What mechanism drives the popular sire effect?
The answer is complex, but in the end, it can be reduced to two simple quests:
Breed for superman and breed from superman.
One of the most interesting factors that drives the most used sire effect is something called “prepotency.” That’s the ability of a sire to produce quality offspring over a wide range dams. The only way to prove this ability is to breed to as many dams as possible.
On the Border Wars blog, Christopher Landauer, explains that
[t]he greater theory of Prepotency is bunk: that superman sires should be able to overcome any problems in the dam, ideally the female being but a vessel to produce perfect copies of the sire. What isn’t bunk is the very real effect of rising homozygosity: the more homozygous the parent, the less variation in genes passed along to the offspring.
The culture celebrates stud dogs. Simply because a males can have many, many more offspring that females, sire have a greater influence on the gene pools than dams do. If one has a great stud dog that has superior traits in either phenotype or behavior, one has the ability to affect the greater development of the breed as a whole.
The owner of a good stud dog has great power, and with this power comes responsibility.
As a whole, this problem has not really been given careful consideration within the various fiefdoms, principalities, and cliques with the greater dog culture.
The goal is to produce that superman dog. One that has such superior traits in whatever utility he is needed for and to have him replicate those traits when bred to so many different bitches.
That is where power comes from within these dog culture systems.
If you have a stud dog that is totally awesome, one can really control the breed–for more than just the present generation.
Top producing sires are quite feted, at least within the AKC system. (Here’s the record for AKC St. Bernard sires. The healthiest breed ever, right?)
That is a problem.
So how are we going to solve this problem of the popular sires?
There are some answers, but they are almost all contrary to the prevailing wisdom and cultural mores inherent within these systems.
Line-breeding and inbreeding are the best ways to produce offspring that are relatively similar in whatever way one desires.
It takes a bit more skill to produce the exact qualities in more heterozygous stock.
And we can’t mention the idea that we might want to open registries to allow new blood in.
That idea is either universally p00-pooed as it is in the big multi-breed registries or given lip service as it is in the JRTCA and ABCA, which are, for all intents and purposes, Potemkin open registries.
The only real open system with dogs is one that exists for racing sled dogs, which doesn’t even have a central registry system. You simply breed what runs hard and long in very cold conditions with what runs long and hard in cold conditions. That really doesn’t exist anywhere else in the greater dog culture, although the feists and curs still exist within something like it, even as they are all being standardized into breeds.
Domestic dogs possess great genetic diversity. However, in the West, it has been sequestered into various breeds or strains. (In the East, well, as we have seen in China and Japan, they have simply adopted the Western system.)
Besides opening the registries, we have lots of things we could do but are so politically impossible to do on a large scale.
The notion that we should really worry about how genetically diverse the various bloodlines are is simply a major affront to the prevailing wisdom.
Diversity means less predictability.
I have read dozens of dog books that extol the main virtue of the purebred dog: we know what we’re getting when we pick a certain breed.
That means that somewhere there must exist a happy medium between preserving genetic diversity and producing dogs that have a relatively consistent phenotype and temperament.
I think the answer may lie with the boxer/corgi hybridization program. There a naturally bob-tailed corgi was bred to white boxer. And within just a few generations of breeding back, dogs were produced that looked and acted just like boxer. But they had natural bobtails. (With country after country banning tail docking, is this really such a stupid thing to consider?)
If a breeder can do that with two breeds that are as different as boxers and Pembroke corgis, then one surely would be able to produce a consistent phenotype and behavior with the use of two similar breeds.
Just a little variance on just a few genes separates the different dog breeds. It is one reason why dogs change type over just a very short period of time. It is also why wild wolves vary so much in appearance and have always done so.
But it is hard to think like this, when the culture is all about breeding for superman and breeding from superman.
To have a superman means that one’s breeding program is immortal.
To breed from a superman means that one gets a bit of the super gene and over time, the breed will become more consistent in type and temperament.
Until the inbreeding depression sets in.
But that’s as long way off.
It is better to have results as soon as possible. That’s how one wins. That’s how one gets closer to immortality within the breed.
