "real" light that next day, not making excusses or just flat out lying to themselves and the rest of the world. You were oh so correct way earlier in this post, when you said people get too emotional and in that lies the problem. 

I wish you bred GSD's, I'd be your next customer.


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## Connie Sutherland

Michelle Kehoe said:


> I agree with your methods Don ... You were oh so correct way earlier in this post ... I wish you bred GSD's, I'd be your next customer.


Are you against early neurological stimulation too?

Same reason as Don's?

Or did you mean inbreeding?




Whoever said we should split the thread was right. :lol:

Instead, we re-named it to cover both parts.


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## Connie Sutherland

Steven Lepic said:


> ... It's a paper audit and I assume it does correspond to a resistance to being demonstrably crippled. Probably. Useful for buying an adult dog? I assume so. I have no experience with it. ... The questions is, how/why did it get that Excellent rating? Where did it come from? ...


Gotcha.

Again, though, why not both?

Why not the x-ray that says that the dog has the joints for the work, AND the test of "all the parts working together"?

I guess I'm still not clear on why the x-ray would be a waste of time. I'm asking; I'm not quarreling. I don't know enough about OFA to argue.



Don Turnipseed said:


> I have always been amused by hip tests .... What good does the test do?


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## Bob Scott

My dog Thunder's xrays were not graded because he is "moderately" displastic. 
That worried the crap out of me initially. Then I realized that he is as light on his feet as any 80lb GSD could be. He jumps probably as smooth as or better then any dog at club. He has never shown any signs of ANY joint problems. 
I don't worry about it anymore. If he ages a bit earlier, so be it!


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## Michelle Reusser

Connie Sutherland said:


> Are you against early neurological stimulation too?
> 
> Same reason as Don's?
> 
> Or did you mean inbreeding?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Whoever said we should split the thread was right. :lol:
> 
> Instead, we re-named it to cover both parts.


I wouldn't say I am against NS, I have done it and think it will help dogs get farther, nothing wrong with that. I think you can still tell the better pups if you do it. I admir Don's inbreeding and his all or nothing ways about it. Too many people get emotional about culling and that really screws things up. Even if you don't want to cull, you can still place the dogs in the right homes for their aptitude, with limited or no reg, and even a spay/neuter contract. Problem is breeders lose some sales/money doing it or are to lazy to look into buyers, as buyers should look into sellers. 

Originally Posted by *Don Turnipseed*  
_.... the test doesn't stop when you load them into the truck at the end of the day. .... you better watch them. Few dogs can hide it for long. Maybe endurance is the problem they are laging behind, the next day when they get up with no problem you could have just eliminated the hips as being the source. Maybe it is the feet and they look to be walking on eggshells the next day. Observation in the field will tell you most of what you need to know._

My comment was really about actually trialing the dogs in a natural way, to test for soundness and mental soundness as well. He isn't affraid to house groups of dogs together to teach pups lessons. Many sport people want that puppy in a locked down environment, so they can control every aspect of what that pup learns.( My X and I fought about letting my pup hang with the adult dogs) Yeah he got thrown around and snapped at a few times, he was a little shit and needed a good bite in the ass. He still needs a boot in his butt from me occasionally. It didn't and it w ont ruin him becasue he is a strong dog. I say if my dogs can't take learning from eachother and title, they aren't worth breeding too anyway. I don't like the idea of a "artificial environement". Dogs learn by life just like we do and if they can't hack it, we shouldn't breed to them.

I still like to take my pups everywhere and show them everything at 8 weeks and up. The more they see the better they are in my opinion. I'd like to see the palisade brought back to Schutzhund. I don't like things getting easier. With all of our leaps and bounds in training and training tools, we should be stepping up, not watering it down. 

I'm a firm believer in being hard on my dogs and if they can take it, good. If not, I want to know they can't take it (pet home). Example, I will take a 10 week old pup walking right next to the tracks as a train rolls by. Yes we ease into it but that dog better be comfortable doing what I am comfortable doing. If he wigs again and again at the train...he's gone!


