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How do dog breeders breed dogs?



 
 
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  #1  
Old June 26th 05, 04:16 AM
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Default How do dog breeders breed dogs?

I've looked around for a NG devoted to discussing the finer points of
breeding but have been unable to find one. Hopefully this one has
enough serious breeders to suggest answers or even better, provide an
authoritative rebuttal.

The problem is the following post, posted in another NG, which was in
response to a serious scientific study which allegedly has found an
"intelligence gene" in persons of Jewish ethnicity. I don't wish to
enter into a discussion of that fact, right or wrong, nor into the
other biological details, most of which are over my head. I was
however struck by the characterization of dog breeding which I believe
to be erroneous. I'd like the input of someone more knowledgeable than
I on this point. Hence this post.

Begin quote*********

Well, the Tay-Sachs part, yes. But the idea that inbred groups of
people might differ from each other in their (various) mental abilities
as much as they do appearance, height, and physical abilities, doesn't
seem that far-fetched to me. As I said, after all, beagles are pretty
dumb. And border collies, on average, are pretty darn smart.


I agree that inbred groups are likely to have disproportionate ratios
of some alleles, but you need pretty heavy selection to get the kind
of
uniformity you see in a dog breed. You can see a little of such
selection where a population has lived in a particular climate for a
very long time, but it's selection for only a few traits, like heat
loss or resistance to malaria. These ethnic groups are generally as
diverse as anybody else otherwise, as can be seen from blood group and
HLA markers.

You can't select for everything, when creating a breed. Border
collies
were selected for their intelligence and willingness to cooperate with
the shepherd, alertly noting his signals and obeying them. Beagles
were selected for acute sense of smell and willingness to follow a
scent.
These traits are exaggerated forms of behaviours found in wolves.
Beagles
are useless as sheepdogs, and border collies are lousy trackers. Note
that desirable traits have to be continually maintained by selection
--
most working breeds of dogs have separate populations now, show dogs
selected for their conformity to the written standards for appearance
and working dogs, which are selected to maintain the behaviour traits
for which the breed was developed.

To create a uniform population like a dog breed, you start with a very
small initial population, usually only a few individuals, inbreed very
closely (parent to child, parent to grandchild), and select strongly
for desired traits, discarding all but a few best matches to your
ideal
when deciding which animals will produce the next generation. These
conditions don't occur naturally, especially not in humans. Even
small
populations on islands and religious groups that practice complete
endogamy avoid inbreeding as much as possible and don't practice
artificial selection. They begin to show unusual rates of a few
genetic traits, usually undesirable ones, after many generations, and
a
very small island population may start to have a sort of family look
about them, but they are nowhere near as uniform as an animal breed.

Jews are a very poor candidate for a human "race" or "breed". It's
long been established that genetically they are closely similar to the
ethnicities they live among, and for obvious reasons. There's some
effect due to migrations in the past thousand years, as Jews were
expelled from most western European countries in late medieval times
and moved east and south. But even visually, eastern European Jews
look like eastern Europeans, North African Jews look like North
Africans and Chinese Jews look like Chinese. Blood group data
demonstrate this very clearly.

As for all these Nobel laureate Jews, well, I can assure you that
there
is no shortage of Jews who are not so smart. If a culture very
strongly values a trait, members of that culture will be pushed to
develop that trait in themselves, and rewarded for doing so, and those
individuals with talent in that direction will have the opportunity to
excel. This applies to any talent or trait -- intellectual ability,
athletic ability, aggressiveness, artistic talent, religious
tendencies, whatever. The Scandinavians are the same people they were
800 years ago, but they are no longer noted for the ability to go into
berserk rages and slaughter the defenseless in droves oblivious to
their own safety, although this was a prized and widely expressed
talent in Viking times.

This notion that Tay-Sachs is associated with intelligence is just
hand
waving, as far as I can see. Until there's some actual data, we have
no reason to believe it's anything but wishful thinking. I've also
heard the theory that Tay-Sachs is associated with resistance to
tuberculosis, another link for which there's no evidence. I suspect
that Tay-Sachs is just another bad recessive trait that hasn't had
enough selection against over long enough time to be eliminated.
Against the Third World like conditions that prevailed in Europe until
a few generations ago -- large families and high mortality rates in
infants and young children -- deaths from Tay-Sachs would be lost in
the noise.

People don't select themselves for desirable traits, after all. Even
if a culture strongly values some trait, and rewards men who excel at
it with greater opportunities to contribute to the next generation,
most everybody, and almost all women, still marry and have children.
You may want to marry the person who best displays the ideal of your
culture, but you'll settle for what you can get. You don't make any
progress in developing a genetically uniform population, like a
livestock breed, that way.

