Family Breeding and Other Models

FAMILY BREEDING AND OTHER MODELS


As the reader may be well aware, there are differing opinions on breeding models. What works best? Well, that is exactly uhat the disagreement is all about. However, I intend to give a concise answer—not just muddy the waters.

First, a caveat: One bum says to the other, "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" If I am to give an authoritative opin­ion, I should have a track record to refer to. That is, I should have bred some good ones myself. Well, I have, but the point is that I am primarily an armchair follower of the pit dog game. There are several reasons why I am not an active participant. One may be that I am, by nature, simply more student than activist. Another is that I have been writing about these dogs for a long time. Humaniacs even try to use my books as evidence if they have searched some­one's house with a warrant in regard to ille­gal dogfighting. Hence, I am a high profile target (I suspect), so it behooves me to stay completely legal. Besides, I must confess, it is not my nature to want to train the dogs for pit contests. My mind set is more toward the breed and its improvement. For that reason, among others, I am very inter­ested in which dogs are the best pit dogs. My point, however, is that, even as a breeder, I am not a very active participant. I only rarely make breedings, and very few people outside my group of friends get dogs from me. Because of that, not many of the dogs I have bred get a chance to become known.

A legitimate question, then, would be what possible basis could I have to be authoritative at all. The answer is that I have been around for a long time. I have known some of the best dog men, and many of them were the ones who produced the foundation for the best dogs we have now. And I must confess that by "best" I mean the gamest, which, of course, means pit dogs. The only reason for judging in that way is that long experience has taught me that the best dogs are from pit stock. They are the brightest, the healthiest, and they have the best dispositions. Besides very long experience with the dogs (approaching sixty years now), I have an uncommonly good knowledge of biology and general science, fields that apply to the selective breeding of dogs.

Now that you have my credentials, let me give the simple answer to my question. Which breeding is paramount: best to best or family breeding? Best to best implies breeding the best male available to the best female. Family breeding connotes also breeding best to best, but there is an emphasis on staying within a group of dogs that are related. Thus, they are a "family" of dogs. Out crosses are only made for very good reasons.

There are several examples of popular families within the American Pit Bull Terrier breed. The Colby strain is most def­initely the oldest and the best known. Many lines have come and gone, although their influence is still felt. Some bloodlines have become nearly extinct because the breeder was not inclined to let dogs out, except to close friends. The Wallace line of dogs would be an example of that catego­ry. Generally the line is called for its founder, such as the Lightner name, but there have been strains in which the founder deliberately distanced himself from the line in regard to family name. For example, there was once the Zenith line of dogs, and Going Light Barney's owner called his dogs all by the "Going Light" prefix, and yet, he rarely sold dogs, and he kept his personal stud book. Similarly, the Old Family Red Nose line was named by Dan McCoy, but it developed a following of several very prominent dog breeders. Finally, there have always been family lines based upon an individual dog that was outstanding, such as Tombstone or Jeep. Those two are common lines today that are bred by many different people, but those of us who have been around for a while also remember the Diamond Dick dogs, named for the immortal Diamond Dick, a dog that was famous back in the thirties.

Without further delay, I am going to pro­nounce the family model as the best one in regard to the selective breeding of dogs. Let me first tell you the advantages, and then I'll discuss some of the problems.

Advantages of family breeding

The idea is to husband and guard the desirable genes. The very fact that there isn't a pit dog man in the world who would cross a Bulldog to another breed (at least, not more than once!) is an indication that the breed itself is a sort of "family," in that all individuals are related to some degree and the breed is mainly free of genetic material from "curs" (meaning non-bull­dogs in this case). The idea is the same in a family of dogs. One of the advantages is that you know all the ancestry is game. No compromises have been made. There are no skeletons in the closet. Family breeding can be done by one individual or by a num­ber of different people. One of the reasons given for the once great status of the Old Family Red Nose line is that a number of different people were working on the bloodline, and they were nearly all top breeders. The same might be said of the Dibo line of dogs, although an important part of the success is that Dibo just hap­pened to be an outstanding producer of good dogs. Even the very renowned Colby strain has had more than just the Colby family breeding it. Top dog men, such as Howard Heinzl and John Fonseca, dedicat­ed themselves to that line.

Not content with simply breeding a fam­ily of great pit dogs, breeders can actually eliminate health problems and physical faults in a family of dogs. The close breed­ing that is used in family breeding brings recessive faults to the surface. In other words, there will be more defective dogs, at first. But continually removing such individuals from the gene pool over a long period of time (numerous generations) will eliminate the genes that produce these defects. Only rare mutations will produce any blind or deaf dogs or dogs susceptible to certain ailments. This is certainly a desirable feature of family breeding. Truth to tell, it will work in outbreeding pro­grams, too, but such efforts will be much less effective there, as there is a dilution of the effect because of so many dogs—and all it takes is one maverick breeder to repro­duce a defective dog to throw the undesir­able characteristic back into the hopper.

One of the best features of family breed­ing is uniformity. Gameness will be more consistent, as will ability. It is not for no reason that time-honored breeders kept their strains closely bred. After achieving a high quality line that bred true, any indi­vidual would be foolish to make an out-cross and incorporate the progeny into the strain. However, I think a lot of those old-time breeders were blinded by the power of inbreeding. It is a powerful tool to achieve uniformity and to purge a strain of physical defects, but it is not the only path. I am sometimes confounded that I spent so much time writing to debunk some of the myths of inbreeding and then discover that some dog men think that it is the only way to breed. There are, in fact, some problems with family breeding.

