Well yes, that is the start point but same thing is with almost all dog breeds. With akitas we have times when they have used sertain dogs way too much (like the now legendary Ise Unruy Go what can be found everywhere) and if you have dog whos pedigree is full of this one dog you can count how many gene variations you have lost in the way. There is a way to count it. Dont know if you use this way to calculate, but it tells much more than just calculating inbreeding %. If you look your dogs pedigree for like 6 generations and count how many different dogs there should be. Then you count all those different dogs what your dog have in his pedigree. Then you divide the number of the pedigree dogs with the bigger number. The more at 1 you get the end result the better. And there you can also see how possible genes you loose. I can say with my own dogs that these guys have lost so many genes that it might make me cry. My female have damn Ise Unruy Go 11 times in her pedigree in 9 generations. And my male is so inbreed that i want to hit my head to the wall. No wonder he also have really bad allergies -.-
For the benefit of other readers, here's what Table B, pg 473 looks like for just the Japanese breeds...
(5) Akita x (4) San'in Shiba = 0.1 (5) Akita x (5) Akita = 0.000 (self, so of course, zero) (5) Akita x (6) Kishu = 0.073 (5) Akita x (7) Shin-su Shiba = 0.060 (5) Akita x (8) Shikoku = 0.110 (5) Akita x (9) Akita-Shiba (Jomon) = 0.101 (5) Akita x (10) Kai =0.093 (5) Akita x (11) Mino-Shiba = 0.094 (5) Akita x (12) Ryukyu =0.113 (5) Akita x (13) Hokkaido = 0.092
In short, low numbers are bad, high numbers are good the way this is calculated. This is based the "frequencies of 34 genes over 13 variable loci."
What they did to generate these numbers is the take blood samples from the dogs and check what kind of blood protein they had. They then extrapolated to what the DNA gene must be for that blood protein and calculated how often that gene appear in the breed. With the frequencies known, they could make breed-to-breed comparisions.
This article was among the first of the famed Tanabe articles about the Japanese dog breeds, the migration of the Japanese dog breeds, and so forth. I do appreciate him and his group for doing this research as it also helped with understanding the Korean dog breeds.
However, I think article is insufficient to base a major Akita-Shiba crossbreeding decision outside of the wishes of the country of origin.
The article examined 14 blood proteins, which is only a small component of the health of an animal. Also mentioned earlier, some of the results from this article runs contrary to what is currently known about the migrations of people (and their dogs) into Japan.
A new DNA breed survey needs to be taking place, utilizing knowledge and technology that is 20 years more current.
The MHC/DLA is a start that I wholly support as diversifying that region will buy time until the other disease genes can be discovered and selected against. The cross-breeding is *not* what I would endorse based on one country's projecting their breed woes to the rest of the world. That is not proven yet.
I get the jest of what Tensai is saying though. Japan bred certain dogs repeatedly (line/in), then when they reached a certain age, sent them abroad to Europe/USA where they did the same all over again. The JA does not have enough genetic diversity and is not healthy. Unfortunately most breeds probably don't. I think when breeding animals we should strive for more than "kinda ok."
This crossbreeding among dogs seems to be common in countries where the dog is not originally from.
@ayk as I said, that is only one part of the reasoning and actually quite small part. More bigger reasons are that akitas desperately need new genes and this is not just in Finland. We have bring dogs from Japan quite alot and still almost all share same dogs in pedigrees and by that you can calculate with simple math that we have problems. Shibas are good option for crossbreeding because they have same structure (shiba is like mini-akita), they have samekind basic nature (though shibas are more eh.. terrier nature), we have most knowledge about shibas (health, lines etc), we have enough shibas and different lines to make crossbreeds with different lines (what is also important for continue) and the biggest reason is: It is japanese breed. I dont think Japanese will allow anything else to be mixed to their breeds than other Japanese breed. So with shiba we have tiny change to get it trough.
Yeah, I wish that I could go to Japan, get all their pedigrees in neat database (like what we have here) with all breeds and then get them make DLA-research to them all. But yeah.. most likely not going to happen but hey, girl should always have her dreams!
