Breeding Dogs Discussion

[Goose87]

Oh and what about the bracket theory?

I’ve studied and read up on the bracket theory a few years ago, it seems to work well but is just another form of linebreeding,...


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[Goose87]

i just had some mutations til i researched it ..blue pups ...man i just couldn't figured where it come from ....til i read where  some db gene will make a black dog blue ....hahahaha i got rid of 5 perty good dogs because i thought it was a throw back from breeding to an older female of this line a friend had ......

When I was 15 I made a breeding of two bulldogs that I had, I knew a good bit about their backgrounds to know what was behind them, these were black and white bulldogs off of black and white dogs, with a good bit of Eli breeding on them, one of the pups came out blue, this was before blue bulldogs were a fad and at the time still semi “ rare”, I was puzzled for several years until I found out what caused it...


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[t-dog]

A really good friend of mine is one of the top greyhound people in the country. One day while picking his brain, I asked how he chose to pair his markings. What strategy did he use. He replied, well I have studied the winningest breeders over time. I studied them and the peds that tbey produced. No one approach is fail proof or right or wrong per say. Some of them definately ha e had better results though. One man in particular had the highest winning percentage by a good bit. He line bred for 3 generations and every 4th made an outcross. This was his approach to the line breeding theory. Of course then all the personal preferences and observations come into effect in breed worthy selections. As stated earlier, to each their own method and there's more than one way to skin a cat. I try to line breed and use the best to best theory along with it. I sure don't know it all and don't have the "best" families of dogs walking. What I do have are a family of curr type dogs and a family of catch dogs that "I" like, my flavor. Until it doesn't work I'm gonna keep on keeping on with what has been working. 

[bigo]

There is big money in greyhounds and you can bet they have some smart people working on how to breed them. They don't have to worry about some ones definition of good because they have to beat the competition and the clock. They also have the best nutrition and care money can buy and yet only about 30% make it on the track. They don't tolerate the bad ole gooduns or the good ole baduns because they run just fast enough to lose your money and the track will send them home.

[Semmes]

I want to switch gears a little...

I want to ask a question of you older, and younger, dog breeders the have a line of dogs you work with and line breed on...

While pondering the ‘let the sire, of the sire, be the grandsire of the dam’  that was Brackett’s formula. I switched it in my head to ‘let the dam of the dam, be the grand dam of the sire, or let the dam of the sire be the grand dam of the dam.

This in itself is no big revelation as a line breeding scheme. I’ve seen it in thousands of pedigrees. And I’m sure Brackett wasn’t the first. Mendel, from what I read was one of the guys that Brackett studied. And I’m sure Mendel wasn’t the progenitor. This stuff prob goes back to domestication of canines before folks even had written language.

Brackett always based his line around stud dogs.
Many of the peds in the breed I am a student of do as well. As well as a lot of the cur breeds and other breeds I have cursory knowledge about the pedigrees of.

Larry, I know you breed on blackie, you breed on males down from blackie. I’ve seen you write about it before.
I know you like to hunt males and breed the b!tches. That is your preference. And it’s working for you...

This is my pondering

Does anyone have a line they have based on a female???

I know in line breeding the females will also show up quite often. And this are being line bred on as well.

It seems the Brackett and others from conformation dogs or breeds to working dogs always have a stud heavy focus. This, I get it...Because a stud I one year can be bred to dogs in its family and outcrosses, and more distant relations and even to dif breeds. This would far surpass the pups one b!tch could throw in a whole lifetime. Even if double sired and all pups dna tested.

This would quickly show the propensity of a particular stud to be a a Breeder or a cull in conformational nature and with just a little more time in dogs of a working nature.

But it seems with what has been touched on in this discussion regarding epigenetics, and from what I have heard from breeders as well for years about the dam contribution to the final makeup of the pups outweighing the sire’s. Esp in working dogs as pups learn behaviors from their mother first which affects temperament certain drives in ways yet to be understood or at least scientifically.

So I wonder if the breeding focus on studs is somewhat of a handicap. I know it’s a faster lane. And the time literally does tick on what you can learn about a dams contribution. Esp in working dogs... say you breed a dam of a working breed and don’t regard the conformation of the pups so much, but more their performance.
The you have to wait a year and a half to see what the end results in performance were. That’s about a two year window that you could have chased down a rabbit hole. Only to start again. When in the same time one could literally have hundreds of pups from a particular sire to sort thru and cull of keep and each would weigh percentage wise on whether the dog was a good stud or to move another direction.