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## Don Turnipseed

Connie, as Bob was pointing out, if all the parts work well with each other, that is the real test. Especially if the condition is moderate as in Bob's dog. As far the why not do the exray and the field evaluation. The field evaluation tells you what you need to know. If the dog has a hard time getting up the next day, have him OFA'd if it makes anyone feel better. But, if it is feet or endurance, elbo's or whatever, at least you can pretty much tell what to test for........but why? If I have a dog in the field that can't keep up with the other three dogs, I don't need a test, he is outa there. I don't want to breed to him. He is just not up to par. Why worry about tests. What are they going to tell you? Yes, he has bad hips? So then you now know what you knew in the first place....he is not what you wanted. I had kidney stones for nine days a few years back. Everyone said "go to the doctor!!" I said "Why" so he can tell me what I already know....for maybe a grand". Same thing with dogs. Why go through all the tests if you already see the dog isn't up to snuff? To put a different light on it, if you have a dog that freaks out and runs from the guy with the suit, what are you going to do? Take him to a dog shrink or accept the fact that this isn't something he can do? Your going to accept the fact he can't do it but I doubt you will take him to the shrink. Same thing. Field testing will tell you a lot more about the dog than an exray.


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## Terrasita Cuffie

I x-rayed my first herding bitch at age 2. She was dysplastic in all four extremiites with degenerative bony changes. You couldn't tell when you would see her out covering a flock of 100+ sheep. Suddenly at Age 5, after a day at the farm she didn't want to jump up into the back seat of my Camry. That was the first clue. The second was the day she couldn't cover in a 100 x 200 arena. I retired her after that date. She was a truly awesome dog with oodles of natural talent and it broke my heart to see the look on her face as she knew she had been beat by the stock. WHEN it shows up in the work is the problem. If we had bred this bitch as her breeder wanted and hadn't done the x-rays,what would we have passed on to her offspring if we were just going with the work theory. She was also my pet so she wasn't going anywhere although it did take me a couple of years to persuade the breeder that we needed to spay her. But if you are going to put 5 years of training into a dog or breed them, you might want to know which way the deck is stacked.

Terrasita


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## Guest

> Why not the x-ray that says that the dog has the joints for the work, AND the test of "all the parts working together"?
> 
> I guess I'm still not clear on why the x-ray would be a waste of time. I'm asking; I'm not quarreling. I don't know enough about OFA to argue.


Not saying it's a waste of time neccesarily. If those ratings generally correspond to a dog who can meet a given performance standard for a standard duration, fine. It'd be a handy reference to have when you buy a dog.

But from the perspective of breeding for a work standard, I think I'm understanding Don, in that it's basically trivia when the _performance is already telling him the dog isnt crippled._

Having said that, the answer would be that an OFA rating would be a neccesary by-product. It should confirm what one already knows...that the dogs hips are such that the requisite work can be performed.

Don, correct me if I'm wrong, but if the work is satisfactorily performed an intensity and duration that you've deemed sufficient, for such a period of time in which the dog remains apparently pain and injury free, that's evidence you can take at face value that the hips are fine. "Fine" meaning apparently good enough for the task you set as the minimum standard. Let's say you OFA'd the hips on a whim anyway, and they came back "poor". You'd say: "Well then poor is apparently good enough, but the observable performance did not indicate disability." Would that be accurate to say?

Forget hips a second. What if you found out that your dogs all had vision which, as tested under laboratory conditions, were 50% more near sighted than a hypothetical average dog? Yet, for the past however many years, not one of your dogs failed in the standards you set as far as hunting game and not-running-themselves-off-cliffs etc.

You'd say: "Regardless, the vision is apparently good enough for the standards I've set, and I can't go by anything other than observable performance."

Edit: Don responded while I was typing. Questions answerd.


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## Connie Sutherland

Don Turnipseed said:


> Why go through all the tests if you already see the dog isn't up to snuff?


