Reuben your are 100% wrong on the tightly linebred dogs needing vaccines because of deficient immune systems. Since becoming interested in plotts and devoting 100% of my time learning and researching plotts and bloodlines I have noticed that there are countless strains held together by individuals, some with NO outcrosses for 40-50 years and the myth about genetic effects on the immune system simply don't hold water. I can show you pedigrees that you would swear the offspring would have 5 legs and 3 eyes but its by no means the case. I have not bred my dogs that tight YET but I damn sure will when the cream begins to rise to the top. I can name four men that have and I have seen numerous plotts from each of the EXTREMELY tight breedings and was pleasantly suprised with the consistency in the dogs from each strain with ABSOLUTLY NO ill effects on tge immune systems or conformation. Not trying to be a butt (again lol) but I could not disagree with a statement anymore than I do the statement you made. Take care
back in the 1980's it seems there was lots of articles on "Inbreeding Depression" and "Hybrid Vigor"...the old timers called inbreeding depression "Tired Blood"...so outcrossing or crossing to a different family of dogs would bring back hybrid vigor...
my theory or logical explanation as to what many old time breeders believed back then...such as making dogs crazy and dumb etc...etc...probably had a lot to do with breeding depression issues...it happened sooner in humans than with dogs...so breeding best to the best and keeping them unrelated was probably due to what had been experienced in the early times...back then there was no such thing as vaccines and the medicines were limited so in my opinion it was a good way to produce healthy animals even if there was a higher cull rate in those days because of the increased diversity...
below I copied from the net...I tried to copy and paste the definition of both inbreeding depression and hybrid vigor but I couldn't get it to copy so you will have to open the link...
http://dictionary.reference.com/slideshows/travel-words#wayfarer