Lately the Finnish Kennel Club have get worried about genetic situation of our breeds and the baseline is with small breeds that go and do crossbreeds if you dont have enough healthy dogs. It doesnt hurt anyone. If people dont like the idea of the crossbreed then they just should not take dogs from these lines or take part to the project. This project might give so much to the breed and it doesnt take anything away. If it doesnt work, then it doesnt work, but atleast we have tried. I'm not saying the crossbreeding will solve all the problems, most likely it will not because AI-genes are so wildly spread and most likely we would find these also from the crossbreeds if we dont have working genetests by then. But it might help and there isn't nothing wrong with trying.
The pinser-snautser project have went pretty well here and kennel Yarracita have been doing those crossbreeds since the 90s and have good results with health and looks. And pinser and snautser are basicly same breed but have different hair. When thinking akita I would say some totally different type of breed would be best if we look just genes, but there are also other things to think. We have been researching and working with this project for several years and we had allready one breeder to ask for permission for this. Our Kennel Club and their own breeding commitee (where is genetics, breeding scientist etc) were all showing green light and question was only what Japan will say. Unfortunately this female akita died before we could get it trough further Now we are trying to find another female for this project and make it happen in year or two.
And yeah, after I have had skin problem akitas and I have worked with AI-sick dogs and see how hard it is to people I have long time ago decided that I wont get purebreed akitas anymore. I cant be worried 24/7 with every scratch that what if my dog now get sick what I would do. I want dog what is healthy. Thats why next dog what comes to this family will be crossbreed or totally different breed. My own nerves cant handle the stress :P
2 things I wanted to point out: 1) In all honesty, the fault lies with European breeders as much as it does with Japanese ones. Because:
a) not all dogs are carriers in Japan b) a dog can be carrier in Japan but because the breeders have a lot of experience and choose the right mates for the dog there are no affected puppies - since there are no affected puppies you cannot tell for sure the dog is a carrier (there are no tests) c) the dog is shipped to Europe but the European breeder doesn't research pedigrees to find carrier dogs and thus affected puppies appear.
I can tell you for sure that there is only a minority of breeders that does research on the pedigree of a male/female before breeding in order to find carriers.
2) I have seen less and less Japanese imports that are linebred/inbred in Japan. And I have looked at a lot of them, as I had to choose the right male for Hinu last year and this year I will have to find the right one for Tsuki. The problem is that European breeders import dogs that are descendants of great dogs and afterwards do linebreeding on them. For example: Toushou go Aso Inoue, Hidemaru go Houjuen or Kasuga go Shirai. I have seen many pups from this dogs imported from Japan and then bred to each other.
There is another situation - and I talk from personal experience - when a great dog from famous parents is imported and then another breeder imports one of his parents.
I will give you an example: Birin go Musashi Aiwa (call name Taiyou), the male I chose to sire Hinu's litter. His Sire is the great Bandou Tarou go Saginuma Kensha and his Dam is Meiyosho Awa Aihime go Musashi Aiwa. Taiyou was born in Japan and imported when he was a Junior. He is an awesome male, great bone structure, big size, lovely personality. And a great reproducer. Good bloodline, great health, no known carriers.
His Sire, Bandou Tarou, was then imported in Europe and has since sired dozens of puppies that have then been bred to one another.
Similar situation with Taiyou's dam. Since she is a Meiyosho, the highest rank that can be awarded to a JA in Japan, she bred a lot of puppies that have been sold to Europe and these have been in turn bred to each other. When you don't know what to do or which dog to choose to have good quality puppies, you do linebreeding. Most of the times you don't screw it up.
So to my mind the problem doesn't necessarily lie with Japanese breeders or dogs, but how they are bred. Of course, it's just my two cents.
How you get to know carriers from Japan when they dont tell about the sick dogs? How you know for sure there are not any sick puppies? How same dogs can have only healthy puppies in Japan and when they come to Finland for example you start to get sick puppies, even though you choose the lines and there shouldnt be any carriers known? Just wondering how it is possible when we all know that SA is autosomal resessive so the gene needs to come from both parents. Though with most cases it needs somekind factor to tricker the disease. But yeah, does Japanese have somekind of database for themselfs what they dont share to us or where is this info about the known carriers behind our dogs.. And we have several imports from Japan what are SA sick or have bad knees what needs surgery or have really bad hips what will need surgery later or have inherited cataracta and so on.