What if what's wrong with the dog who isn't up to snuff is minor and temporary, or maybe correctable and has nothing to do with HD, or maybe is something else entirely that now I will never know about but that I maybe should know about if I'm breeding the dog's parents again?

Just thinking out loud again. It's hard for me to accept that a source of information like this is something that I should scoff at.


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## Don Turnipseed

That is precisely what I am saying Steven, you just say it better.LOL If I have a dog that is afraid to face a hog, he isn't a hog dog and no test is going to change it.
Terrasita makes an excellent point and I have to agree with her....as hard as it is.LOL


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## Connie Sutherland

Terrasita Cuffie said:


> I x-rayed my first herding bitch at age 2. She was dysplastic in all four extremiites with degenerative bony changes. .... You couldn't tell when you would see her out covering a flock of 100+ sheep. .... Suddenly at Age 5, after a day at the farm she didn't want to jump up into the back seat of my Camry. .... If we had bred this bitch as her breeder wanted and hadn't done the x-rays, what would we have passed on to her offspring if we were just going with the work theory.
> 
> Terrasita


Looks like good logic to me.

Kinda like the dog who strains every muscle to the _n_th degree and passes the test with such flying colors that no one would ever suspect HD. Just like, in fact! :lol:


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## Connie Sutherland

Steven Lepic said:


> But from the perspective of breeding for a work standard, I think I'm understanding Don, in that it's basically trivia when the _performance is already telling him the dog isnt crippled._..


But again, like Terrasita's dysplastic and hard-working dog, who has not seen a dog with severe HD who works like a Trojan until he can't ---- at age 4 or 5 or whatever?

Is that the dog you want to breed because he is so willing and ready and apparently able to do the work ---- until he can't, long before the usual age of "can't"?


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## Connie Sutherland

Steven Lepic said:


> Don, correct me if I'm wrong, but if the work is satisfactorily performed an intensity and duration that you've deemed sufficient, for such a period of time in which the dog remains apparently pain and injury free, that's evidence you can take at face value that the hips are fine. .


I'd say that yes, that can be wrong. Like Terrasita's dog......



P.S. This thread has been _very _educational for me. For many, I'm sure. Several radically different points of view, and a lot of authoritative information.


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## Don Turnipseed

I agree Connie, It can be wrong in various instances. I breed my dogs fairly young if they show me they have the right stuff, but, I have been dealing with these same dogs for a long time. Stepping into someone elses shoes and buying dogs I wasn't so familiar with yes, Terrasita, and you of course, make an excellent point. Mostly of the owner of the dog is planning on breeding the dog.
Where is see more of a problem is marginal ratings in OFA. Also, you can get a different rating on the same dog every time you have him exrayed an submit them. Just depend on which 3 people evaluate them. Terrasita's situation, a dog severly displastic in all four limbs and not showing any sign is probably not common. I run my dogs in groups and I know some are hard chargers and have good hips from years in the field. I have something to compare to while I am watching. I am inclined to agree, after Terrasita's story, maybe the situation should dictate how it is handled. I would be a bit reluctant to invest two years of intense training not having some idea what kind of shape the dog was in. Penn Hip may well be a better way to go since you can evaluate the dog at a younger age I believe.


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## Michelle Reusser

I'd still do OFA on dogs I was going to breed for peace of mind and that is what buyers are lookig for, for their peace of mind. I'm guessing Don doesn't stud his males out and breeds them only with his own females. 

I (gasp) would breed a 5 year old dog who was OFA dysplastic but not showing signs, if he was that great a dog. Too many crappy hipped dogs producing well and vice versa to say no way 100% one way or the other. However I would be super honest about that fact, if I sold or gave away pups from a litter like that. I mean before OFA dogs that should not have been bred together were. If you have a deffinate yes bad hips, make damn sure the other dog has clean joints and comes from a long line of healthy stock. Odds are you wont end up with the majority of the litter with bad hips. Quite possibly all could clear OFA.

I know a Bulldog breeder who cleared up hips on his dogs, tightly inbreeding in a matter of a few generations. Hips are easy to fix...temperament, now that gets tricky! He is like Don, seriously serious about his pups and doesn't hold back anything that doesn't look great. You have to be brutal and brutally honest.


