BigGameHoundsmen.com

People on here with more experience may be able to help me out.

I want to keep a line of hounds going that I have for Fox chasin here in Australia. I have a dog and bitch and they are both above average for the hunting I do. (The dog and bitch are not closly related that I know of. We do not have the wealth of knowledge of backgrounds as you have for our hunting dogs here)

I bred them last year and some pups were hunting well at 6 months all by 8. So they are producing good working dogs.

I didnt keep any pups, but have access to a couple of females/males to breed if required.

I also have access to the fathers litter brother, so the uncle to the bitch pups.

To start a line of these dogs to keep the traits I want, going, what do you think I should do?

Uncle to neice?
Father to daughter?
Son to Mother?

What cross then for 3rd generation with lines on both sides?

Any info, thoughts, experiences would be greatly appreciated,



Cheers Rimfire




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Ive had good luck with the Uncle to neice cross.As far as the the next cross I would try to cross out(at least nothing real close)If you get good results then think about crossing back into your foundation.Word of caution line/family breeding can also bring out the worst,be prepared to cull and start over.

It is always nice to see how they turn out. I would not myself do father to daughter or a mother to son. I would not be afraid of breeding uncle to neice.

Their are probably a few people that would disagree with me but here is what I would do. First of all keeping a good line of hounds going can take some time. You said that the first cross worked really well and that the Sire and Dam to the pups are not closely related. Remember that everytime you outcross you lose 50% of what you had but you may also gain some very desireable traits. If the sire and dam are not closely related then I wouldnt feel bad about makeing a father/daughter cross or a mother/son cross In fact that is what I would do. Or even cross back on the littermate to the father with one of the pups. Cull hard and really strive for the traits and ability that work for your style of hunting.

Their are probably many people on here with alot more breeding savvy than me so this advice may not be worth your time but I know it has worked for a few other guys.

Thanks
Reagan

Great advise Reagan. As with any breeding, the big picture is how the pups turn out, being able to hunt and decide which ones make it.

Thanks for your advice, seems I may try a couple different xs .

My main point for breeding is my male dog is nearly 11, obviously not a lot of hunting left. Although you wouldnt know it, he looks acts/years younger than age. But we all know this can come to a halt real quick.

I am looking for the long term and want to be able to keep and x dogs that carry the same good tempermant and hunting drive this dog has. It has taken many years 9and many dogs)to find a dog to suit my hunting

I know its an age old question and lots of people have spent a life time doing it.

I would like to hear how you go about the 3rd and 4th generation to keep these good characteristics going,

Cheers Rimfire

Line breeding back to near relatives can be a valuable tool in developing a bloodline. When you cross 2 closely related dogs with the same qualities you increase the chance of pups inheriting good qualities as well as any bad qualities that the parents carry genes for. Each successive generation will also increase the chances. As long as you cull every pup that displays traits you want to weed out and only breed to the adult dogs that display traits you are trying to fix in the line it should improve the bloodline. Simply put, what you try to do is limit the pool of genetic traits that the pups can inherit from. The reason we don't have perfect dogs by now is that they carry genes from both parents but only display one set of qualities-a mix of half of the possible ones. The other half is uncertain and could contain genes from an ancestor that just hasn't been manifested in a noticeable way in recent generations (that is how you get a throwback to an old type like a redticked pup in a line that has had only blueticks for several generations). The more years you breed carefully and cull strictly the purer and more predictable your dogs will become.

uncle and niece should be fine, but father to daughter or mother to son, now thats in-breeding a few generations won't hurt but if you keep doing that the dogs aren't going to get better, they'll get worse, they'll end up with handy-cap issues, like brain disfunctions, deformaties, in-breding isn't always a pretty thing, and if you can't have access to uncle to niece or aunt to nephew, just find a dog that isn't related at all but still hunts good and has the coloring and features that you want for the next generation, thats why we pay such good money for stud dogs!!!

Beagle Girl,
That can be true but usually not? If the dogs bred together the first time are not closely related then their is quite a diverse gene pool to begin with. Dogs are not like humans. I have seen some old guys cross father/daughter, Mother/son, and even littermates for 4 or 5 generations and never have any problems at all. In fact one particular lion hunter that I know of had the Duncan line of black and tans and he bred real close for a few generations and then had an accidental cross on littermates and those dogs turned out to be the best he had. He continued to make that cross until those dogs got to old to breed and never had any physical or mental deformities. Little things can crop up here and their but you are usually fairly safe to stay quite close for the first couple of generations. When you get to the point to make an outcross do your work on the line of dogs and how consistent it is in producing good dogs. Dont just look for a good dog that has no history behind it as they can crop up out of most lines. Wiley Carroll once said if you want to hunt big game go to the guys who are consistently catching big game in your type of hunting conditions and get your dogs. I am sure you already know this.
Just my opinion

Reagan Myers

really? well, i don't know much about breeding anyway, just what my arrogent daddy has told me, and he thinks he knows it all, but in reality he doesn't know s***(but i still love him ) but my mom has told me the same thing, she does know alot, but not about breeding, i wanted to make a mother-son cross and everybody told me it was a bad thing to do, and my mother ended up geting that female spayed behind my back cause she knew that i would find some way to breed the two without her knowing(i'm sneeky that way) so i was convinced that it was bad, but as soon as i'm 18 i can do what ever i want with my dogs damn it!!!

wait, can a puppy still be registered under UKC if the pup was from a mother to son cross? cause, in the papers the mothers name would show up twice, i'll look at some of my dogs papers to see if there is anything like that, i think i might remember reading the same name twice in my first redbone's papers,

Yes they can... I have a pup registered who is out of a half/brother sister cross...

I believe they just mark the registration papers as "inbred" for a cross of parent to pup or brother to sister but yes they can be registered. Crossing closely related dogs is not the big issue that it would be with humans. The problem with it is that if both dogs carry a gene for something bad and it doesn't show itself in them you have a greater chance of the pups inheriting it than if only one of the adult dogs carries it. That is why a good bloodline takes so long to develop. You want to be as sure as possible that most of the bad genes have been culled out.

arachyd wrote:I believe they just mark the registration papers as "inbred" for a cross of parent to pup or brother to sister but yes they can be registered.

They don't even mark it "inbred" any more... Just regular papers... I think it is a great tool if used correctly.

well thats pretty cool, i have always been taught that in-breeding is something to stay away from, but my parents and my uncle are all old fashion ppl, that think they know everything, but i guess i'm the odd ball cause i ask questions about things and don't just assum i know it all, so if i see that two dogs are making pups with some kind of toe deformity, its not souly that the dogs are in bred, its just that both parents carry a gene for funny toes? cause thats how my dog socks is, she has this one toe that is shorter than the rest and the nail curls around into her pad if it doesnt get trimed, my daddy says its cause she was in-bred, my dad had his own dog Buck, that fathered my dog Socks(Socks has the funny toe) and dad said the guy that wanted his dog to breed with dads, dad said, "she was probably Bucks sister, he don't keep track of his dogs properly" but a few year later my dad bred Buck w/ this blue beagle, prettiest beagle you've ever seen and this female actually had papers, and dad kept a puppy for my step-mom, and that pups toes were even more messed up than Socks, so i'm thinkin' that Buck's the one with the screwed up genes, thank god Buck is in the ground cause some of those pups had to be killed cause they couldnt walk, dad would have kept on breeding Buck, and he did! till the very day he died, some random guy droped off his female at dad's to breed with Buck, Buck ATTEMPTS to mate, he starts panting real heavy and an hour later the dog was dead!!!! what a way to go !!! he was 16 though!