Natural History

When on peruses different dog breed sites and literature, it is not unusual to come across something called “formula breeding.” Formula breeding is nothing more than a specific “formula” of line breeding in which a particular relative or set of relatives is held in common by both the sire and dam.

These are the “recipes” to set a line.

In dogs, the best known formula is called Brackett’s Formula. It is not particularly complicated. It is named after pioneering German shepherd dog breeder Lloyd Brackett. He started his own Long-Worth strain in 1912, when the breed was in its infancy in North America.

His formula for breeding best be described as “Let the sire of the sire become the grandsire on the dam’s side.”

Over time, the alleles become concentrated within a line, making it distinct.

That is the Brackett’s formula in a nutshell.

It is interesting that Brackett put a lot of emphasis on the sires.

Unless one is breeding sex-linked traits, it doesn’t matter what  gender the ancestor ancestor the breeder chose to include multiple times in the pedigree. It will still be the same genetic contribution.

A dog bred in a classical Brackett’s Formula breeding will have 37.5 percent of its genes from that chosen “sire of the sire.” One could get that same percentage if the sexes of the chosen dog were changed.

But if one chooses from sires, rather than dams, one can have many more opportunities to do Brackett’s Formula breedings. Sires always produce more puppies than dams do in their lifetimes. So one can more easily find males that fit into a Brackett’s formula pedigree than bitches.

And if one really thinks about this breeding system carefully, it is actually something that can and does feed into the popular sire effect. How does one find  a lot  of “quality offspring” that share sire and grandsire in this fashion? It is easy if certain sires produced hundreds of puppies over just a few years’ time. Brackett’s Formula requires that the breeder choose only the best quality stud dogs to breed from, which almost saying choose from the winners and the descendants of winners.

Brackett was for very strict selection in choosing breeding stock from litters born of these breedings.

So over time, the amount of genetic diversity within any line would be reduced.

And Brackett was not a fan of outcrossing– “only for definite purposes.” To Brackett,most dogs don’t have real strain and outcrossing is just a way of killing a “real” strain:

One familiar with many breeds of dogs is struck by the fact that few breeds have many real strains within them. Uninformed breeders speak of “my strain” or “his strain’ when all that any of them have is a kennel of dogs possessing hit-or-miss pedigrees with a hodgepodge of ancestors, perhaps including “Champions” in their pedigrees, which, of course, indicates to the cognoscente that the advertiser is a rank and uninformed novice of the first order. In conversations, these people usually speak of their “strains” when, as stated above, all they have is a mixture of several strains, or perhaps one of “just dogs” with no rhyme or reason for any of them having been mated together.

However, where there ARE real strains within any breed, one seldom finds them unmixed with the blood of other so-called strains, because most breeders start their strain with the same ancestor, or ancestors. This is done because those mutual ancestors were considered to be great dogs of their time, as they probably were, or else a breeder knowledgeable and serious-minded enough to start building a strain would not have chosen them. WHEN such superior specimens have in mutuality been selected by the founders of different strains within a breed, the so-called out-crossing between their strains is less hazardous than would he the using of animals with either no, or very distant, relationship.

If it’s not inbred, it’s not a strain.

And not surprisingly, this system is actually a very good way to create a line of very distinct and very homozygous dogs.

The German Shepherd Dog Club of America actually gives an award in Lloyd Brackett’s name for any breeder “whose dogs display a consistency of breed type and have created a line of German Shepherd Dogs easily recognizable within the breed.” That means a award to a breeder has created a particularly homozygous line that has very low genetic diversity.

Within a closed registry system that already rewards and celebrates popular sires, such a breeding system is really nothing more than a slower and more sophisticated method of Robert Bakewell’s system for livestock improvement.

Bakewell was one of the pioneers of selective breeding for livestock, and he produced “improved” strains of sheep, beef cattle, and draft horses in the middle to the late eighteenth century.

What was Bakewell’s system for establishing homozygous lines that had the desire market animal system?

It was simply called “in and in.” Bakewell bred very close relatives of his stock together, and it meant that he could very quickly establish traits and even exaggerate them.

The only difference between Bakewell’s system and what is produced under Brackett’s Formula is that Brackett’s formula is a bit slower. It takes more generations to estalish what a Bakewell system would have established more quickly.

But if one follows Brackett’s advice on outcrossing only rarely, the results are going to be the same– a genetically depauperate lineage.

Now, Brackett’s Formula is a more sophisticated than Bakewell’s, but if the results are essentially the same, they both need to be examined with the same scrutiny.

Brackett believed that “careful selection” alone could atone for the problems that happen with inbreeding–“It all boils down to CAREFUL SELECTION.” As if human selective process were somehow equivalent to those in nature.

Brackett also erroneously believed that inbreeding was common in all natural organisms:

In wild animal life amongst deer, foxes, rodents, cats, dogs, horses and cattle, inbreeding, checked only by the SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, has prevailed uninterruptedly since time immemorial. As a result, there has been a pronounced similarity prevailing in the age-long result; nor is there any inherent degeneracy traceable to such inbreeding.

This is simply false. Foxes, wild dogs, and all species of cat have very strong inbreeding avoidance behavior. Wolves disperse over vast distances from their natal packs to establish their own families with what are likely unrelated mates. Wolves have very strong inbreeding avoidance behavior.

And while natural selection is a check the problems inbreeding , artificial selection is not a substitute for natural selection in the Darwinian sense.

Brackett’s methodology is like Bakewell’s in that it assumes that there are few consequences for reducing genetic diversity. All one must do is select from the best of the population and breed tightly from those animals.

Such ideas may have had some merit in the short run.

In the long run, one can see what they do to the population genetics of any given breed or strain.

Whether one uses Brackett or Bakewell, the results are the same: reduced genetic diversity.

***

To make matters worse, Brackett also uses pseudo-history from the Bible to make the claim that inbreeding made the “Jewish race” stronger:

We have read of an old Syrian tribesman named Terati who had three sons and a daughter named respectively Nahor, Haran, Abram and Sarai, by different wives. Contrary to modern custom, the two latter (half brother and sister) married, and their son married Nahor’s granddaughter who was twice his first cousin, once removed, and they were known as Isaac and Rebekah. Their son Jacob married his two first cousins (great-granddaughters of Nahor, Terah’s son) and had eight sons, who became the founders of the most persistently influential nation in human history, the ever-miraculous Jewish race.

Eight of the twelve founders of tribes have each four separate crosses to Terah, and they passed a law to establish their tradition that their children should not marry into strange families, which law survives in essence today. Of the many charges brought against the Jews in all of history, nobody has ever levied, or even heard, that of degeneracy.

The Bible may say those things. However, the best that can be said about that genealogy is that it is suspect, and it is certainly not worthy of comment in any kind of scientific discussion about animal breeding practices.  The Old Testament said that some of these people lived in excess of 900 years. Take all of that with grain of salt, please.

It is also just a touch Anti-Semitic in the Peter Griffin “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein” sort of way.

This discussion makes the whole analysis from Lloyd Brackett quite suspect.

***

For a more detailed critique of Lloyd Brackett’s nonsense, check out Christopher Landauer’s post, where Brackett’s anti-Mendellian pseudo-scientific assumptions are exposed.