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## Terrasita Cuffie

Guys,

This was an awesome bitch. You don't beat the area's fantastic BCs with a so so dog.<vbg>. She was asymptomatic the first few years I worked her which included a couple of tough rounds with cattle. A herding dog hits their prime at age 5 and most will tell you that you don't have a finished dog until about then. My error in this is that I let my buddy BS me and did the pedigree research AFTER I had the dog. Before I x-rayed her, I researched her pedigree with some help of folks that had been in the breed 30 years and records. There was lots of back room knowledge of dogs with surgically fixed this and that. After I had completely marked up the pedigree, I told my husband that she was bred to be dysplastic front and back and she was. I have not had a dysplastic dog since. Either what I've bought or bred has certified. My present bitch is retiring this year at Age 10. Certainly, as hubby would put it,mine live the pampered life compared to Don's who has a fascinating breeding program and the guts to see it through. I have so many questions, I can't even post them yet because I have to organize all the technical info in my notes.

I wholeheartedly agree with the field testing for temperament and being up to snuff. I try to evaluate my dogs in all phases of commercial farm livestock work which include sheep and cattle so that I know what I have. Once I've put them through their paces then I know if they have the desired nerve strength, confidence, intelligence, etc.

Don, I've been x-raying dogs for over 20 years and once they are on the light table, I don't need an OFA panel to tell me whether they are fair, good or excellent. I'm not that great with elbows. But its not that cut and dried as you indicate. I also x-ray dogs later; anywhere from 3-5 and breed later when I've done it which has come back to bite me. I like it that they are rated goods closer to age 5 as opposed to just 2. We all know the OFA Goods at age 2 that were OFA Dysplastic at age 5. 

However, although its not a perfect system, it can be a breeding TOOL. I sure appreciate the "keeping it real" breeding discussions. Textbooks are one thing but being able to look at a breeding program using the various systems, I think gives you the complete picture. Again thanks for taking the time to share.

Terrasita


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## Guest

> Is that the dog you want to breed because he is so willing and ready and apparently able to do the work ---- until he can't, long before the usual age of "can't"?


Here's the one and only thing I'd been picturing in my mind's eye (and this wasn't my original idea); a circumstance or set of circumstances which would be strongly indicative that HD would be marginalized. It would never rule out a single dog getting it, but by virtue of the performance requirements, the odds of seeing in the breed... 

Ya know what...I'll just find the link instead:  

http://www.workingdogforum.com/vBulletin/f28/how-not-breed-malinois-6751/index6.html#post72050



> GSD's, Malinois and Dutch shepherds all started from landrace dogs in regions very close to each other. Overall, I think all three breeds started on equal ground and I have no doubt just over a hundred years ago they were more similar than different. The GSD has had much stricter breeding requirements when it comes to hip evaluations and in breeding restrictions. Yet, according to OFA, the GSD is nearly four times more likely to develop hip dysplasia than the Malinois.





> With the difficulty of the ringsport jumps, I do not think a dog jumping max could just be masking pain. Any dog who competes in dogsports for a lifetime will have a arthritis. The two dogs I am thinking of aged as gracefully as any dogs I have seen. As far as what was behind the dogs, as imports with French and Belgian parents, none of the dogs in the pedigree were tested for hip dysplasia. I have seen other dogs who competed in ring who are OFA excellent who broke down at a much earlier age.
> 
> Again, I am not advising making breedings to dysplatic dogs. Just wondering if the data we are basing our breedings on is really an adequate means of selecting breeding stock.


