What would be a good breeding program?

yiasthoj

I'm not very familar with breeding dogs so I need everybody's input on this.

Lets say if I had a male Kishu that was down from a great/strong hunting bloodline and my goal is to continue preserving this bloodline. How would I do this? How do I choose a female to breed him with in order to still claim that the puppies are true bloodlines of this family and not a mix of two great lines? Would it be better to breed the male Kishu to a totally unrelated female Kishu that is also from a great hunting bloodline, or is it okay to breed the male to a half sister or a neice of his? Is inbreeding a bad thing to do in dogs? And if inbreeding is okay, how many times should you inbreed and when should you outcross your bloodline to an unrelated bloodline? I figure that if I always breed my dog to an unrelated bloodline then eventually the original line would be bred out. So everyone please give me your thougts on this. Thanks!

lindsayt

So in general, if you had a really exceptional dog in your program with outstanding merit, and the rest of your dogs are average, but you REALLY want the traits of your awesome dog to carry thru, you would want to line breed. Line breeding is how certain traits that are desirable get cemented into a certain line. Every few generations your outstanding breeding dogs whose type and traits you as a breeder just absolutely love, get pulled back into the pedigree to help stamp their particular type or trait into new offspring.

You can outcross all the time if you want, but then you tend to lose some predictability in outcome of health and type in the offspring, so you would choose outcrosses very carefully and compare how they did when bred to dogs with similar lines as your own. Inbreeding is never really a good idea IMO, but I do realize this a way that NK such as Shiba, were able to be preserved after the war.

With rare breeds like Kishu, Shikoku, Kai and Hokkaido, I think the goals are more to keep the pool from narrowing, so tight line breeding for type would be counterproductive to the breed as a whole while the numbers are so small. Loose line breeding would probably be fine, but outcrossing would probably be better for the overall health of a breed with small numbers.

I'm really not sure what would be best approach if the main goal was to breed for something like hunting ability. I don't think it would matter as much what the two dogs looked like as long as there is an apptitude for hunting and they are able to consistently perform the tasks and pass that drive onto their offspring. Still shouldn't inbreed tho, IMO.

yiasthoj

@lindsayt, thanks you for your input on this topic.

Now, if you don't mind may you describe the line breeding program a little more in detail for me please? For example and please correct me if I'm wrong, for line breeding, I would outcross my stud dog, and then also outcross the offsprings and the offsprings after that I cross it back to their grandfather or their grandfather's brothers/sisters?

ayk

Here are some articles about Canine Diversity:

http://www.canine-genetics.com/

And here is an explanation of what is going on when you do the linebreeding that you've described (disregard the last paragraphs though):

http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/bracketts-formula-is-a-slow-way-to-bakewell/