So question is...

Do any of you have a linebreeding based directly and purposefully on a b!tch dog?

[Goose87]

A really good friend of mine is one of the top greyhound people in the country. One day while picking his brain, I asked how he chose to pair his markings. What strategy did he use. He replied, well I have studied the winningest breeders over time. I studied them and the peds that tbey produced. No one approach is fail proof or right or wrong per say. Some of them definately ha e had better results though. One man in particular had the highest winning percentage by a good bit. He line bred for 3 generations and every 4th made an outcross. This was his approach to the line breeding theory. Of course then all the personal preferences and observations come into effect in breed worthy selections. As stated earlier, to each their own method and there's more than one way to skin a cat. I try to line breed and use the best to best theory along with it. I sure don't know it all and don't have the "best" families of dogs walking. What I do have are a family of curr type dogs and a family of catch dogs that "I" like, my flavor. Until it doesn't work I'm gonna keep on keeping on with what has been working. 

Some more good stuff right here, one of my neighbors Charles Fasola  breeds kemmer stock curs and has a pretty good track record in the competition squirrel hunts and maintains a line/family of dogs and once told me that he does the same as your greyhound friend, he breeds within his family 3 times and the outcrosses on the 4th, his dogs cross over to big game pretty successful as well, I 100% agree that no one has it completely figured out or ever will, we can only manipulate Mother Nature to certain extents, we share similar breeding practices also, Ive been and am trying to keep and maintain a line going as best as I can that suits ME, I’m not scared to add some outside blood that matches what I got already but brings what I’m looking to improve to the table...


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[Mike]

Semmes... all my dogs are based off a female. I breed everything back to my old Tweety gyp. All of her pups were basically clones of her... no resemblance whatsoever to the sire. They looked, acted, hunted and handled just like her. I’m 5 generations down now and still getting consistent dogs very similar to her.


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[Semmes]

Thanks Mike, I almost mentioned you and asked...

I knew it was tweety/ Winchester but forgot if one was bred to a dif cross and then stacked in or not...

[Semmes]

Only reason it interests me so much is because I have a small scale thing I’m doing based off a female. It’s a bit complicated and kinda by seat of my pants. Def not an accelerated thing...I got all time in world and it just for me. But anyway....

[Mike]

I’m the same way... small scale. I breed when I need pups, place the ones I don’t want with people I know. I do have a daughter to Tweety’s sister and Winchester’s brother that I’ll breed back to one of their great grandpups when she comes in... we’ll see how that works out.


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[WayOutWest]

I have always believed if you don't have a good brood bitch, you are out of business in the dog world.

[parker49]

good males can bring you down the road  quite a bit faster .....  once  your down the road  it don't matter either male  or female  ......but  the male gives way more options .... we have  2  good breeder males  we  take females off each and breed them to females from each male crossed on the other ...last  litter is back on her daddy ......i'm done its  maintinace  now ....what else  can i do ?  i have a good solid  working line that is perty much trash free and hog minded .....now if i am  lucky enuff to keep that once in awhile super dog i'll breed around him a while ...... i like a good gyp i used to hunt  some good gyps .... but we are training young dogs  most every trip or finishing one  so i don't want his nose  up another dogs rear  or trying to trail one up ... i want him split trailing his own ..... so i do  hunt  one from tme to time but not much .....

[Goose87]

I want to switch gears a little...

I want to ask a question of you older, and younger, dog breeders the have a line of dogs you work with and line breed on...

While pondering the ‘let the sire, of the sire, be the grandsire of the dam’  that was Brackett’s formula. I switched it in my head to ‘let the dam of the dam, be the grand dam of the sire, or let the dam of the sire be the grand dam of the dam.

This in itself is no big revelation as a line breeding scheme. I’ve seen it in thousands of pedigrees. And I’m sure Brackett wasn’t the first. Mendel, from what I read was one of the guys that Brackett studied. And I’m sure Mendel wasn’t the progenitor. This stuff prob goes back to domestication of canines before folks even had written language.

Brackett always based his line around stud dogs.
Many of the peds in the breed I am a student of do as well. As well as a lot of the cur breeds and other breeds I have cursory knowledge about the pedigrees of.

Larry, I know you breed on blackie, you breed on males down from blackie. I’ve seen you write about it before.
I know you like to hunt males and breed the b!tches. That is your preference. And it’s working for you...