Even here where we are really open about this subject we have breeders who hide sick dogs (or atleast try to hide) and in Europa that is really common. And couple years (well more like ten) back even president of AKIHO said that they dont have SA or any other problems and we have get those problems because of our weather and feeding *rolleyes* Luckily they changed that point of wiev some years later and started to work with the SA-study. And in Finland we havent done inbreeding in 10-20 years because we know it is bad. Our Kennel Club is against it and doesnt recommend anything above 6,25% inbreeding. With akitas in the past ten years the inbreeding number have been almost zero all the time. (easy to calculate and see when our database does it all for us ^^ me so love it!). At one year it went up to 2% but that was because there was one accident litter with half sisters. And yeah, you cant see the inbreeding in 3-4 generation with most of the dogs.
By the way you can find our Dairin behind Taiyou, so you have relatives in Finland ^^ Actually both my dogs are relatives to your litter because there is also Daiji of Kisarazu and Tohgoku Go behind them. So small is the world you know And my male is old European dog born in year 2000 and have several allergies. He doesnt have any 1. generation AI-sick puppies but can find those in 2. generation. And my female is his grandchild. And by the way halfbrother of Taiyou is known carrier of SA and VKH, name is Ryuuko Go Musashi Aiwa (here in Finland, can find his puppys at our openlist). Just last november I helped my friend with the hard task to put his puppy to sleep when she got both SA and VKH. Just telling if you havent heard about these.
But yeah, situation is not the same in other European countries. In Finland we are really strict about health and health checks etc. Thats why we also have most of the known sick dogs and open register for them :P I also wish to find some breeders from Japan who dont give a damn about the shows and just breed dogs for their nature, structure and health. With the amount of dogs they register in year there must be atleast one who does it... Should move to Japan and start doing more research. If I only win in lottery
Tensai, exactly what you are saying - I was not talking about what happens in Finland or Northern Europe, as the kind of work that you and your club do is not common to the rest of the continent, unfortunately.
I am pretty sure that my dogs are related to about 50% of the JA population in Europe LOL well, maybe that is an overstatement but not by much. They have 4 meiyosho in their bloodline, world champions and viceworld champions etc, the disadvantages of owning dogs with great ancestors - everybody wants one LOL.
As for Ryuuko, you can only know a carrier if he/she produces an affected puppy. As genetics works, if you breed one carrier to a free the risk of having a carrier is 50%. (which means the other 50% is free). What I am saying is that even if Ryuuko is carrier, this doesn't mean that his litter siblings of half siblings are carriers too. To my knowledge Taiyou has not given any carrier puppies and hence my statement that there are no known carriers in his bloodline, this being the reason why I chose him.
That is true, we count those percents couple years back and had 25% percent carrier percent as limit for breeding dogs. Unfortunately that was too big percent. We drop too many healthy breeding dogs away from breeding because of that and lost so many genes. For example my female comes from lines what you should not have used then and her breeder get many people angry when she took the risk and used sister of SA-sick dog for breeding. Risk was good because all the puppies are healthy and they are now over eight years old and next generation is now two years old and they are still healthy. They might get sick in the future but you never know Everyone can get sick.
And I think my old male is related to whole akita population because he also have those brindle lines behind him from his mom's side And yeah, he is awesome dog in nature, wish i could clone him and do some genetic work and took the sick genes away and so on. He is fierce protector, momma's little teddybear, fearless and dominant. You should see his naturetest vid! Shame I have it only at old vhs tape. One another good thing about him and his lines, they live long! He is now 12 years old and healthy as young dog. He still goes for 4 hour walks with me to the woods and play and run with my younger dog. And his grandfather Daiji lived also really long, last I heard he was way over 15 years old.
I completely agree, it comes a time when you have to choose the lesser risk - if you have a really great dog - and I am not talking about type but about structure and temperament, things that tend to be overlooked when it comes to JA - but he/she is related to a carrier, what do you do? Breed and take a chance or not breed and miss out on improving the gene pool in the region if he is not a carrier?
