Christopher Landauer has performed more analysis on Lloyd Brackett’s theories.
It was he who got me looking at “the formula,” which seems so ubiquitous as the preferred “recipe” for linebreeding for many dog breeders.
Although it is not necessarily a way of driving people to select from just a few elite sires, it is the logical conclusion of his line-breeding formula.
It is somewhat amazing that Brackett believed that outcrossing was so dangerous to a line. I am fairly certain that no modern breeder line breeds with so much trepidation about bringing in new blood.
(I could be wrong about this assumption.)
One should keep in mind that although the hypothetical dog named Brackett has a COI of 6.25%, a real world breeding within a closed registry breed would likely have a higher COI than that. Most of these breeds have a very finite number of founders, and if breeders are selecting from these elite sires to produce the majority of puppies, the COI’s go up really quickly.
Brackett assumes that all outcrossed dogs have severe defects, and the only way to get rid of defects is to tightly breed. It doesn’t usually work that way. If a defect is recessive, breeding out the recessive trait can lead to a doubling down on another recessive defect– one that no one knew existed because it was very rare for two dogs to be homozygous for the recessive alleles causing the defect.
It becomes the genetic whack-a-mole.
In my perusing of the breeder website, I found a piece that talked about how wonderful it was that Scottish terriers no longer were as commonly affected by von Willebrand disease. So much were they hooting about this, that they forgot to mention that the average lifespan of Scottish terriers had decreased within the past decade. The Brackett notion that one can “improve” the health and quality of dog through very tight breeding has been wrong.
You might be able to breed out certain genetic disorders through very tight breeding, but you will never get rid of all of them. And the only thing one can do is develop ways of shuffling the genetic deck against a dog developing genetic health disorders that are caused by recessive genes.
Of course, that leave out all the MHC stuff that seems to way over Lloyd Brackett’s head.
You’re very right about the rampant push toward higher COIs, I just haven’t gotten to that part yet.
Brackett reccomends, after you do it once, do it again! And he speaks so horribly about dogs with “a wide open pedigree” and associates that with being horribly diseased.
Not only is he asking for COIs to skyrocket, he’s asking to inbreed on inbred dogs. And that’s the real kicker for disease. An inbred dog is more likely to have doubled up on a rare or new recessive itself, then inbreeding on that dog is likely to make that disease set in the population.
He’s also the one that demands that breeders need to make their own strains to justify even more inbreeding beyond that which is used to found a breed.
There are some breeders who still believe high COI is a desirable thing. When I was looking at Italian Greyhounds, I found one breeder who seemed perfect — health tested, coursed their dogs, etc. and then I read their breeding philosophy where they spoke in glowing terms of a high COI of certain of their dogs. They even had the COIs posted on each dog’s page, so it was clear they were actively calculating them and then seeing high numbers as some kind of plus.
It kind of freaked me out, to be honest.
Sometimes the goal seems to be to replicate a great dog of the past.
Yes, and yet these same people think cloning is barbaric and unethical!
It also puts the lie to the concept of ‘bettering the breed’ or making each generation better than the one before.
I would suggest that critics keep in mind that when Brackett was active, just about the only thing breeders had to go on was phenotype. There were no genetic tests. Often anecdotal reports were inaccurate, or even deliberately falsified. For these reasons and more, many breeders preferred to keep within the cohort of dogs that they knew personally.
And with the often-unknown backgrounds of many founders of various breeds, a certain degreee of close breeding probably made sense at that time. Now, of course, we have so much more knowledge available to us (maybe even too much, at times!) and no doubt more will be available in future years. (If we’re still allowed to breed dogs then).
To castigate Brackett because he had no knowledge of the MHC is senseless. Might as well condemn the Model T Ford because it didn’t have safety belts and power brakes.
I’m not castigating him for that.
I am castigating him for basing his whole formula on the assumption that natural selection and artificial selection are the same thing.
They aren’t.
And Charles Darwin made it clear.
I did a google search on breeders who use this formula (probably not as extensively as Brackett suggests), but the formula is treated as some kind of gold standard– even though virtually all the scientific assumptions Brackett puts forth have been falsified.
Not to mention the nonsense about Jewish people being more fit because of records of early inbreeding in the bible.
