The Hunting Trait...

I'm with Bryant on the consistency thing. I don't think inbreeding or line breeding multiply or magnify traits. They just multiply the frequency of occurrence of a given trait (how often it shows up). And they're enhanced by good selection . . . keeping the desired and culling the undesired. You limit the genetic variance and then there are fewer possibilities. Keep your breeding pool at the higher end of the performance spectrum and you will produce more usable dogs. Produce good numbers of usable dogs and occasionally a freakishly good one will appear.

With color or ear length we not only see the result we are getting, but we see how even in a tightly bred family it may vary in shade, etc from one dog to the next.

With utility traits like trailing ability you only ever get to view the overall product and not the blueprint. Terms like "cold-nosed" are not helpful because it gives the impression that one dog is smelling things the others are not . . in an attempt to make an enormously complex system seem simpler. For the most part . . any dog can smell what any other dog can smell. What differs is their reaction to scent. This reaction is what we are trying to manage in a controlled breeding program and it is determined by things like length of the nasal passages, density of the nearly microscopic membranes that pick up scent particles, dopamine and endorphin transmitters in the brain, etc. If my family of dogs produce more adrenalin at the first hint of hog scent they may be willing to work harder to line out an old track whereas your dogs smell the same scent but aren't excited by it. It takes more scent and much fresher scent to get yours interested so the 12 hour old track doesn't even phase them. Unfortunately . . while my dogs are excited by and willing to try and line out an old track . . they have shorter nasal passages and fewer membranes with which to pick up the scent . . therefore they have to walk along taking in great, big whiffs of the target scent in order to follow it. The perfect dog has all of these factors I mentioned (and maybe as many as 200 others) in exactly the right dosage. But once in a great while perfect dogs are born . . or nearly perfect, anyway. And most often . . just when someone thru hard work, patience and an iron will gets the trailing thing all worked out . . either they or someone else decides to add grit by crossing in some pitbull or add speed by adding some greyhound . . or he decides an outcross is needed to another family from the same breed because good old uncle Zebediah told him not to breed too close.

And here's the real X-factor. A dog's performance in the woods is an absolutely horrible indicator of his potential for performance in the breeding shed. Performance and reproductive quality are NOT directly connected. Good dogs can produce worthless pups and worthless hunters can produce world class pups. More often than not . . the best reproducer from a given litter is not the dog who is the best performer. If for a dog to be perfect in the woods it is equal to lightning striking twice in the same spot, the same is true for what it takes for a dog to be a prepotent reproducer. So . . for a dog to be a great hunter and a great breeder it would require the equivalent of lightning striking the same spot four or five times. For practical purposes nobody wants to keep and breed poor performers and breed multiple litters from them to evaluate their reproductive worth. So we're all killing off our best chances at reproducing the best litters. And for as long as hunters are wowed by seeing greats like "Old Never Lie" and "John Doe's Champion" in a pedigree . . we are working parallel to our goal rather than making strides toward it.

I don't think we're ever gonna be able to mass produce outstanding dogs . . and I don't know any shortcuts to get there, but I will say that 'the 5 steps forward and 1.3 million steps back program' that random crossbreeding represents . . is definitely not the answer for engineering consistency.

And I will be happy to accept 2 cents for these thoughts via paypal.