Breeding thoughts or Any anecdotal evidence?

[Andyva]

I'm thinking you would run into more cattle traits than you ever dreamed of if you tried to breed up stock to today's standards using unrelated scrubs. And you could never do it. Takes too long to get a heifer old enough to breed, then she has one calf nine months after breeding. You might have to breed her several times to determine if she was homozygous for the trait you were after in the breeding. If you are looking for a particular sex to make a cross you have in mind, the cow you want a calf out of will have the wrong sex for about nine years in a row and the neighbor's bull will breed her the tenth.

You are darned lucky to breed good ones using all the tools and pedigrees available using pure bred stock. Everybody is AI crazy, so they are continually dragging junk back up from the seventies or beyond, that should have been banded the day it hit the ground. Somebody writes something about it in a magazine and the next thing you know a breed is drug back to the seventies. Everybody gets crossed up tight on it and find out it had a genetic defect, or maybe three or four. Then you are shooting for a heifer calf that is negative for those defects and has whatever traits you were looking for, you need a whole herd to get that one heifer, like panning for gold. And to spite everything, Mr. Popular was from a clandestine outcross (that's where the defects come from), a poor reproducer that threw spectacular stuff on a very limited basis. About the time you are on your third bypass or your last grandchild marries, it might dawn on you that the spectacular and valuable trait you are looking for is only present in the defect CARRIERS that you have been trying to weed out of the herd for the last several decades.

So don't assume that cattle breeding is simple, there are cattle breeders that would love to get 8 calves on the ground at one time to see what a cross was really like or to up their chances of getting the total package. Recently they can do it, with embryo transfer, but it is pricey, then you have to feed all the recip cows. The only redeeming thing about cow breeding, the screw ups are still made of steak.

But, cattle traits, just the basic simple ones, are pretty well known, and the dominance of those traits is pretty well understood. Here we are talking about things like do they have horns or not, not whether they will win at the nationals. With dogs, it would seem that nobody has a definitive explanation of the nature of even the simple traits like treeing.

[Goose]

[19LittleD99]

If you read the Walk With Wick books, there's some really good info about breeding hounds. In the second book, there's a really good chapter about rating hounds so that breeders have something to look at. What John Wick says seems to make a lot of sense. If people could make a rating system, it could make breeding a lot easier I would think.
Thanks,
D

[dwalton]

A rating system might work but the problem that I see is the difference of opinion that people have of a dog and what they expect from a dog. I know of dogs that I would not take hunting that I have hunted with and hear how good they are. We all see it different and there are people that can get the most from a dog and the next may get nothing from it and still be happy with it. That said breeding hounds is far more complicated them breeding cows, pigs or chickens. There are a lot of factors that come into breeding dogs that are not needed for meat, egg or milk production. The things you see about a dog color, size or conformation are fairly easy to breed for but they alone will not catch you many bobcats. If someone had it figured out there would be a breed called bobcat dogs instead a mixture of dogs that can tree some bobcats. Bobcats are easy to catch with the right dog and almost impossible with the wrong dog. Just the way I see it Dewey

[Goose]

I agree Dewey, the ONLY way a rating system would work is we as individuals come up with our own because like has been mentioned, there are so many different varying opinions on what a productive dog is...

Back to the over compensating faults breeding theory, I've been really thinking about this and it's never occurred to me but in a way I've been doing this for years with my catch dogs, I've made several crosses over the years of what I've called ying and yang breeding, we want level headed calm catch dogs but after several generations of breeding for that I lost a good hard bite in my dogs so I crossed some real hot game dog blood in several times to get that bite and overall tenacity back, one thing I noticed is no litters were uniform, some came out hot as a firecracker, some mellow as a melon and some that in my opinion was the Luke warm of the crosses, just the right combo of both parents...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro