Breeding thoughts or Any anecdotal evidence?

[perk]

Was wondering for those of you guys using running dogs or crosses. Do you think the male or female influences propensity to tree more? For example have you experienced, do you think that a treeing male bred to female who doesn't tree or vise versa would be more likely to produce offspring that would tree? Be it tree hound to a running gyp or running hound to tree bred gyp? Or if your looking to cross tree dog x running and both dogs tree would you think it matters which one was sire / dam? Example running male that trees to treeing walker, or hard treeing walker bred to treeing running gyp? What if only 1 treed do you think it's more important for it to be the male or female?
Hope the question is clear...Any thoughts?

[merlo_105]

Perk I am by no far a breeder and most likely will only have a litter here and there for myself. I hAve a young female running dog that was treeing early in the NW. I bred her to a male that is a good enough locate tree dog. Most the pups came out looking like and built like the Mom. Two of the pups I kept started treeing around 8-9 10-11 months way earlier then expected. But that's about the same time mom started treeing. The third pup I kept I think will tree in short order. None of the pups have had game lowered out to them. The pups that went to friends are doing good around the tree staying close to the tree no back tracking So far. Will be interesting to see what others have to say or hear about there crosses

[pegleg]

This is a great question. Sex linked traits have a real impact in some species and perhaps others that haven't been studied as thoroughly. I am really critical of the qualities in any female I breed. With male's I want a good solid hound with good genetics but I may not require a " super star" it seems to work well. But truthfully if you find breeding a simple venture your not trying very hard.
I have bred brothers to a pair of sister's and alternated them the next year and can say it did change the outcome some even on these hounds who are pretty tight genetically.
If treeing is what you are looking for I personally would be damn selective. I would look for individuals that tree in a style I like.
Then being me would breed a treeing female to a really good tenacious track dog. One with a very even dependable style and temperament. Then if it happened this produced a good solid male pup that treed like I like it would be line bred back on the female side. I don't advocate breeding any hound with big faults But I do tend to scrutinize the female and the ancestors more then the male. Temperament issues seem very pronounced when coming from the female as do size and physical dependability.
Male dogs are often more physical and enduring especially when compared directly with female's that have been bred and have some age on them.
Things being equal I avoid male's that show dominance , marking behaviors, and laziness.
I believe the female has a slightly more pronounced affect on pups then the male in a line or family breeding programme.
On out cross matings it seems female impact physical traits a bit more then the male but everything else seems a genetic gamble.
As most of my dogs tree in about the same general style I can't say I've got a lot of experience on it's impact. On the few outcrosses I've done some tree style seems to get passed along regardless of parent.
I prefer dogs that develop "treeing" after they've been hunted some or a bit of training on it. I long ago developed a distrust of lines where very young puppies tree mindlessly.
Accuracy is more important to me. I don't care if a hound only barks 15 times a minute if that cat is there and the hound is solid . I am happy with it.
I don't have running dogs but I do have a strong dose of non treeing hound blood in my dogs and can only say it's a improvement and far better then some treeing lines I've hunted.
If you find the answer I'm interested in hearing it. But tree is fairly low on my list of requirements so long as they do and are accurate.

[perk]

Pegleg, I'm not looking for an answer particularly for myself , I am lucky enough to raise a few pups here and there that suit me and follow a piece of game around, was just having the same convo with my father about the running dogs he has seen tree over last 50 years if he noticed a trend or if one parent seemed responsible for that trait. Wondered how some others viewed it, or if even thought of it, since out west there are 1000% more tree/running crosses than here on east coast. Thanks for the response!

[david]

Perk, I know nothing about it, but will give one example I know of if you are just building a data base.

There is a well known and influential breeder that did what I can only call "composite breeding". I don't know of any one else who breeds this way, and expect it will make most breeders feel un-easy. If his line showed a weakness, he would look for a dog that was "over-endowed" (to a fault) with that trait for an out-cross.

So I know of an out cross where he bred to a female whose treeing instinct was way out of balance, in order to bring a better balance of treeing into his dogs, (because he saw a weakness in treeing.) I don't know what else he may have seen in her, but she was way too much of a tree dog for any houndman i am familiar with.

And, like Pegleg said, genetics is complicated, but he improved the treeing in his line by it, and his line of dogs were/are very balanced treedogs used by some successful cat hunters; balance brought to them by a female.

I sure can't say it is a sex-linked trait. Just offering a tiny piece of data. Hopefully there will be more.