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## Ian Forbes

Maren Bell Jones said:


> Yeah, I meant health testing for stuff like von Willebrand disease, which there are good genetic tests for. Not testing for working ability. Show folks get a bad rap for not testing for health stuff, but without naming names, I was pretty dismayed last spring when I was calling around and e-mailing Dutch shepherd and Malinois breeders about puppies and there were folks who still don't believe in testing hips and elbows, but go on and on about breeding better dogs. Do we really want the Malinois to go the way of the GSD in terms of hips? With its increase in popularity, the possibility exists. Ignoring or pretending genetic disease or diseases like hip dysplasia with both genetic and environmental components or whatever else doesn't exist doesn't help anyone. [-(


Hip testing is around now, so it seems sensible to use it....BUT...bear in mind that Malinois devleoped into a great working breed without hip testing. The reason being is that the dogs were tested in Belgian Ring/NVBK and if they qualified to a good level and no bits fell off, then they were bred. This resulted in a healthy, working dog.

If you use that criteria for breeding, do you need hip testing??


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## Michelle Reusser

Thanks for posting that link Stephen. I totally missd where it went to hips and not color! I'll have to go back adn read from where I left off.


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## Howard Gaines III

Don Turnipseed said:


> Jeff has touched upon something that has not been mentioned. There was a time when serious breeders inbred the dogs for a few generations just to see what hidden recessive there were. Today, most breeders don't have a clue what baggage their dogs are carrying around and passing to every dog bred to it. So what if a few things pop up in a litter occassionally. This is the reason I am more comfortable breeding dogs I know inside and out that to take a chance outcrossing regardless how good the dog appears to be. They all have baggage, but it would be noice to at least have an idea of what that baggage is and if it can be dealt with.


Don inbreeding isn't new, just look at Georgia! Ooooops, sorry Jerry. LOL [-X  
Many bird dog and **** hunters do it to contiune the fine line of that breed. As you know, you still have to breed out from the line. My female Bouvier was inbred and this was done for a reason. I then bred her to my Belgium male and the working lines are a real good match. The puppies should have the things that breeders have looked for in the past, but with newer blood. 

*Inbred*= "I took some cheese and put it *inbred *to make a sandwich." Yep, ******* word use of the day.


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## Don Turnipseed

Gillian Schuler's post on that link says a lot to me. Hip testing has become, in my opinion, an important sales tool. I had it put to me once that even if the dogs are all excellent, it would be extremely difficult to sell to a certain clientel without the testing on the parents. Remember this is not about testing the purchased dog, it is about testing the parents when it comes to sales. We seem to be going back and forth here and it changes the whole picture. Testing the dog itself before breeding and such and testing the parents as a prediction the pups will be the same.

Out of curiosity, much is made out of hips, even when they don't fail the dog until say, 8 years old. Seems to me an 8 year old dog that has been worked is due. Since hips are so important, and the thread is concerning inbreeding also, I would think it is at least as bad to buy a dog that is marginal in drives and desire for the work he is supposed to do. I took a look at the "Litter Announcement Forum" and most advertise the pups as great working line dogs. What do you do after a year or so of working a dog and he hasn't got the right stuff. Field testing covers it all better. Sure, a few dogs slip through, but dogs get hurt in protection sports, mine get hurt holding hogs. In my situation, I don't, and won't wait till a dog is 5 years old to say that dog is great. Half his life is past already. Many my dogs will be in the middle of the fight at 9 mo old. I would get rid of a dog that hunted marginally as fast as I would one with bad hips but at a dog with marginal hips may make it to 8 years. Marginal hunt and there is no point in taking it to the field.


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## Jeff Oehlsen

Quote: I haven't had radiology yet, but I believe the basic idea is if they haven't shown signs of CHD by around 2 years of age, they likely won't as adults.

Uh, two years is adulthood. Duhhhh:-$ Don't tell her I am giving her shit.

Don, it is sooooooo about time we heard from you. I feel like I am a kid again listening to the hound folks talk dogs, and reality, something dog people are severely lacking nowadays. If I hear one more fluffy hasn't eaten for ten minutes thread I may snap.:-x :-x :-x :-x :-x :-x How can these people think anyone gives a shit ? ? ? ?:smile: 

The dog shrink thing you were talking about is absolutely what I have been experiencing the last ten years. People just shop around till they find an opinion that matches theirs and then they spend a lot of money on a shit dog to not fix shit, but to learn how not to put the dog in those situations again.

