On Breeding Better Dogs

I think oconee is right about breeding science being able to produce good dogs consistently, but historically this works best with large numbers of dogs, when the Germans refined their dog breeds they had kennels with over a thousand dogs at times, when you're breeding the best to the best out of a thousand dogs you can refine the gene pool much faster than if you are breeding best to best of 30 dogs, when its 30 dogs it's much more of a crap shoot like judge says, even if you are working with line bred dogs. A lot of our hunting breeds in the U.S. Have way more diversity in the gene pool than German bred dogs, some of the books I've seen that promote inbreeding and line breeding without outcrossing don't take into account the breeding history of the dog breed. It's a shame the American hunting dog breeders from a generation or two ago didn't write more books, im always curious about stories of dog sub breeds kept in one family for generations that have not experienced inbreeding depression. Some of the stories of Florida or cracker curs come to mind

Id like to see Cajun chime in and tell us what percentage of his litters make sure nuff hog dogs, not to put him on the spot but because he's a reputable breeder working with a consistent line of dogs with a German history, Mtn curs and cats I believe have exponentially more genetic diversity just judging by their color variations, maybe bmcs less so because they have been bred for color

Breeding a high percentage of quality dogs from a small family of dogs is probably harder than you think or more people would be doing it

Creating your own breed seems like an exhausting amount of work, I'm sure during the creation of some of the newer breeds like the Dogo they had hundreds of dogs at times or culled through hundreds in a year. Once your gene pool has been refined to produce mostly what your looking for you could reduce your numbers down to 15-30 but the less dogs you have the more likely you are to wind up in a corner and have to outcross

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