Losing working ability in 3 generations

[Laurae]

Hi all,

 

In an offshoot of the AKC recognition proposal discussion on another list (which I have so far successfully stayed out of because I become incoherent when I discuss things I feel strongly about with people who will never "get it"), another lister discussed the idea that working dogs lose their ability to produce dogs who can work to a high level after three generations of nonworking dogs. That is, if three successive generations of a talented stockdog did not work, that line would cease to (consistently?) produce talented working dogs. Sort of a "use it or lose it" premise. Other list members think that is improbable. I have always heard this general idea posited, but with the difference that if the line is not purposefully bred for working ability as the top priority, the working ability can be lost in three generations. Does anyone know if there has been any actual scientific studies done on this subject, preferably in a refereed journal? I am curious about whether there has been any research to support this theory...

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Katelynn & Gang]

You can lose working ability in just ONE generation. This three generations is just something people say but when you lose any traits of working ability, no matter how large or small, you are losing it.

 

I have a book that gives a great example of this and I WILL find it and post it.

 

Saying that its impossible to lose working ability over three generations of just breeding (with no goals to working ability) is like saying that its impossible to make a drink (think up your fav) with no care to how much of what is going into it and that it is still going to come out the same drink as the first because you are still using the same things, no matter how much of what is going in. Is the end result going to be the same?

 

Probably not the best way to discribe it but I use this one a lot with everyday people when they ask about my dogs and why I dis like the AKC and they all seem to understand it in the end.

 

Katelynn

[Rebecca, Irena Farm]

It's probably based on the body of knowlege passed around by working breeders, that it only takes a few generations to go from a really nice worker and producer of useful dogs, to a pup that is entirely useless.

 

One of the reasons you won't find a lot of formal material on this concept is that in the agricultural world, where the Border Collie was developed, it is a basic concept that you have to select in each generation for performance traits. Appearance can be fixed and maintained through tight inbreeding, but performance like milk production or mothering skills, have to be demonstrated by the actual breeding prospects.

 

And many times breeding like to like (as is commonly done in conformation programs) will actually harm performance goals - and the threshold can only be determined by monitoring the performance of each generation.

[Laurae]

Thanks Katelynn and Rebecca. I was hoping for something "scientific" because on the Internet, sometimes it can be difficult to judge the validity of someone's point. I was sort of hoping to post something with scientific backup there. Oh well.

 

This point that ability can be lost in one generation is interesting. I understand that a smart breeder will look at each generation and make thoughtful choices regarding traits to hopefully pass along to the next generation. But what about dogs who are not very accomplished themselves but throw pups who become remarkable workers in their own right? I'm terrible with pedigrees, so I can't name names, but I know there have been several examples of this. I often wonder about my dog and his sister. My dog is fairly well-bred and he is talented (how talented he is is difficult to assess, since I'm an inexperienced handler and have made many mistakes while training him). His sister is a great agility dog but wants absolutely nothing to do with sheep, despite several exposures. By the "one generation" logic, she should definitely not be bred (she's spayed anyway, this is just conjecture). But maybe she would produce pups that were talented...

 

Or am I just being way too literal here? I'm honestly trying to understand all this, not be argumentative at all. I'm fascinated by all this...

[Rebecca, Irena Farm]

A very good breeder will sometimes use a female with genetics he likes (ie, pedigree), and successfully produce useful or even exceptional offspring. And rarely you'll see a "one off" from lines that are less careful - ie, using a lot of non working females and not really training the males - but I've noticed that these dogs themselves tend to be terminal crosses - a genetic dead end with nothing to offer future generations. This should not be the goal of a conscientious breeder, which most conformation and sport people claim to be.

 

Remember this about "herding ability." We are not talking about one gene, one set of genes, or even something that is the same in all Border Collies. There are almost as many ways to arrive at the goal of controlling livestock, as there are dogs who do it. Each dog brings something slightly different to the table, and rightly so.

 

So that's why I stopped talking about "ability" and shifted to "usefulness." Ability implies potential which may be assessed at a burgeoning phase - usefulness can only be evaluated through, well, use. People who use these dogs every day understand that a dog may have some abilities but may not actually be useful. Often that is because some small piece of the puzzle has been lost from one generation to another - or the balance of one trait has shifted too far one way or another.

 

One famous example is the wise old sheepdog in Far From the Madding Crowd, and his son who was so headstrong he refused to take orders and caused the sheep to stampede over a cliff. The older dog was clever and independent - his son took that too far. You could only find that sort of thing out by actually working the dog.

 

My Ben is my heart and soul, but he lacks something - I think he needs more eye for the way he works. Maybe I could breed him to a bitch with more eye and gets pups that have his power, sensible nature, and courage - but I don't have the experience to avoid producing pups with his fault AND the faults of the bitch, whatever they might be. That's another way usefulness can be lost in just one generation = and that's really the most daunting one to me.

[Josh Ingham]

S=Show

P=Pet

W=Working, if working ability greater than or equal to index of 100 (if W<100, the dog cannot herd effectively)

 

 

Laurae, you have posed a very interesting question. The more I think about it, the more it intrigues me.

 

I did a lit search using a proprietary working paper database for scholarly articles but only one group of researchers seem to be working on this issue as we discuss this topic and no one else seems to have done research directly relevant to this topic.