This is my pondering

Does anyone have a line they have based on a female???

I know in line breeding the females will also show up quite often. And this are being line bred on as well.

It seems the Brackett and others from conformation dogs or breeds to working dogs always have a stud heavy focus. This, I get it...Because a stud I one year can be bred to dogs in its family and outcrosses, and more distant relations and even to dif breeds. This would far surpass the pups one b!tch could throw in a whole lifetime. Even if double sired and all pups dna tested.

This would quickly show the propensity of a particular stud to be a a Breeder or a cull in conformational nature and with just a little more time in dogs of a working nature.

But it seems with what has been touched on in this discussion regarding epigenetics, and from what I have heard from breeders as well for years about the dam contribution to the final makeup of the pups outweighing the sire’s. Esp in working dogs as pups learn behaviors from their mother first which affects temperament certain drives in ways yet to be understood or at least scientifically.

So I wonder if the breeding focus on studs is somewhat of a handicap. I know it’s a faster lane. And the time literally does tick on what you can learn about a dams contribution. Esp in working dogs... say you breed a dam of a working breed and don’t regard the conformation of the pups so much, but more their performance.
The you have to wait a year and a half to see what the end results in performance were. That’s about a two year window that you could have chased down a rabbit hole. Only to start again. When in the same time one could literally have hundreds of pups from a particular sire to sort thru and cull of keep and each would weigh percentage wise on whether the dog was a good stud or to move another direction.

So question is...

Do any of you have a linebreeding based directly and purposefully on a b!tch dog?

Some good stuff here as well, centering my breedings around females is exactly what I’m doing, I used to keep and hunt mostly male dogs but when I decided to start breeding and raising my own stock I gradually gravitated to keeping mostly females, my main purpose was I looked at it like this, there are plenty of good quality studs out there to breed to but how many people are going to let you breed your top stud that you feel is breed worthy to a female of the same caliber that they own, not very many, not only that but if a man has a stringer of good females then if he plays his cards right will keep himself in good dogs for years to come, at least that’s the way I look at it, another one of my neighbors whom introduced me to the man I mentioned in my last post has always had a kennel full of top notch English pointers and has for the duration of his entire dog career centralized his breedings around one particular female he owned many years ago, his philosophy is he doesn’t keep females that aren’t reproducers of themselves or better, he chooses a stud that is already a proven reproducer to breed to, if the pups don’t meet his criteria then the female is disposed of or spayed and is sold after her competition career is over and is pleasure hunted the rest of her days, I’m trying to get my breedings centralized around a particular motherline within this family of curs I’m working on, they are strong reproducers of themselves and throw quality offspring, and aside from all of that, I’ve never seen a successful cattleman keep a pasture full of bulls to continue his herd in the future...


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[Goose87]

Oftentimes when we think outside the box there will be many nay sayers to include those with other opinions until it becomes common knowledge one way or another...

Time to get back to the normal as most of us see it day in and day out...



Staying away from gestational imprinting/conditioning or even epigenetics...I have been in discussions where coondoggers swear that there pups were straight coon dogs...never ran trash...so why is that?

The last paragraph, I think it has more to do with being born with natural intelligence than gestational imprinting, i have a few on my yard now that I’m not scared to say are just about 100% trash free, there was no trash breaking or shocking involved, all I did was pair them up with a proven dog and give them a ride to the woods, they figured out what game we were after, a few of my younger cur walker crosses will bump a coyote and red fox every now and then but that’s because they started themselves on them running loose at my house, they’ve bumped deer that have gotten up in front of them but realized quick that’s not what their supposed to be running, now with me saying this I’ll have one hell of a deer race next time I dump the box...


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[parker49]

i have a question ? and i' m not tying to be  smart or anything ....i but  see where some think the female is the way to go in breeding and i'm wondering where the thinking comes from ? is there facts  to back it up or  just opinion ?  i don't know ....myself i think it may be something when you start but after several generations  of tight  line breeding to me  on is  as  good as the other i just choose males cause  i hunt them more .....