He was writing in the twentieth century, not the seventeenth, so such a claim really discredits him. And then you look into his scientific assumptions and look at what Mendel and Darwin actually said and what modern science now says, and I don’t know how anyone could use.
It’s like using Lamarckian or Lysenkoist methodology in breeding programs.
Sometimes I wonder if dogs would be healthier if they are bred accordingly to lamarckian or Lysenkoist standards.
But then I remember what happen to trial dogs sold as pets.
I thought about that too.
I think the problem is standards. When you have a platonic standard, you can have an infinite many things that must be / just so / and thus you have an excuse to inbreed for each and every one of them.
The working people, even though I constantly say that they do the same harmful things, are clearly doing so more slowly. Perhaps it’s because when you have a much more objective standard, you allow any route to success.
This allows competition and innovation. Having a platonic ideal has no room for these things.
Standards only exist when people have the time and money to establish them. Most of the ones who use them for actual work don’t have the time for that, nor do they necessary have the luxury of paying someone or take on a breeding program to establish the superdogs’ bloodlines.
The ones who are using them for actual works as stockdogs, protection, search’n’rescue, military and service dogs don’t really care if Fido beats the last champion by a few points or a few seconds. All they care about is if the dogs can work in its daily environment on the terrain they use them for and is reliable be it being able to hold a person back upon impeding traffic, can reliably deliver medicines in middle of a war-zone, able to pin down a fugitive climbing over a fence or being able to drive cattle on the harsh and rugged Rocky Mountains trails. These are scenarios trials don’t necessarily test for, and even if they do, there are multitude of other scenarios not tested for either.
I guess what I am trying to say, a cattle dog driving from the foothills of Alberta to the rough terrain of the East Kootenays via the Rocky Mountain is going to have a different working quality compared to the same breed working out on the Prairie. A guide dog from Tokyo isn’t going to have the same qualities as a guide dog in New York. So, at least the people with actual work dogs have some genetic variations best suited for the environment they live in.
Trials and competition folks don’t have these micro-environmental differences. I say micro-environment because it’s how subspecies of frogs and salamanders are classified; the same frog who lives half a mile away in the mountains isn’t going to do as well as the ones who live in the hot, basking lowlands and vice versa despite genetically being the same species.
We castigate people who still build cars without safety belts and power brakes, no?
That’s the point. Debunking Brackett is just the first step. The important part is that people STILL use his guide blindly as some sort of safe science. That’s the crime.
I’m getting to that in my posts.
But Brackett also knew a lot more than just phenotype. He uses very specific genetic terms (at least mentions them) in his essays.
But he still believes in falsehoods that out crossed pedigrees are necessarily filled with disease, that magical prepotent males are more essential than females who are seed beds, etc.
His justification of inbreeding in human culture is laughable. It was known, even in the 1960s, that the Jews were suffering from inbred disease. Tay Sachs was identified in the 1880s.
And it’s also a horrible arrogant position to assume as Brackett does, that homozygosity is superior in every way to heterozygosity.
And don’t forget, he’s an unashamed champion, if not messiah, of the requirement of making your own distinct “type” within a breed. The breed within a breed, and the only way to get there, in his words, is inbreeding.
This is the very ethic which took dog breeding from improvement to ego building ribbon chasing where the dogs are just a prop in a sick play.
The whole “strain” thing doesn’t make sense. If the animals are judged accordingly to the same standards established by the clubs, then how can someone have their own strain?
The only thing that would give credit to that notion of “strains” is on a macro scale, not something as minute as a breeding program, where each countries’ kennel clubs and each region’s working club or trial clubs have their own standards.
To fulfill the proposal of a strain, as Brackett is advocating for, is to withdraw completely from the competitions, ignore the demands of external forces and have your own conformation show hosted at your own home using only the dogs from your breeding program.
Actually, Brackett’s version of ‘strain’ is on a micro level. To establish a strain within a breed, you have to work on the micro level, as working on the macro level would indeed put you outside the breed standard.
What Brackett is talking about as a strain is basically just family characteristics. A certain expression, eye set, richness of color, all within the standard, but peculiar to that particular strain. That’s why he insists that you must start out with excellent dogs. You cannot establish a ‘look’ if you are busy trying to improve the basic dog. You also cannot establish a look without lots of very close breeding.