When I say **** it, it is just a dog, I really mean it. I have never seen a dog that was so special that he/she was a "one of". The dog may be hard to replace, but there is another like it somewhere. Doesn't mean I do not love my dogs, or dogs in general, just that I have a point where, **** it, the piece of shit can dig worms if they have nothing that I particularly care for about them.

I think your theory of bad hips and mom standing on the pups is legitamate. I have no doubt that it is poly genetic as well, but no shit, I have had some IDIOT females in the whelping box for sure. It would explain for sure the one pup out of the litter/one bad hip thing/ect for sure. And yes, **** the OFA, and those that think a hip x ray is a reason to breed. Known a lot of shitters with great hips. LOL


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## Jeff Oehlsen

Quote: Originally Posted by *Don Turnipseed*  
_Jeff has touched upon something that has not been mentioned. There was a time when serious breeders inbred the dogs for a few generations just to see what hidden recessive there were. Today, most breeders don't have a clue what baggage their dogs are carrying around and passing to every dog bred to it. So what if a few things pop up in a litter occassionally. This is the reason I am more comfortable breeding dogs I know inside and out that to take a chance outcrossing regardless how good the dog appears to be. They all have baggage, but it would be noice to at least have an idea of what that baggage is and if it can be dealt with._
Don inbreeding isn't new, just look at Georgia! Ooooops, sorry Jerry. LOL















Many bird dog and **** hunters do it to contiune the fine line of that breed. As you know, you still have to breed out from the line. My female Bouvier was inbred and this was done for a reason. I then bred her to my Belgium male and the working lines are a real good match. The puppies should have the things that breeders have looked for in the past, but with newer blood.


I still am looking into the origins of inbreeding in Georgia, as there should be some really good looking chicks down there, but not nearly in the proportions that you would think with all that tight linebreeding. I figure it has to be the ugly ass males messing up the mix.:lol: =D> :lol: =D> :lol: =D> 

Could not resist.


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## Connie Sutherland

Jeff Oehlsen said:


> I think your theory of bad hips and mom standing on the pups is legitamate. I have no doubt that it is poly genetic as well, but no shit, I have had some IDIOT females in the whelping box for sure. It would explain for sure the one pup out of the litter/one bad hip thing/ect for sure. And yes, **** the OFA, and those that think a hip x ray is a reason to breed. Known a lot of shitters with great hips. LOL


Is one pup with HD (out of a liter) pretty common?

What about the x-ray along with field/working ability test?


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## Jeff Oehlsen

Quote: Out of curiosity, much is made out of hips, even when they don't fail the dog until say, 8 years old. Seems to me an 8 year old dog that has been worked is due. Since hips are so important, and the thread is concerning inbreeding also, I would think it is at least as bad to buy a dog that is marginal in drives and desire for the work he is supposed to do. I took a look at the "Litter Announcement Forum" and most advertise the pups as great working line dogs.Out of curiosity, much is made out of hips, even when they don't fail the dog until say, 8 years old. Seems to me an 8 year old dog that has been worked is due. Since hips are so important, and the thread is concerning inbreeding also, I would think it is at least as bad to buy a dog that is marginal in drives and desire for the work he is supposed to do. I took a look at the "Litter Announcement Forum" and most advertise the pups as great working line dogs. What do you do after a year or so of working a dog and he hasn't got the right stuff. Field testing covers it all better. Sure, a few dogs slip through, but dogs get hurt in protection sports, mine get hurt holding hogs. In my situation, I don't, and won't wait till a dog is 5 years old to say that dog is great. Half his life is past already. Many my dogs will be in the middle of the fight at 9 mo old. I would get rid of a dog that hunted marginally as fast as I would one with bad hips but at a dog with marginal hips may make it to 8 years. 