 

I am not sure if it would be inappropriate to give out all details of their research before their work is published but from their description of their work-in-progress, this is what I gather from my very limited understanding:

 

If you breed a working sire to a working dam with working ability indexed at 100 each, then one would probably expect working ability in the litter to be normally distributed around a mean working ability. Suppose there are three pups and the average working ability is indexed at 100, then you might expect one pup to have a working ability of 95, one to have a working ability of 100 and one to have a working ability of 105. Here we are assuming a statistically normal distribution.

 

But what if this does not happen? What if working ability is not distributed normally but follows a skewed distribution like a chi-square distribution? Then if you have 10 pups, you may expect working abilities of 87, 89,92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104. Of these only three (100, 102, 104 would be working dogs while the rest would be pet-quality pups).

 

Working line breeders would carefully select pups indexed at 100, 102 and 104, foster their working abilities, and breed them again. An iterative process would preserve working ability in subsequent litters.

 

Show line breeders (S), puppy mill breeders (M) and other non-working breeders would - for the sake of illustration - pick two pups at random from those indexed at 87, 89,92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104 since working ability is not very important to them. Since the two pups are picked at random, the breeder would pick say pups indexed at 89 and 92 and breed them. The skewed distribution of the litter would mean that when 10 pups are born, their working abilities are indexed at 77, 79, 81, ... 94. Note that all pups from the Show/Mill/non-working litters would have working abilities indexed below 100, which means none of the pups would make good working dogs and not one would be able to herd. So working ability is lost in one generation.

 

The researchers reasoning is more complex than what I have outlined and I couldn't understand much of their reasoning but they have shown in their work-in-progress that working ability can be lost in one generation.

[Lenajo]

The differences are really apparent when you work with these type dogs regularily That is the W versue the S versus the R (random - show/work crosses and pet bred). W bred I can usually predict usefullness, a minimum degree of talent that allows farmwork to be done, and with varying degrees of effort, moderate trialing. The extraodinary, are not predictable.

 

S bred, you might get some willing to work, but so far none I have seen progressed beyond a certain point. They lack something always, varying pieces of the puzzle from work ethic, sometimes focus, stamina...bits and pieces here and there, some right, some wrong, some right but in the wrong place.

 

R bred is even worse. Sometimes you get a pretty nice dog, but he won't breed true because the dog is essentially a hybrid - the product of 2 incredibly differen gene pool selections. Or you get duds. Big duds. Not really good at anything unless the training turns themselves inside out to make it happen. And that's not really even going to help with stockwork. But in sports, where training makes all the difference, these dogs get lauded as successful results of "breeding"....when they are fall from it.

 

The worse thing is when you get a great big flashy working speciman of a R bred - rare but some are trying hard. He becomes excuses for all sorts of more R breeding, and he (something she, but a he has more potential for genetic pollution) gets bred out the wazoo. In livestock terms you just took your Black Baldie (the legendary Angus/Hereford) or in horses your Anglo-Arab back into your purebred genepools. It makes nothing but mud there, but the damage can be signficant.

 

In 3 generations I can breed the wool out of flock, and a cattleman change the whole tide of what his/her herd of cattle look like. In dogs....it basically is where you can see the solid evidence of your decisions with impermeable ink. Livestock people don't need science to show them that, because as Rogers said "they've already peed on that fence for themselves"

 

I think most intelligent non-working BC breeders know that down deep, but they are like the drug companies frantically selling their doomed product before the results come in from the "studies".

 

And no I wasn't being sarcastic calling them intelligent. I think most of them are, but they aren't realistic.....they think they can really beat the past. That they are going to be the first and foremost to show that a conformation standard doesn't ruin a breed. They just can't find any examples of it.

[Rebecca, Irena Farm]

In the R, W, S and indexes, please don't forget that working ability itself isn't a single characteristic that is scalable. I normally don't quote myself, but don't feel like repeating this:

 

Remember this about "herding ability." We are not talking about one gene, one set of genes, or even something that is the same in all Border Collies. There are almost as many ways to arrive at the goal of controlling livestock, as there are dogs who do it. Each dog brings something slightly different to the table, and rightly so.

 

The level of ability in the Border Collie breed is maintained by exposure and use on livestock, not numbers, indexes, classifications, and to a large part not even pedigrees. Everyone knows I'm a huge fan of bloodlines but I still strongly feel they are not much more than a tool to select between dogs of already demonstated usefulness.

 

Because there is such a focus on usefulness in the context of particular livestock operations, you will arrive at contradictory results when trying to quantify "Working ability". Do we say working ability is "lost" if a pup no longer has a perfect natural cast, but can still drive sheep up and hold them in a corner? Is it when the dog takes half a dozen patient sessions to show enough sustained interest to chase the stock a bit, and takes a year to learn flanks, wearing, and a reliable stop? Or is it when the dog in question cannot be trained to the Open level for whatever reason? Do we measure this on cattle, sheep, or ducks?

 

You see the problem and what's at stake.

[stockdogranch]

here are almost as many ways to arrive at the goal of controlling livestock, as there are dogs who do it. Each dog brings something slightly different to the table, and rightly so.

 

That says it all right there. That's what makes this so intriguing, and so elusive. Others have said that breeding good working dogs is more of an art than a science, and in many repects I belive that is so; however, as Becca points out, researching pedigrees can certainly be a useful tool, but in many respects is just a starting point,

Anna