Back in the heydays of the big kennels that bred a lot of dogs, everybody had a strain. Generally, you have to breed a lot of dogs to establish a strain, because you end up discarding a lot of dogs that are good, but don’t have the visual stamp you’re looking for.
Part of Brackett’s contempt for outcrossing comes from classism. Traditionally, the big kennel owners were wealthy, they kept lots of dogs, bred lots of litters, and had staff to help look after them. Lots of money there. After WWII, when everybody could get a purebred dog, and show and breed on a small scale, you get a wider showing and breeding demographic. More outcrossing simply because people cannot afford to keep lots of dogs and breed lots of litters, and must find their stud dogs locally instead of shipping bitches across the country. The effort of breeding to establish a strain was (and is) simply beyond fanciers of more modest means.
Breeding on a small scale, it is a long slow road to establishing a recognizable line.
Many, many years ago, I actually had a long time breeder of, I think, Maltese, tell me that all these ‘pet owners that keep their dogs in the house’ would be the downfall of the fancy. Real breeders kept a lot of dogs and kept them in kennels, not as house pets.
In the 1930’s n West Virginia, people were breeding strains of foxhound, within the macro-strains of Walker and Trigg within the breed we call the American foxhound. Most of these people were dirt poor farmers, but were able to keep large numbers because they fed their dogs shot varmints and roadkill. The classism that comes from that arena is from the Tuckahoe types who follow hounds with horses and those people who live in the mountains and run foxhounds at night while standing around a bonfire and drinking whiskey.
Of course, people bred curs and feists without sitting around worrying about strains, and the dogs performed wonderfully. Now, they are being “improved.” At one time, they produced those dogs and they were genetically diverse. The same goes with working farm shepherd dogs.
Working class dogs were genetically diverse. And Brackett’s disdain for outbred dogs also is reflected in the degeneration of the word “cur,” which too many people use for mongrel.
Oh, yes, dogs are just rife with tribalism.
Yes, that what I initially thought he meant, but it’s rather short-sighted since dogs are still being entered in competitions. Creating a strain you want makes sense in the short run, but eventually people will want the bloodline who constantly win over and over again, thus eventually dissolving any other strains available.
Actually, no. Part of the attraction of breeding dogs for conformation is to win over other good dogs. You may start out with dogs that aren’t very competitive, but over time you will breed better dogs that will eventually beat the ones from lines that were trouncing yours when you started.
If judges were impartial robots you might end up with an entire breed that looked exactly alike. They’re human, though, and they aren’t ALL going to keep putting up the same dogs all the time.
Isn’t that’s the same thing as I said about it occurring over the long-term? Yes, humans are faddists, but the bloodlines of previous winners are still being forwarded by those who trick themselves into thinking they’re are attempting to create their own strains.
Anyway, his strain argument does make sense to me, because that’s the mentality of people who own animals simply for a decor in their living room where people are more materialistic, rather than trying to be better than the Joneses. I just don’t see it occurring in a competitive environment. Maybe I am too much of a libertarian to see it any other way.
Yes, the strain concept is hugely destructive. It benefits no one but the kennel owner. The dogs are worse individually for no benefit and the breed as a whole is worse, again, for no benefit.
I can only imagine that it’s for ego and to circumvent the supposed anonymity of showing (this isn’t that effective, the handler is usually a dead give-away) , especially in GSDs where there’s a rampant amount of “double handling” where the owner outside the ring will try tricks to get the dog’s attention (usually with a distinct sound maker) to improve the dog’s “expression” in the ring.
I agree with what you’re saying as not making sense though, as there are hugely conflicting forces at work. To meet an ideal that is supposedly communal and specific, but then also stand out so boldly that your dogs are easy to identify on sight.
That’s why there’s the standard as written and then the virtual standard. There are, for example, no color prohibitions in the Border Collie in the AKC, but I’ve witnessed first hand the breed club contest a dog’s coloring.
There are also numerous features in the top winning show BCs that you would assume are written in the standard, but do not appear. Some are legacy of the standards in the UK and Aus/NZ where we get almost all the show stock, and some are just fads.