You hit on some really good points here. The hip issue was battered into people till it became the holy grail and all else was not considered. If I have a phenominal working dog with not so good hips, but many other fantastic traits, I will still breed this dog, as the other traits are harder to produce, and there is the fact that it could be an environmental factor like bouncing around the kennel all day that made the hips.......or mom did something stupid.](*,) 

Drives, unfortunately are a matter of opinion, and the only person that had the guts to even attempt to show the different level of drives was Ed Frawley. Unfortunately, I think that hunting drives are much easier to see. I do not have the words yet to tell why I think that, as I just see things, and other people have words. To me, many people just have too high opinion of the crap drive their dog has. LOL

I also think that you are right about just throwing a pup into the mix when you are hunting, as you are hunting in a pack, and it is an animal you are hunting. We have sooooooooooooooooo much more conflict with what we do. I am conflicted as I write this, as on the one hand, **** a pup that cannot hack it, but because so many mature too late (in my opinion) and cost so ****ing much, I can see why people are hesitant to push them. Maren, you can be a gagillionaire if you figure out which gene makes these retards mature late. Need to get rid of that, as it would take away a lot of breeders excuses for their crap.....just wait longer, his lines mature late. what they really mean is get more attatched to the piece of shit, that way I can get over.


There is nothing worse than writing a dog off, only to see that he just matured later. such a pain in the ass those dogs. I have to admit, I like them to be the way they are always gonna be right out of the box, **** the waiting. Makes life a lot easier on us old decoys as well.


QUOTE: What do you do after a year or so of working a dog and he hasn't got the right stuff.

THis is the quintessential question, and the answer is something that breeders count on, and that is that they keep the dog, and drop out of the sport X percentage of the time, which I am not sure, but it is fairly high, get a second dog, X percentage of the time, which is also a pretty big number, or they send the dog back to the breeder and get denied the "guarentee" that the breeder has in the contract X percentage which is the larger of the last catagory, which is sending the dog back to the breeder, which is pretty stinking small.

Don, you are a "one of" in style. Got to remember that most breeders produce less than average dogs at best. Worse, is that very few of them actually realize that they are doing this, and just flop along thinking their shit doesn't stink. I see very few breeders that are actually willing to go on a public board and do what you do, which is just tell it like it is, damn the torpedoes. Kudos to you ! ! ! !


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## Jeff Oehlsen

Quote: Is one pup with HD (out of a liter) pretty common?

I should clarify that "bad" means something that is affecting the dog significantly, and pretty much right away. HD implies too much. I have seen too many dogs that worked well with what the OFA said was bad, and seen them work badly, with what ofa said was fair.

Ooooops, yes, I have had litters with 1" bad" hip out of the bunch. My old GSD Axel came from a litter with one pup that was put down at 4 months because of her hips. The rest were fine. Axels hips were great.


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## Connie Sutherland

Jeff Oehlsen said:


> I see very few breeders that are actually willing to go on a public board and do what you do, which is just tell it like it is, damn the torpedoes. Kudos to you ! ! ! !


Makes for a great thread, too.



Jeff Oehlsen said:


> Maren, you can be a gagillionaire if you figure out which gene makes these retards mature late. Need to get rid of that, as it would take away a lot of breeders excuses for their crap.....just wait longer, his lines mature late.


GSDs in particular? Or not?


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## Jeff Oehlsen

QUOTE: GSDs in particular? Or not?

Any breed. Rotts are even worse, as you have to wait three years for their stupid brains to really be able to deal with everything. Mals have lines that mature late as well. It is something that would be really cool to get rid of, or at least positively identify as a young pup. That way you could skip past that litter, or if that is your style, get one and just enjoy the puppy thing.


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## Maren Bell Jones

Jeff Oehlsen said:


> Maren, you can be a gagillionaire if you figure out which gene makes these retards mature late. Need to get rid of that, as it would take away a lot of breeders excuses for their crap.....just wait longer, his lines mature late. what they really mean is get more attatched to the piece of shit, that way I can get over.



