Milo's Necropsy Report - Page 5

Sorry for your loss,  is the breeder in the mittel   west?

Yes.  Milo was a long coat too.  We always groom daily as part of our routine.  I know it's not advised to get to puppies at the same time...especially littermates.  The dogs were taken to separate training facilities and we each spent time individually with them.  Don't get me wrong, they did spend a lot of time together, but we quickly established the pack hierarchy and although they obviously were like "frick and frack", both dogs paid attention to my wife and I, and we never had a problem.  The both had the same type of personality...really want to please and Milo was going to start training to become a therapy dog.  We've been a multiple GSD home for a long time and if i had the property, I would own 10 of them!

Mike

"Sorry for your loss,  is the breeder in the mittel   west?"


LOL...yes they are located in the "Mitt West"

Mike

 

I think that breeder will do the right thing.

I'd like to own more than one GSD too, but not more that one coat at a time . Mine had a massive double coat - one of those Shollie coats - it took me hours a week to groom him. I liked to keep the hair on his feet and around his ears trimmed to keep out the mats. He looked really nice, but what a job!!! 

Why not 3-3 on Urus? Because it's too damn close, that's why!  The SV strongly recommends that linebreeding be done no closer than the 5th or 4th generation.

Look, I approach genetics a bit differently from a breeder. I've got a degree in biology. The first thing that happens when the critters you're experimenting with get too closely inbred is you loose hardihood, longevity, and defective genes start to pop up. One of the reasons the offspring are no longer so hardy or resilient is because the immune systems get screwed up. And that can manifest itself as allergies.

It doesn't matter if Ursus is 3 generations back. What matters is he contributed the same set of genes to the pedigree twice and some of them are bound to be faulty. No dog is perfect. The closer the breeding, the greater the chance of those genes being in a homozygous state, where they are going to show themselves. We've got a closed genepool. All we can do is shuffle and re-shuffle the same set of genes again and again.

If you REALLY want to know how closely you're breeding, you need to calculate the coefficient of inbreeding.

Look back to the origins of the current showlines. An awful lot of very heavy inbreeding took place. My female has Palme 14 times in the 6th and 7th generation of her pedigree. People may say, "oh, that's too far back to have any effect" but that's not so. What happened back then fixed certain characteristics in the showlines: the red and black coat, for instance. The genes contrubuted by Palme, Uran and Canto didn't just vanish over the generations: they are still there, and due to that initial inbreeding, they are present in just about every single showline dog. Try finding a German showline without Palme in its pedigree. It's nearly as difficult as finding an American showline that doesn't have Lance of Fran-Jo!

Here's a couple of articles that explain it better than I can:

http://www.texterterriers.com/dbreeders.htm 

 http://www.briardsbriards.com/the_fable_of_old_blu.htm 

Sun silver, didn't mean to strike a nerve. I fully understand the ramifications of inbreeding, but when you mentioned 3-3 on Ursus specifically, it appeared that you had some knowledge of Ursus himself being THE problem.

Joanro, takes more than that to ruffle my feathers. I was just surprised you'd say that. You seem to be very knowledgeable about our breed, and I thought you'd know about the guidelines for linebreeding.

Urus's problem is his popularity. I'm not aware of any specific faults he passed on, though I'm sure there must be a few. Like I said, no dog is perfect.

Everyone needs to read the articles I linked to. They are vital to understanding the pitfalls of linebreeding/inbreeding. It also explains why this problem crops up in showline dogs rather than working lines.

Here's a short quote that sums up the problem pretty well:

Use of even the best popular sires, by its very nature, limits the frequency of some in the breed gene pool while simultaneously increasing the frequency of others. Since sons and grandsons of popular sires tend to become popular sires the trend continues, resulting in further decrease and even extinction of some genes while others become homozygous throughout the breed. Some of these traits will be positive, but not all of them.  


 

Sure hope you can get Rocco another GSD buddy soon. He was devastated too. Sounds like you were doing just fine with two pups. Some people can do great with two pups, others can't.

LOL...hardihood.  Do you mean hybrid vigor?