[Andyva]

David, the breeder you describe is doing what the dairy cattle industry has been doing for a very long time. They have their animals appraised, they get a spreadsheet of all important traits, on a scale. Things like teat length, mostly stuff to do with the udder, but they take conformation in to account. When they look at a cow, they try to pick a bull, based on information from his female relatives to cover up her shortcomings and tone down some of her over achievements. They get a lot of data on these bulls, cause they are AI and have a ton of daughters on the ground already. This would be a little tougher to do with dogs, by the time a guy figured out what was subject to throw what, he is usually pushing up daisies, and the next guy doesn't even recognize the traits the same way as the original breeder. At least with dogs, you don't have to worry about breeding a male that has no udder to a female to get good udders, you can see what you are dealing with in both parents.

There are sex linked genes, they seem to be a little more common in poultry, but may be just less defined in mammals. You have recessive and dominant genes, these are pretty well understood. If treeing was recessive, they would only tree if you bred a tree dog to a tree dog. If treeing was a dominant trait, you would get around half tree dogs and half not in a litter where there was a cross. This assuming, maybe incorrectly, that treeing is influenced by a single genetic trait.

I have given this some thought, I know next to nothing about hound breeding, but a heck of a lot about cattle breeding. I think that it is more likely that treeing is an incomplete dominant gene. This one is tricky. The way it works in cows, lets just pick the roan gene, a single gene determining coat color patterns. It's an incomplete dominant. You get a red and white "ticked" cow (think shorthorn or some longhorn) it is carrying the roan gene in heterozygous form. Breed it to a solid cow and you will get 50% solids and 50% roan. Breed it to another roan, and you will get 25% solid, 50% roan, and the other 25% will be almost solid white. These solid whites are homozygous for the roan gene. Breed them on a solid colored cow herd and they will throw 100% roans.

Translated to tree dogs, let's suppose that the homozygous form of the tree gene, if it is an incomplete dominant gene, is the tree happy, slick treeing idiot. Most people aren't going to breed to him, and get 100% tree dogs, unless he is one of the bench champion, treeing contest winning coonhound studs that is retired from the night hunt circuit. This leaves a lot of dogs in the hands of hunters that are heterozygous for tree, and, when crossed about half of the pups will tree, a quarter of them won't, and a quarter will be tree happy idiots. This doesn't seem so far off to me.

Keep in mind, when I'm throwing around these percentages, they will hold true when you breed 1000 offspring, one litter might be way off from these percentages, so that makes it kind of hard to prove.

[david]

[Andyva]

The roan gene is actually the white gene. (In shorthorns or some longhorns) It is incompletely dominant, so in heterozygous form it comes through as salt and pepper sprinklings of white making a dappled effect. (The white in Charolaise cattle is a completely different gene mutation, and not an incomplete dominant but a "modifying" gene, in case any one wants to point out that they bred a Charolaise cow to an angus bull and got a grey calf.)

So, supposing that the treeing gene was an incomplete dominant, and the slick treeing idiot was the homozygous form, he would throw 100% heterozygous for treeing when bred to a non treeing dog. The heterozygous for treeing dogs might be a little looser at the tree, or take a while to lock down, or might take longer to start treeing. The homozygous tree dog might not be the idiot that I referenced, but in actuality a dog that trees hard and early in life.

I'm sure to some extent, it could be a learned behavior, but it makes sense that it is the result of a genetic mutation somewhere along the way. Otherwise, people would run into packs of wolves treeing something, and I've never heard of that in the sense that a tree dog trees something. We know that genetic mutation have to behave in certain ways, so the strong treeing instinct has to be either a recessive, dominant, incomplete dominant, or diffuse modifier gene. If it were a recessive, then you would never get a tree dog out of a cross between a non tree dog and a tree dog. If it were dominant, any tree dog bred to a non tree dog would give you all tree dogs. I'll have to wrap my head around what would happen if it was a modifier and get back with you. There are sex linked genes, but they usually follow the same pattern as the others, only dependent on sex, and they usually are related to other traits.

(The merle gene in dogs is another incomplete dominant gene, if you want to look at a canine incomplete dominant gene in action. It, like the white roan gene in cattle, is connected to some unwanted side effects, somewhat sex linked in the cattle as some white roan heifers are sterile. The broken color pattern in rabbits is another one, the near solid whites, known as "charlies" are often unthrifty. It is easier to see these genes at work when discussing color patterns, because you can see the results, but all genes have to follow these "rules".)