And you know what is ironic? One of the ways of knowing for sure (apart from breeding to a known carrier) is inbreeding - since inbreeding doubles on the same genes, it is one of the best ways of knowing what is hidden in your dog's genes.
Yeah, that is only way I aprove inbreeding, when you test what possible bad genes there is but after that you need to start doing outbreeding and so on. Not all really bad inbred puppies are sick. For example my friend had accident puppies with her huskies (she had huskyfarm back then) who were sister and brother. All puppies have been healthy and they dont have any problems. Then you know they dont have bad genes and can breed them further. But in a long run you cant do that all the time or you loose too many gene variations. Thats why one good thing is to crossbreed to different breed for new healthy genes and then breed back to the original breed. Because with closed registers you end up with inbreeding and close relatives in time anyways. But there is difference if the inbreeding have increased slowly, then the problems aint that bad than when we increase inbreeding fastly, what have happen with akitas.
Yeah, i have plan to get it to dvd but I just need to find our working dvd-player what can record tried two allready and both were broken. Third one is at my summer house and I hope that will work!
Brother/sister is the best combination in order to achieve this goal (not that I approve of it or plan to do it in the future) but to my mind the offsprings should be culled from the breeding program - fixed and given to pet homes with full disclosure - the owners of the dogs must be aware of what has been done and the possible consequences. But afterwards the parents can be successfully bred outside their gene pool.
I don't think the answer is to crossbreed, though. You can outcross (if that is the right word - i mean breeding to a dog of the same race but with no obvious family ties with your dog). I think that after the 5th generation the input is so small that it doesn't really matter. But i do agree that there are advantages and disadvantages for both crossbreeding and outcrossing.
" I think that after the 5th generation the input is so small that it doesn't really matter."
It does matter if you have pedigree with 7-9 generations and there is one dog about ten times, then you have lost way too much different gene variations. If it was just one inbreed like 9 generations ago it wouldnt be that bad, but with most cases with akitas (and with several other breeds) situation isn't like that, unfortunately And it is hard to outbreed if you have those same matadors at every pedigree.
But yeah, it's basic population genetics that you will need outbreeding in time to time. Even wild animals do it by nature. I should search that study about wolfs where they noticed that these packs mate with other packs (what live in other countries etc) time to time to get new genes. They compared that to dog breeding and result was that if we would breed dogs like wolfs do things by nature we should crossbreed our breeds to other breeds in every 4th generation so it would keep strong and healthy. Just pulling these from my memory, I should search it again. It was really interesting to read. It was Swedish study if I remember right. But one good study about the subject is "The Shallow End of the Gene Pool" by Coile, C., Thorpe-Vargas, S. ja Cargill, J. And there is even akita mentioned ^^
I just want to say a little note that crossbreed is only planned. I have not heard that this project is moved forward, or even got the permission for the Finnish Kennel Club.
Comments
(5) Akita x (4) San'in Shiba = 0.1
(5) Akita x (5) Akita = 0.000 (self, so of course, zero)
(5) Akita x (6) Kishu = 0.073
(5) Akita x (7) Shin-su Shiba = 0.060
(5) Akita x (8) Shikoku = 0.110
(5) Akita x (9) Akita-Shiba (Jomon) = 0.101
(5) Akita x (10) Kai =0.093
(5) Akita x (11) Mino-Shiba = 0.094
(5) Akita x (12) Ryukyu =0.113
(5) Akita x (13) Hokkaido = 0.092
In short, low numbers are bad, high numbers are good the way this is calculated. This is based the "frequencies of 34 genes over 13 variable loci."
What they did to generate these numbers is the take blood samples from the dogs and check what kind of blood protein they had. They then extrapolated to what the DNA gene must be for that blood protein and calculated how often that gene appear in the breed. With the frequencies known, they could make breed-to-breed comparisions.
This article was among the first of the famed Tanabe articles about the Japanese dog breeds, the migration of the Japanese dog breeds, and so forth. I do appreciate him and his group for doing this research as it also helped with understanding the Korean dog breeds.