Disadvantages of family breeding

One of the main problems of family breeding is that you need lots of time to establish a strain. I am often amused at young breeders who claim a strain when they have only bred one or two generations of dogs. Technically, a strain consists of at least eleven generations. If you are going to do family breeding, the smart thing is to start out with a quality line. But there are other disadvantages, too.

You need a lot of dogs in order to fami­ly breed. By that, I mean that you will have to maintain a lot of dogs. You can start out with just a bitch and breed her to the best male. But you should be able to keep all the progeny. That is the basis of all selec­tive breeding, family model or not, you must raise up a lot of dogs and then breed only to the very best individuals. The secret of success is not mere addition, but sub­traction, too. The individual dogs that don't measure up don't have to be eutha­nized, but they must be removed from the breeding program. (And this is the case for any breeding program, whether it is of pit dogs or show dog Pomeranians.) But you have to raise up a lot to find out which the very best ones are.

You often will not be able to breed to the best dog in the country, as that would be an outcross. So you pay for the uniformity you get, such as nearly all game individu­als, by a decrease in the number of out­standing individuals, the aces. However, you should have a corresponding decrease in the number of rank curs.

If you are going to do family breeding, you need to know yourself enough to know that you are in the game for the long haul. You also need a place where you can main­tain a lot of dogs. Bob Wallace kept up to fifty dogs at his place, but the more usual number for him was around twenty to twenty-five. Here is an interesting aside. Leo Kinard was famous for keeping over two hundred dogs at his spacious country place. At the middle of the last century, that was the only place in the country to go to see that many Bulldogs in one place. And yet, Leo wasn't an avid breeder. He had too soft a heart for a breeder. If a dog quit, it still had a spot on his place—at least until he could find it a decent home of some sort. In any case, family breeding will never come to fruition for you if you are not one of those who are in the breed for a "life sentence," so to speak.

The most infamous drawback to family breeding is that many breeders use the bloodlines to justify breeding a couple of curs. In fact, I would guess that more curs have been deliberately bred based on the idea that the quality of the family would ensure some good pups. Well, it usually does, but such practices certainly weaken the line.

Another problem with family breeding is that the line can undergo a weakening. It doesn't have to happen, but it is one of the characteristics of inbreeding that there is some sort of degeneration, from a loss of fertility to a loss of vigor. Very careful selection can prevent this from happening, but very few people are able to be that selective. As an example, just the other day, I heard some pit dog man talking about those "soft-mouthed Jeep dogs." Well, Jeep was renowned for his punishing ability. If the dogs named for him have lost "mouth," it is most likely a consequence of family breeding, albeit a preventable one.

OUTBREEDING

The fact is that people have produced some fine dogs from outbreeding. That way you can breed best to best on a much wider basis, so the "best" is likely to be very good, as it just may be the very best dog in the country. At least, the sire may be, as some of the best dogs are often pur­chased and placed at public stud. People who use this system may be interested in working with a smaller group of dogs, and they are probably interested in quick results. They start out by getting the best female that they can attain and then breed to what they perceive as the best male. They may choose to only raise the females. The one that turns out the best is, in turn, bred to the best male available. Some of the best stables of dogs that I know were produced in that way. The important point here is that good judgment must be used in selecting the studs. There's the rub. There is always diversity of opinion about the worth of even a winning dog. However, the very fact that some our all-time best pit dogs were not family bred, strictly speaking, and may even have been called "scat­ter bred" is testament to the fact that out-breeding can work, too.

One of the main problems with out-breeding is to verify the pedigrees of dogs that are used in the breeding program. It does no good to breed to an outstanding individual if he is the exception to his ancestry and he is down from a passel of curs! This is sort of the opposite problem that is very typical in family breeding. In family breeding, the common mistake in family breeding is breed to a couple of curs that are down from good dogs that are tightly bred. In outbreeding, the most typi­cal error is to breed two great dogs that are themselves poorly bred. And then, the per­petrators wonder why the pups are only average—or worse!

Comments

That fact is that breeding Bulldogs can be a tough row to hoe irrespective of which model you choose. And most of us use a little of both. Even Lightner and Wallace made occasional outcrosses to outstanding dogs. Some skill is needed in judging dogs. It takes experience to develop an eye for the dogs enough to evaluate them well. Also, it takes some time to get to know individual dogs by experience or reputa­tion so that a pedigree can be properly evaluated. The time was that it was almost possible to know every good dog in the country, but that time has long passed.

In the final analysis, either inbreeding or outbreeding-or both-can be effectively used by a breeder who is motivated and has a good knowledge of these dogs. There are drawbacks to family breeding, and I have mentioned just a few of them. It is never­theless one of the most powerful tools to producing good dogs.


~ Richard F. Stratton

YIS

 

good read!!!

 

only 3 post on this thread. 10,000 on the mayfield thread. LMFAO

 

Cuz it makes too much sense ben.

 

Lol Makes it pretty easy to see which one has a lot of B.S. in it.

 

nice, injoyed it

 

thanks i love reading articles like this

 

Bump....after the other good reads, I thought I'd add another Dr Lector gem hidden away....Enjoy.

 

Nice article .

 

Real good read. I agree to use both styles but try to keep separate strains , pure & crossed, if can or @ least seeing 3 generations of crossed dogs before adding with main pure dogs.
Easier to discontinue crossed dogs if they don't turn out so well after 3 generations then it is trying to breed them out of your dogs.

 

What does a breeder mean when they say they've introduced such-n-such a dog in their breeding program as a catalyst??? My best guess is that it's some form of outbreeding but I'm still wondering that these more behind such a term. Anybody care to elaborate....thanks.

 

They are hoping that worm will turn into a butterfly and NOT a moth LMAO.

 

^^^LOl^^^ good play on words...gotcha!......that poses another question tho....does it HAVE to be a Monarch??? LOL.