Breeding Winners to Winners and “Soft Wired Breeding”

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316 – August, 2021

By Dr. Carmen L. Battaglia

This report updates the findings and disappointments found among breeders who bred quality bitches to high quality males with unimpressive results. The study was first discussed in Part I. In this article, I will continue with a discussion about the methods and information used to select the sires and dams and the preliminary finding that most of the breeders believed that they should have had better results given that the breedings involved the “best to the best”. Further analysis showed that most of the decisions about the selection of sires and dams placed emphasis on one or two traits and most of the breeders stated they had only a limited knowledge of genetics.

The interviews further confirmed that breeding plans were not used nor was pedigree analysis that involved determining the strengths and weaknesses of the sire and dam. As noted in Part I, Mendel in the 1850s focused on how specific traits can be passed down from one generation to the next. His First Law involved the dominant and recessive genes and the methods he used to find them. In this study, one of the breeder problems involved not knowing if either the sire or dam was a carrier, normal or an affected for certain disorders. Mendel’s discovery was originally difficult to understand, but another researcher named Reginald Punnett found a way to explain what Mendel discovered using letters of the alphabet to explain inheritance. Punnett used capital letters (B) to represent dominate genes and lower case letters (b) to represent recessive genes. Figure 1 illustrates how Mendel’s research would have approached this problem based on what was known about the parents. Figure 1 shows that a black female (Bb) was bred to a brown male (bb) and they produced a litter of five pups, two were black (Bb, BB), and a third pup (bb) a chocolate. The key to understanding what would occur is in knowing about the parents.

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316 – August, 2021

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