However, I think article is insufficient to base a major Akita-Shiba crossbreeding decision outside of the wishes of the country of origin.
The article examined 14 blood proteins, which is only a small component of the health of an animal. Also mentioned earlier, some of the results from this article runs contrary to what is currently known about the migrations of people (and their dogs) into Japan.
A new DNA breed survey needs to be taking place, utilizing knowledge and technology that is 20 years more current.
The MHC/DLA is a start that I wholly support as diversifying that region will buy time until the other disease genes can be discovered and selected against. The cross-breeding is *not* what I would endorse based on one country's projecting their breed woes to the rest of the world. That is not proven yet.
This crossbreeding among dogs seems to be common in countries where the dog is not originally from.
Yeah, I wish that I could go to Japan, get all their pedigrees in neat database (like what we have here) with all breeds and then get them make DLA-research to them all. But yeah.. most likely not going to happen but hey, girl should always have her dreams!
Lately the Finnish Kennel Club have get worried about genetic situation of our breeds and the baseline is with small breeds that go and do crossbreeds if you dont have enough healthy dogs. It doesnt hurt anyone. If people dont like the idea of the crossbreed then they just should not take dogs from these lines or take part to the project. This project might give so much to the breed and it doesnt take anything away. If it doesnt work, then it doesnt work, but atleast we have tried. I'm not saying the crossbreeding will solve all the problems, most likely it will not because AI-genes are so wildly spread and most likely we would find these also from the crossbreeds if we dont have working genetests by then. But it might help and there isn't nothing wrong with trying.
The pinser-snautser project have went pretty well here and kennel Yarracita have been doing those crossbreeds since the 90s and have good results with health and looks. And pinser and snautser are basicly same breed but have different hair. When thinking akita I would say some totally different type of breed would be best if we look just genes, but there are also other things to think. We have been researching and working with this project for several years and we had allready one breeder to ask for permission for this. Our Kennel Club and their own breeding commitee (where is genetics, breeding scientist etc) were all showing green light and question was only what Japan will say. Unfortunately this female akita died before we could get it trough further
And yeah, after I have had skin problem akitas and I have worked with AI-sick dogs and see how hard it is to people I have long time ago decided that I wont get purebreed akitas anymore. I cant be worried 24/7 with every scratch that what if my dog now get sick what I would do. I want dog what is healthy. Thats why next dog what comes to this family will be crossbreed or totally different breed. My own nerves cant handle the stress :P
1) In all honesty, the fault lies with European breeders as much as it does with Japanese ones. Because:
a) not all dogs are carriers in Japan
b) a dog can be carrier in Japan but because the breeders have a lot of experience and choose the right mates for the dog there are no affected puppies - since there are no affected puppies you cannot tell for sure the dog is a carrier (there are no tests)
c) the dog is shipped to Europe but the European breeder doesn't research pedigrees to find carrier dogs and thus affected puppies appear.
I can tell you for sure that there is only a minority of breeders that does research on the pedigree of a male/female before breeding in order to find carriers.
2) I have seen less and less Japanese imports that are linebred/inbred in Japan. And I have looked at a lot of them, as I had to choose the right male for Hinu last year and this year I will have to find the right one for Tsuki. The problem is that European breeders import dogs that are descendants of great dogs and afterwards do linebreeding on them. For example: Toushou go Aso Inoue, Hidemaru go Houjuen or Kasuga go Shirai. I have seen many pups from this dogs imported from Japan and then bred to each other.
There is another situation - and I talk from personal experience - when a great dog from famous parents is imported and then another breeder imports one of his parents.
I will give you an example: Birin go Musashi Aiwa (call name Taiyou), the male I chose to sire Hinu's litter. His Sire is the great Bandou Tarou go Saginuma Kensha and his Dam is Meiyosho Awa Aihime go Musashi Aiwa. Taiyou was born in Japan and imported when he was a Junior. He is an awesome male, great bone structure, big size, lovely personality. And a great reproducer. Good bloodline, great health, no known carriers.
His Sire, Bandou Tarou, was then imported in Europe and has since sired dozens of puppies that have then been bred to one another.