Interesting that you bring that up. I was at a seminar in January or February from the president of the American Canine Sports Medicine Association. He's a DVM who has done field trials with his labs for over 20 years, so he's not all about his ivory tower. He was of the opinion that we are indeed actually seeing a selection trend towards maturing younger and younger in ability. The dogs that mature faster and are able to work or get titled sooner are more likely to be bred younger, say at two years for the first time instead of three or four, and arguably will be bred more often. So you get 3 litters out of a female as a known performer at two years instead of 2 that mature a year or two later. Eventually, you'll get selection for pups that mature younger. He says the only problem with this is that people see these young puppies who are the natural prodigies and push them too hard too soon. They may be able to take it ability wise and maybe mentally, but physically, they're like the 12 year old lifting weights.


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## Don Turnipseed

Maren, that would be a great topic. Why don't you start a thread on it?


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## Don Turnipseed

Jeff, I'll never be a "one of" as long as you are here? LOL

By the way, where do you get all the smilies?


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## Connie Sutherland

Jeff Oehlsen said:


> I have seen too many dogs that worked well with what the OFA said was bad, and seen them work badly, with what ofa said was fair.


Could part of this be environmental factors? Like the dog with clear HD on the x-ray who is then dashing around on slick floors every day and maybe kept too heavy?

These environmental factor shouldn't mean much to a young dog with good hips, but couldn't they make a big difference with a dog who does inherit HD?

I mean aside from the high-drive/high-pain-threshold connection.


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## Connie Sutherland

Don Turnipseed said:


> Jeff, I'll never be a "one of" as long as you are here? LOL
> 
> By the way, where do you get all the smilies?


Jeff has a personal stash of smilies, but you can get your own over to the right when you are composing your message.:-$:arrow:


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## Don Turnipseed

Connie Sutherland said:


> Could part of this be environmental factors? Like the dog with clear HD on the x-ray who is then dashing around on slick floors every day and maybe kept too heavy?
> 
> These environmental factor shouldn't mean much to a young dog with good hips, but couldn't they make a big difference with a dog who does inherit HD?
> 
> I mean aside from the high-drive/high-pain-threshold connection.


Ah, you touched on something Connie. I have often heard HD is caused by multiple things. Weight is always one of them. The way you put your post it makes sense. My guess is weight is not in itself a cause leading to HD, but, excess weight can certainly exacerbate the problem if it is already there.:idea:


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## Connie Sutherland

Don Turnipseed said:


> .... excess weight can certainly exacerbate the problem if it is already there.:idea:


Excellent use of smilies. :lol:


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## Connie Sutherland

Don Turnipseed said:


> ... excess weight can certainly exacerbate the problem if it is already there.:idea:


'Zackly. That's what I get from newsletters out of Tufts and UC Davis ... that such things as slidey floors with throw rugs and high jumps and extra weight will exacerbate the condition that already exists but not "cause" the condition.


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## Gillian Schuler

For me results from pre-x-raying aren't conducive so I wait until my dog is about 14-16 months to do it. I treat the pup as if he "could" have it without being overly cautious, ie. no boisterous playing on slippy floors, not much stair climbing and no long walks on the lead. There's a rule "one minute per week" walking time which I don't always adhere to fanatically as the pup gets older.

However, I walk over slippy and strange surfaces, climb a few stairs up and down, etc. with them from the word go.

As I understand it, a HD clear dog can't develop it but you can make one that isn't a lot worse by too much exercise and food. My breeder/helper said from the force with which he jumped for the sleeve he was probably HD clear but it wasn't a guarantee. I know a lot of people who can "tell" whether their dogs have HD or not and never x-ray. If I had a "Heinz 47" variety, I'd have it x-rayed for hips and elbows if I wanted to do sport with it. I think here you can have the spine x-rayed but I don't know much about it at the moment - another thread maybe:idea:


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## Jeff Oehlsen

I remember as I was learning about HD I was told to not feed puppy food as the rapid growth caused problems with the hips. I remember thinking that maybe we were getting a handle on the thing......THEN I learned it was polygenetic, and from that point on, quite honestly, I stopped worrying about it, as there was about **** all I could do about it.


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