WHY HAVE A BREEDING PROGRAMME? (continued)
WHEN AND HOW OFTEN TO USE DOGS
It does not matter when a dog is used for breeding as long as it is sexually mature but a bitch should only be used between the ages of two and six years; this will mean that she will be fully trained before breeding. A half trained bitch should not be used as she will be difficult to train after pupping when she is an adult.. Generally try to use a bitch before she is six years old as after that she may produce a small number of pups or might even be sterile… Try to minimise the amount of similar genetic material to prevent inbreeding and do not use a particular relationship more than three times.
HEREDITARY CHARACTERISTICS
Very little work has been done on the hereditary characteristics of dogs, because it is not economically justified except where a specific disease situation is involved i.e. Entropion.
Thus the following comments are mainly drawn from other domestic animals. It is well known that conformation (shape and size) is hereditary and this is the principle behind most livestock breeding where animals that ‘look right’ are used. The size of the animal at birth is strongly related to the size of the ‘dam’, in a famous experiment a shire horse was crossed with a Shetland pony mare and vice versa; The resulting offspring were very near the size expected from a pure bred of the dams used. Therefore, when picking bitches go for the large ones and try and find a dog that is ‘the right shape’.
Intelligence is said to be hereditary and this is the reason for breeding from a champion gun dog or sheep dog used for trials. But there is no scientific evidence for this and what evidence there is would suggest that intelligence is not hereditary but is dependent on the animal’s early environment. Where twins have been put into different foster homes the child’s final intelligence has depended on the type of education and upbringing it had in the first five years of its life.
Lurkiness is not, I believe, hereditary but is a character that is dependent on the dog’s early life, like intelligence in humans, so bring the pups into the house and make sure that they have plenty of human contact early so that they can become intelligent. However in the case of a lurky family, it is better to use the dog rather than the bitch to obtain the genetic material as the dog will not pass on any lurky character to the pup but the bitch might ‘TEACH’ the pup to become lurky.
NUMBERS REQUIRED
The following figures might be of some use in calculating the number of matings required to produce the requisite number of replacement pups. Assume that every time that a dog and bitch are put together you will get a pup otherwise you will lose pups that are born unexpectedly just because nobody saw them locked on. However only about 85% of mating will in fact produce pups. Litter size averages 5. Infant mortality is about 40%. This means that for every 10 bitches that are with dogs you will get 8 ½ litters born producing 42 ½ pups of which 19 will survive to a few days old and about half of these will be bitches.
FINDING SUITABLE DOGS AND BITCHES
First decide which bitches you want to use for your season and also which dogs. Then work out the family trees for those animals that you have chosen going back at least 3 generations and then compare the lines of the dogs and the proposed bitches. In order to out-breed make sure that there is not more than one pair of siblings (bothers or sisters) in the pup’s third generation (The pup’s great grandparents) and not more than two common ancestors in the fourth generation.
UNDESIRED MATINGS.
There are bound to be occasions when a bitch is mated by accident. These should be reported to the base doggy-man as it might be possible to use the offspring but if the mating is not wanted it must be terminated or the offspring out down. Do not keep pups from unsuitable matings as it is not possible to sterilise them and it gives a feeling of false security in that there are not as many breedable animals available as it would appear on first sight.
TURNOVER OF BITCHES
All successful breeding programmes rely on rapid turnover of the female and, at present, there are not many suitable bitches available so it becomes quite a problem selecting bitches for breeding. Thus the bitches should be culled at an earlier time than the dogs to make way for the young bitches and get at more genetic material.
The best way to achieve this is for bitch pups to go out into the field as soon as they reach 1 year old. If they are obviously going to make good leaders they should be bred from when they are about 2 ½ years old and after that they should become spare bitches making way for new bitches in the team. In this way the non-leader bitches would be put down at about 4-5 years old.
Andrew Bellars