This is the quickest and surest way.
The other way, well, that requires a some more work, a little bit more study, and lot more commitment to actually produce. It requires tolerating some variance and maybe a bit of mediocrity to reach a better goal.
It is not a short-cut. It is the harder way.
Which is why the number of breeders who actually consider genetic is actually quite low.
It’s not the fastest way to breed for superman.
***
Everyone should check out that post at Border Wars, not just for the discussion of prepotency, but for the really good graphics that explain what inbreeding is and what it does to the population.
“The other way, well, that requires a some more work, a little bit more study, and lot more commitment to actually produce. It requires tolerating some variance and maybe a bit of mediocrity to reach a better goal.”
DINGDINGDING! You win the internets, today. A telling conversation I had with a Dal person, who insisted that the LUA Dals will never be purebred (I have actually had variations of this conversation with several people):
Me: If you want a desired characteristic or gene, you find a breed that has it and cross it in.
Dal person: But what do you do with the puppies?
Me: What do you mean, what do you do with the puppies? You grow them out and pick the best one with the characteristics you want, then breed it back into the purebred line and see what you get.
Dal person: But you can’t show them until they look like purebreds again! What do you do with them?
Me: :::runs head into brick wall repeatedly:::
This makes me sad, because I know so many people in dogs who DO get it, and these kinds of breeders make them look bad, simply by association.
Tell her to advertise the pups as Doodlemations.
HAHA or DallyDoodles.
This is a result of the incredibly poisonous gospel that has taken hold of many Conformation people, that the -only- ethical reason for breeding is to ‘get something to show’. There is no room for longterm strategies when these people believe that a breeding is a failure if the first generation cannot be considered ‘show quality’. Breeding dogs that are not competitive in the show ring is considered the greatest sin someone can commit against the breed.
Its because they see the dogs as units in some kind of game–not real living creatures. The answer to his question is so easy. You love ’em.
[…] greater theory of Prepotency is bunk: that superman sires should be able to overcome any problems in the dam, ideally the female being but a vessel to […]
In a way, inbreeding is an admission of incompetence. It’s a dramatic statement that you are inept at finding a single sire outside of your own kennel that would be complementary to your bitch and your goals.
This is unforgivable when most breeders are selecting on so few traits. It’s inane to think that you could not find those traits in a dog that is not close blood.
Breeding to such a dog would be no less effective than inbreeding. You are still breeding like to like in that respect, but you are likely not inbreeding on the thousands of other loci that are irrelevant to your whim but are very relevant to the dog’s health and the breed’s wellbeing.
You do not always see closely bred dogs that are breeding within their own kennel. I see a lot of closely bred litters where the stud do is not owned by the bitch owner. It’s for the same reason, though. You often see adds where the litter goes bad to Studly Champion five or six times.
In some breeds it is actually difficult to find dogs of right phenotype that do not also share a genotype.
I’ve often wondered if there are many shelties in the US that do not go back to Ch. Halstor’s Peter Pumpkin (whelped 1965). He sired at least 160 champion offspring, so heaven knows how many total puppies he produced. They did a lot of tight inbreeding on him (he was sometimes bred back to his daughters whose mothers were also his daughters).
The issue of prepotency comes from examples like the Morgan horse and Thoroughbreds. The difference is that stallions can be bred to a large number of mares in even one year, and the “what do you do with the rejects” was fairly apparent. They could still be useful, or if not, they could be eaten. With dogs, you have a problem. One: there really aren’t that many bitches a given stud is bred to. One hundred sounds like a lot, but not compared to a “most popular sire” bull. Second, there’s cultural objections to disposing of a puppy the way one might do with a reject heifer. And finally, the majority of purebred dog folk see only “one” venue for their dogs – the show ring.
The rise of the doodles and the other 50/50 dogs is actually in a way a good thing. If a labradoodle is healthy, looks good, can function as a seeing eye dog, then it DOES give a way for a person to “deal” with those F1 crosses. Is a Belgian/GSD cross likely to be functional? Yes. KNPV records indicate so. And a herding Belgian x a herding GSD is likely to be fully capable of herding. There’s plenty of furor in ASCA about the BC/Aussie crosses to show that plenty of them could herd. The problem with using the corgi/Boxer crosses or the LUI Dals as an example is BOTH of these projects were done by individuals with a lot more knowledge about genetics than most breeders. Moreover, they were able and willing to keep more than a single puppy from each generation or breeding. For most AKC breeders, you have a problem in that the breeder may have 5 or even fewer dogs. They may not be willing to step out of the competitive rings for 2 or 3 generations (keep in mind that most AKC folk are only in the “game” for 5 years or one –two generations). Those in the AKC for longer than 5 years are exactly those who have succeeded in the “most popular sire” game – so asking them to abandon their program for another more long term one is difficult.
And of course there are those who quietly brought in a “ringer” and said nothing. The issue of false pedigrees is one no one wants to discuss. DNA may limit that. I’d rather the pedigrees be correct than to have someone sneak in dog X and say it was dog y. But certainly some “new” blood had gotten into breeds via this method. And sometimes some inbreeding goes unnoticed by the same method.
AKC allowing mixes to participate in other than conformation may be opening the door. Currently it is only the “companion dog” events. But if it goes to performance venues – well, then the person who mixes a Golden Retriever with an Irish Setter and finds they still have a dog capable of field trials could enter. Certainly one who crossed a working Flattie with a Golden (or even a Lab) could find a venue. Of course, it has to be a venue that allows these dogs to remain intact, something that seems to be difficult even for those who think “mixes” are healthier.
Nor does it have to be AKC. Any venue that is reasonably recognized (field trial venues, UKC, etc) that allows those F1 and F2 to have success is likely to reward those who figure “hm, maybe my superdog doesn’t come from doing the same old, same old….” After all, that’s how breeds started in the first place.
Peggy Richter
The process followed by the best breeders in years past was fairly simple: linebreed for 2 or 3 generations, then bring in an outcross that complements the base line. Keep different, distinct, lines/strains going within the breed, so as to maintain resources for outcrossing. Inbreed rarely and very carefully. Outcross for specific reasons. Practice rigorous selection, especially as to soundness (both physical and mental) and health.
Maintaining “diversity” within a breed means that a range of genetic material is available throughout the BREED. That is, different strains, families, lines. This is very different than promoting random heterozygosity within each individual, and losing the distinction of strains.
To use a (somewhat exaggerated) example, if one wishes to paint a portrait, one uses a variety of colors, carefully selected and placed on the canvas. One does not throw all the colors into one pot, stir it up, and expect the result to be either useful or pleasing.
Expert breeders are like skilled artists; unfortunately, the majority of dog breeders are neither expert nor skilled, so they end up producing “paint by numbers” efforts…and sometimes they can’t even read the numbers, so to speak….
Unfortunately we can’t do that anymore. Keeping a large kennel of dogs so you CAN keep two or more lines and breeding enough litters to have a good choice of pups to move forward from is no longer PC. And in some places it’s illegal, due to limit and breeding laws.
Changes in breeding culture are almost as much to blame for the state of purebred dogs right now as closed registries. I think the changes have simply accelerated the inevitable, however.
But it CAN be done…not within one kennel, as Jess suggests, but using a number of cooperating breeders, each of whom may have only a small number of dogs. I know several Golden Retriever breeders who operate in this way, and quite successfully.
Yes, it was perhaps easier in some ways when there were truly large kennels that could each maintain a strain, but with the instant communication and faster travel of today, far better record-keeping for results of health exams, etc, improved veterinary care, and other technological advances, we have it better in many ways.
However, I do agree about the “changes in breeding culture” statement. That’s a discussion that could consume considerable space and time…
wow superdog…,nice info
” Is a Belgian/GSD cross likely to be functional? Yes.”
—In fact, there are several breeding programs within the US military that use that GSD/Belgian (or Dutch) Shepherd Dog mix. GSD for strength, weight and stamina & Malinois or Dutch Shepherd for speed & agility. They are terrific military working dogs.