Jews, like any disfavored group, tell just-so stories to comfort
themselves. One is to point out that in medieval Europe, people with
noted intellectual talents would enter monasteries and leave the gene
pool, presumably making the general population stupider than the Jews.
This of course ignores the fact that most medieval Europeans were
peasants who had no opportunity to express scholarly abilities in
monasteries or elsewhere, and most people who became monks or nuns did
so for other reasons and found reading a real chore, if they ever
became literate at all. Another just-so story is that the prohibition
on pork is a wise tradition, or even an example of special divine
consideration, for preventing trichinosis. Well, an injunction to
boil
water before drinking it, or the inside word on smallpox vaccination
would have saved orders of magnitude more lives that trichinosis could
ever have taken.

Incidentally, most cases of Tay-Sachs now occur amongst people of
French Canadian origin, because Jews are using modern techniques to
select against it in themselves. I sincerely doubt that the Jews are
getting stupider, or the Quebecois are getting smarter.

(Btw, it would be easy to test this theory that Tay-Sachs
heterozygotes
have better intellectual abilities than others. Find a bunch of
high school students who are self-identifying Jews and offer free
Tay-Sachs testing in exchange for a peek at their SAT scores. It
shouldn't be difficult to find many thousands of subjects, and if
there's a real correlation, there should be a significant difference
in Tay-Sachs rates between the upper and lower tenth percentile.
Betcha there isn't, but nobody knows until somebody does the
research.)

End quote***************

  #2  
Old June 26th 05, 04:44 AM
Jo Wolf
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Default

I think you'll find the more serious discussions of dog breeding in the
email groups for the various breeds, rather than on the NGs. This is
because of those pesky little alleles; the ones that most concern a
Golden Retriever breeder are not necessarily the ones that most concern
the Chihuahua breeder.

Tha Canine Genome project has now wound up and the next step, the Canine
Phenome project is in it's earliest phases... and will concentrate on
the individual breeds and their genetic patterns. National breed clubs
are scurrying to put together the money for their breeds'
participation.... This is where our hope to work away from genetic
problems lies, given that the same problem can vary from breed to breed
in it's genetic cause.... and that some disorders are almost limitted to
one or two breeds.

Good luck in finding a "home" where the topic fits well....

Jo Wolf
Martinez, Georgia

  #3  
Old June 26th 05, 04:54 PM
Rocky
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Default

Jo Wolf said in rec.pets.dogs.breeds:

I think you'll find the more serious discussions of dog
breeding in the email groups for the various breeds, rather
than on the NGs. This is because of those pesky little
alleles; the ones that most concern a Golden Retriever
breeder are not necessarily the ones that most concern the
Chihuahua breeder.


There are more than a few extremely knowledgeable-about-genetics
posters here.

Good luck in finding a "home" where the topic fits well....


OP: You don't have to take the discussion elsewhere, just give
it a few days for the posters I mentioned to show up.
"Intelligence genes," as they pertain to *dogs* will be an
interesting topic for this group.

--
--Matt. Rocky's a Dog.
  #4  
Old June 28th 05, 05:23 AM
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

(Melanie L Chang) wrote:

I'm not sure that there was a real question in the initial post worth
addressing.


Really. I'm sorry I didn't phrase it in the form of multiple choice so
you wouldn't have to make an effort to discern questions "worth
addressing". I'll attempt to make it easier for you (presuming that
you actually know something about breeding dogs):

Take the second paragraph where the main writer says, "You can't
select for everything, when creating a breed." and goes on to discuss
how working dogs' traits and those of show dogs are maintained
separately, implying that you can't breed a dog to have both the
"intelligence" traits and the "looks" traits. Is this really true?
Will a border collie who won say best in breed at Westminster be as
desirable as a poodle in performing the function of herding? Do you
really have to continuously maintain the traits (both physical and
"intelligence")? Once you have (say) a blue-eyed Westie what more
"maintenance" would be necessary?

On a more general note just how diverse IS the gene pool for a
particular breed? What point the traveling across country and stud
fees if you can simply breed grandfather to daughter to granddaughter
and back again to re-enforce particular qualities?

I'm sure you can come up with a few more...

To me it looked like an excuse to post a long and not very
interesting vaguely anti-Semitic diatribe.


The main writer would bristle at the suggestion of anti-Semitism. He's
a PC touchie-feelie, based on your signature probably much like
yourself, in an academic environment who's desperately trying to
maintain his un-reconstructed tabula rasa world view. The breeding of
dogs, especially for traits such as intelligence, is an area about
which I'm sure he has nightmares, hence the Herculean effort to
distance it from any possibility that humans might follow a similar
pattern.



 




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