Similar situation with Taiyou's dam. Since she is a Meiyosho, the highest rank that can be awarded to a JA in Japan, she bred a lot of puppies that have been sold to Europe and these have been in turn bred to each other. When you don't know what to do or which dog to choose to have good quality puppies, you do linebreeding. Most of the times you don't screw it up.
So to my mind the problem doesn't necessarily lie with Japanese breeders or dogs, but how they are bred. Of course, it's just my two cents.
Even here where we are really open about this subject we have breeders who hide sick dogs (or atleast try to hide) and in Europa that is really common. And couple years (well more like ten) back even president of AKIHO said that they dont have SA or any other problems and we have get those problems because of our weather and feeding *rolleyes* Luckily they changed that point of wiev some years later and started to work with the SA-study. And in Finland we havent done inbreeding in 10-20 years because we know it is bad. Our Kennel Club is against it and doesnt recommend anything above 6,25% inbreeding. With akitas in the past ten years the inbreeding number have been almost zero all the time. (easy to calculate and see when our database does it all for us ^^ me so love it!). At one year it went up to 2% but that was because there was one accident litter with half sisters. And yeah, you cant see the inbreeding in 3-4 generation with most of the dogs.
By the way you can find our Dairin behind Taiyou, so you have relatives in Finland ^^ Actually both my dogs are relatives to your litter because there is also Daiji of Kisarazu and Tohgoku Go behind them. So small is the world you know
But yeah, situation is not the same in other European countries. In Finland we are really strict about health and health checks etc. Thats why we also have most of the known sick dogs and open register for them :P I also wish to find some breeders from Japan who dont give a damn about the shows and just breed dogs for their nature, structure and health. With the amount of dogs they register in year there must be atleast one who does it... Should move to Japan and start doing more research. If I only win in lottery
I am pretty sure that my dogs are related to about 50% of the JA population in Europe LOL well, maybe that is an overstatement but not by much. They have 4 meiyosho in their bloodline, world champions and viceworld champions etc, the disadvantages of owning dogs with great ancestors - everybody wants one LOL.
As for Ryuuko, you can only know a carrier if he/she produces an affected puppy. As genetics works, if you breed one carrier to a free the risk of having a carrier is 50%. (which means the other 50% is free). What I am saying is that even if Ryuuko is carrier, this doesn't mean that his litter siblings of half siblings are carriers too. To my knowledge Taiyou has not given any carrier puppies and hence my statement that there are no known carriers in his bloodline, this being the reason why I chose him.
And I think my old male is related to whole akita population because he also have those brindle lines behind him from his mom's side
And you know what is ironic? One of the ways of knowing for sure (apart from breeding to a known carrier) is inbreeding - since inbreeding doubles on the same genes, it is one of the best ways of knowing what is hidden in your dog's genes.
PS: tech geniuses can transfer from vhs to cd :-)
Yeah, i have plan to get it to dvd but I just need to find our working dvd-player what can record
I don't think the answer is to crossbreed, though. You can outcross (if that is the right word - i mean breeding to a dog of the same race but with no obvious family ties with your dog). I think that after the 5th generation the input is so small that it doesn't really matter. But i do agree that there are advantages and disadvantages for both crossbreeding and outcrossing.
It does matter if you have pedigree with 7-9 generations and there is one dog about ten times, then you have lost way too much different gene variations. If it was just one inbreed like 9 generations ago it wouldnt be that bad, but with most cases with akitas (and with several other breeds) situation isn't like that, unfortunately
But yeah, it's basic population genetics that you will need outbreeding in time to time. Even wild animals do it by nature. I should search that study about wolfs where they noticed that these packs mate with other packs (what live in other countries etc) time to time to get new genes. They compared that to dog breeding and result was that if we would breed dogs like wolfs do things by nature we should crossbreed our breeds to other breeds in every 4th generation so it would keep strong and healthy. Just pulling these from my memory, I should search it again. It was really interesting to read. It was Swedish study if I remember right. But one good study about the subject is "The Shallow End of the Gene Pool" by Coile, C., Thorpe-Vargas, S. ja Cargill, J. And there is even akita mentioned ^^
Interesting discussions! More like this!