[Reuben]

good males can bring you down the road  quite a bit faster .....  once  your down the road  it don't matter either male  or female  ......but  the male gives way more options .... we have  2  good breeder males  we  take females off each and breed them to females from each male crossed on the other ...last  litter is back on her daddy ......i'm done its  maintinace  now ....what else  can i do ?  i have a good solid  working line that is perty much trash free and hog minded .....now if i am  lucky enuff to keep that once in awhile super dog i'll breed around him a while ...... i like a good gyp i used to hunt  some good gyps .... but we are training young dogs  most every trip or finishing one  so i don't want his nose  up another dogs rear  or trying to trail one up ... i want him split trailing his own ..... so i do  hunt  one from tme to time but not much .....

good males can bring you down the road  quite a bit faster ..... once  your down the road  it don't matter either male  or female

I agree with your thought process...once you have a few generations you can breed around a female or male...

I see it a little different and many don't agree but there are others that have done it this way as well...

I called it purifying the gene pool...once I decided on my male after several generations of quality dogs before him. I bred him to females as soon as they were proven and then bred to a granddaughter who was also his daughter, nieces and grand nieces...every pup I ever kept made good dogs...the very best dog I ever owned I only bred one time because he was a crossbred...I realized even back then that I wouldn't get what I wanted consistently because of that outcross...to purify a gene pool we move forward...once we think we are in a good place just repeat breeding and then outcross as has already been mentioned...preferably a not to distant relative that compliments the bloodline and if the pups are satisfactory then slowly breed one back in to the bloodline and it is good for a few generations...there will be testing and evaluations...how early do they start, is it natural and easy (genetically inclined to react a certain way) for the pup, or does it take more exposure for it to click? These are all good questions that we should answer to ourselves when producing better dogs...you can get better dogs over time from the same bloodline...there are many things we can learn about a pup through observations..."reading the puppy scene" can oftentimes tell us what a pup will be one day...we want to do all we can to select the right pups for hunting and breeding...

One day one of my brothers asked me if one of my dogs would make a good blood trailing deer dog...I said probably as good as any good ones out there...so once the pups were about 10 weeks old I had him come over to pick up his pup...he was on track for me to keep but I wanted my brother to have a good pup so he took him home...long story short he never took him out of his yard...and my brother shoot his 7 mag, 270 and 30-06 in the back yard and that dog was gun shy and hated thunder and lightning...the dog was around 2 years old when he asked me if I wanted the dog back...I said sure and so I went to pick him up...I put him in the bay pen and he looked like a pro...the next day or so we went hunting and right of the bat the dogs struck and this dog takes his own hog and swims the brazos river about three quarters of a mile away...I get a call that someone has the dog so I have to drive around and get him...the next hunt he takes his own hog again and bays them about a mile from where he struck and my brother shoots to good hogs over this dog...the dog ran off for a bit and then came back to finish off the hogs so he thought...I didn't like the fact that he liked running alone...over a short time he started hunting with the pack more often than not...we can pick pups that will more than likely hunt one day...or we can put a little more effort in selecting those that are born with a bigger dose of the right genetic makeup...

[Reuben]

i have a question ? and i' m not tying to be  smart or anything ....i but  see where some think the female is the way to go in breeding and i'm wondering where the thinking comes from ? is there facts  to back it up or  just opinion ?  i don't know ....myself i think it may be something when you start but after several generations  of tight  line breeding to me  on is  as  good as the other i just choose males cause  i hunt them more .....

there are two thought processes that I know about but there are probably more...some say the dam because they are connected to her during gestation and/or because they are nurtured by here and this imprinting can be helpful...

[The Old Man]

I believe it takes both the exception being if either the male or female would be one of those rare blue hen reproducers even then you would be better off to not breed junk since you would be adding a big dose of recessives that can come out. Except for cloning one is no good without the other it takes two, one of each sex.

[bignasty]

Larry how did you breed females to females?

[t-dog]

I refer back to my mentoring and raising a lot because it's what molded my approach to most things I do in life. The other variable being experience. I had a family friend that was as much a grandfather to me as he was anything. The biggest part of his early years all he did was cowboy, even after he married. He was intelligent and knowledgeable about anything that he persued. I never knew him to do anything that he wasn't successful at. Dogs were a passion he and I shared, coon dogs to cow dogs to squirrel and hog dogs. He always said to find that special female. Everybody hunts males, their a dime a dozen so to speak. He told me that you could breed a great male to an average female and you were most likely going to get a litter of average pups and a dud or two. Breed an average male to an exceptional female though and you will likely get an average litter and an exceptional pup or two. There are always exceptions to the rule. Heck, you can breed exceptional to exceptional and get nothing if the genes aren't a niche. Over the years though, I personally have found this to be sound advice for me.