[dwalton]

Some good things for thought here. There are so many traits one needs in a hound[treeing, ability to move a track, conformation,brains,desire,nonaggression soundness and I could go on] to get everything one wants in a hound it is impossible to do. But one can come close and have it in a pack. That said all dogs in a pack should be able to tree their own game what every it is. The people that breed to improve hounds should hold to high standards but one never knows what will come out of a cross until you try. With time and experience one can do pretty good but not all will make the grade. Of course thats is not the case for a breeder that is raising pups just to sale for profit. One needs to do your home work and spend the time it takes to become knowledgeable on what you are buying or breeding. There are some very good hounds out there today I think far better than when I started hunting them 52 years ago or maybe I have just see it a little different then when I was a teenager ??? Good hunting and this is a great post to read and reread. Dewey

[david]

I was trying to remember possible sex-linked traits in hounds that have been mentioned here in the past. I couldn't find the traits, (except that mouth is most often passed on from the male, and temperament is most often passed on from the female), but I found this 12 page discussion on genetics from 2009. It is pretty interesting if any one feels like doing some reading:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=10209&hilit=Sex+linked

[Andyva]

I misspoke in my above response. In the case that treeing was a dominant trait, you would have a situation in which 100 percent of offspring would tree, if you had a homozygous parent bred to a non treeing dog. But, let's suppose the parent that treed was heterozygous for treeing. Then he would throw roughly half non treeing and half treeing offspring when bred to a non treeing dog. So the trait could be a dominant one.

All these traits, in my opinion, have to be the result of genetic influence. If it wasn't, you could just go down to the pound and load up a pack of dogs for hunting anything, if you were any kind of trainer at all. If they are influenced genetically, then they have to behave in certain ways in regards to dominance. To get the whole package, undoubtedly you have to combine many different specific genes that control different things. Opening on trail, treeing, dog aggression, all those things have their own genetic component. It would be most likely that all of the traits that we consider good are different in terms of dominants and recessives. When you get a bunch of dominants, recessives, and incomplete dominants floating around in an animal, the whole package is hard to put together in perfect unison.

Recessives are pretty easy, really, the word sounds like it is weaker, but the good thing about recessives, is that if you see the recessive trait, you know that you are dealing with an animal that is homozygous for that gene. As long as you breed two recessives that are showing that recessive trait, you will get 100% reproduction of that trait.

With dominant genes, you might get a heterozygous animal and you will never see the recessive trait that it is hiding, unless it shows up in offspring. Line breeding works good to ensure homozygous offspring, but those recessives can lay hidden for many generations.

Incomplete dominants can be really confusing, and I think that some of these traits might come as incomplete dominants, and the only way you can get what you want, is by breeding to something that you don't necessarily want, to get 100% of what you want in the offspring. With incomplete dominant genes, breeding two animals that are exactly what you want, will only give you 50% of offspring that are exactly what you want.

To further complicate things, some of these genes for traits can come as a result of separate genetic mutation throughout history, and these mutations can have different dominance components. For example, in most cattle that are red, red is a recessive gene. But there is a separate mutation, in just a handful of Holsteins, where red is dominant. Another example, with cattle is the horn gene. In most British and European cattle, the gene responsible for horns is recessive. But in Brahma influenced cattle, there is a separate mutation for horns, and it is one of those crazy sex linked genes like Perk was asking about in the beginning of this post. The way it works, if you get a homozygous hornless bull, like an Angus, and breed him to a brahma cow that is carrying the African horned gene, as it's called, her bull calves could have horns and her heifer calves would be bald like her.

So, if say, Treeing Walkers had a treeing gene that came from a way back cross with some kind of shepherd or something, and let's say, redbones got it from a completely different ancestor, it could be passed on in completely different ways.

Being as hounds are not as economically important to as many people as cows, and they can be hunted in a pack to overcome each other's weaknesses, and hound owners not necessarily being that interested in knowing the science behind it all, we might never know the answers to some of these questions, and that might be just as well.

I still enjoy genetic discussions, and hope I haven't bored or offended everybody with all this stuff. I had to figure out most of this stuff when my kids started showing bunny rabbits, and we had to figure out which one to put with which one to get what color. I already knew a good bit of it, to keep me from having to dehorn calves and get dinged at the sale barn for off colored calves.

[JTG]

If you breed a male tree hound to a female running hound. The daughters, of that breeding would have a better chance to be tree hounds.
Sex-Linkage-Applies to the situation where genes are carried on one of the sex chromosomes.(usually the X) Such characters are transmitted from mother to son and sire to daughter. (Malcom Willis.)

[JTG]

[quote="Andyva"]
Incomplete dominants can be really confusing, and I think that some of these traits might come as incomplete dominants, and the only way you can get what you want, is by breeding to something that you don't necessarily want, to get 100% of what you want in the offspring. With incomplete dominant genes, breeding two animals that are exactly what you want, will only give you 50% of offspring that are exactly what you want.


No, that is not correct. JTG

[Andyva]

[rockytrails]

I'm confused. Is homo?? Has a dominant and recessive Gene and hetero?? That has either 2 dominate or 2 recessive. Or visa versa?