Thread: Improving the health of the bulldog

This inbreeding discussion got we wondering (to myself) if the Black Robin's very narrow genetic base bode ill for them in the future. I found this research, which is interesting. See chapter 7.

Not sure if it will inform this dog "debate" or not.

https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.n...pdf?sequence=3

Originally Posted by ethos

The no linebreeding at all stance is purist but means we go back to a mishmash and lottery trying to select the best hunting/working/pet dogs again from essentially mongrels. The minute you breed your dog because it runs faster or points better, you are selecting for genes, and that dog will likeley also carry some bad genes and off it goes again.
I get the nausea at bad breeders or breedstandards destroying functionality in some breeds, but Id politely suggest its plenty common for dodgey inbreeding happening with backyard breeders making breeding calls with limited know how and genetics.

Sorry to crop ya post ethos, this is a valid point.
It's ok to take a moral high ground but I think this is the key point the rock doctor is missing.

Originally Posted by Tahr

This inbreeding discussion got we wondering (to myself) if the Black Robin's very narrow genetic base bode ill for them in the future. I found this research, which is interesting. See chapter 7.

Not sure if it will inform this dog "debate" or not.

https://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.n...pdf?sequence=3

I think I recall discussing genetic bottlenecks on the stewart island poisoning thread in another life Tahr.
For relevance here I would infer that the smaller a population is , the less genetically diverse it is likely to be - for wild animals that means lower fertility and higher susceptibility to disease, for our dogs it means more expression of recessive genes and defects.
The smaller the (dog breed) population the more it benefits from outside genetics.
A dog breeder would argue that means importing a stud dog from overseas.
Tussock -if Im reading his argument right- would argue that could be achieved by crossing with a dog of any breed that fit the bill and buggar the breed standard. I dont disagree in principle, its just more of a lottery as to what traits a non pure bred dog will exibit.

No it does not, not breeding for form or for function gives us the bull dog we see today...both English and American.
In theory the English bulldog should have died out the same time animal baiting did.
The only thing that kept it going was the sport of dog showing.....and that's another subject in its own right.
Natural selection is best observed in wild canines, African wild dogs are a good start....pretty sure they are also playing banjos as well and yet they are suppose to free of many problems suffered by domestic dogs.

Tahr touched on the same thing in the previous thread Ethos just summed up. This is not a natural system, these are species that solely exist because of our intervention.

Breeding a white dog of any breed, to another white dog of any breed is still positive assortative mating. You are increasing the chances that that you will make homozygous the genotype at that loci for white colour expression. You are decreasing the chances of the expression of other colours. This is at its most basic 'true to type' mating. Yes thats right, the dreaded 'I' word. The fact you can look at a breed and identify it by eye means it is breeding true to type. This does not happen by accident.

Secondly, where do you get the notion that this is a recent construct? Do you think that the southern men who cemented your bulldogs genotype (and all its associated problems) imported dogs from as far away as possible? No, they used what was available to them, probably within one single state of the US. Much like the Black Robin example above, a limited gene pool to start with, and a hiding to nowhere as you put it.

To say this process of selective breeding is new to us is frankly delusional. we have been doing it for thousands of years, and it has got us where we are now.

In theory the English bulldog should have died out the same time animal baiting did.

the current english bulldog bears no resemblence to his long legged ancesteor kept for gameness and butcher used.
if wild pig hunting the way we do it had existed then maybe the real breed would have survived and thrived
could you imagine the current asmatic shortlegged joke of genetic mishandling and down right kennel club cruelty holding a bull by the snout while the butcher sledge hammers it.
if it had half an ounce of usefulnesss it would be crossed into more pigdogs than you could shake a stick at instead it can barely stagger to the letter box to wheeze at the postie 3 days a week.

This here is Teosinte.

https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7035/6...9ebf8b40_b.jpg

It is a wild type grass, of the Zea family. It is the modern progenitor of every type of corn on the planet today. Yes that's right, corn, one of our biggest and most valuable crops, is a man made construct. We have selectively bred it for nearly 9000 years, and it single handedly funded the giant population explosion that happened at a time most refer to now as the 'agricultural revolution'.

Believe it or not, corn as we know it could not survive on its own without man tending it and protecting it. We have created it from that spindly head I pictured above, into what we know today as corn. Zea species usually grow a single seed head at the top of the plant, about 25mm long. So the ingenious Indians who first started cultivating it by hand very early on retained the ones who sprouted multiple heads, like today's corn, and used them as seed. All this seed, from a handful of multiple headed plants in the whole crop, was used for the next years crop, immediately assortative mating on the genotype for double heads. Once the crop was homozygous for multiple heads, which wouldn't take long, maybe a few seasons, then size of the heads could be selected for. Now multiply this selection by every harvest for 9000 years and tell me that selective breeding is a new fashion.

This husbandry has got us where we are as a species. To take away from it and say this has all happened in the last 200 years is frankly short sighted and ill informed.

The dog, good old Canis, has been with us for over double the length of time that corn has! Are you still going to tell everyone here that this is recent?

this quoting you, post 19 in the other thread:

"The rise of this style of breeding in the last few hundred years coincides with a change in social philosophy. The scientific attitude that animals are equivalent to machines, with no sentience of any kind. They are incapable of suffering and are simply objects to be used as humans see fit.

Before this resurrection of old Greek philosophy in the west such breeding practices were considered abhorrent. "

again, post 28

"Its only in the last 200 years or so this disturbing sport of competing to produce the most identical mutant sprung up in England. This is not the origin of good dogs, just a weird sport that sprung up among English middle class aristocratic wannabes."

Originally Posted by gsp follower

the current english bulldog bears no resemblence to his long legged ancesteor kept for gameness and butcher used.
if wild pig hunting the way we do it had existed then maybe the real breed would have survived and thrived
could you imagine the current asmatic shortlegged joke of genetic mishandling and down right kennel club cruelty holding a bull by the snout while the butcher sledge hammers it.
if it had half an ounce of usefulnesss it would be crossed into more pigdogs than you could shake a stick at instead it can barely stagger to the letter box to wheeze at the postie 3 days a week.

Actually it did survive in the southern states of America when the breed was bought out there in the 1700-1800s, there you go tussock you have a date, it was in fact used as a pig dog and still is today, it became know as the American bulldog or earlier on an English White.
It was later bred back to the English bulldog by a bloke called Johnson and this was the start of the bow legged Johnson type.

Originally Posted by Tussock

Were you to put a Zebra or a Kea in front of me I feel I would be able to recognize them. Of course it happens by accident to suggest otherwise indicates you are not thinking very hard about it.

And as for this part, don't belittle the other readers. We are talking within the same clade at least.

No, those indians were simply selecting the best. Just like Kawhia is about to do

Sit down before you hurt yourself bud.

Originally Posted by Tussock

Obviously those indians were using their vast knowledge of statistics?

These Indians must have tagged every single plant so they could track every generation and keep detailed records?

n.

Sounds pretty much like the system I breed under, bloody Germans write down everything, it's what fucked them at Nuremberg

Traits.....performance traits, you are trying to confuse the issue.

Too many breeds have been fucked by the interpretation of the "breed standard" by puppy farmers. All in the interest of making money from selling "their" breed. I have seen it with the Alaskan Malamute, one of the most primitive breeds. Frigging yanks breeding them smaller so they can sell them to ego-tripping apartment-dwellers, and here, even bigger wankers breeding pitbulls to be "mean." I concur with just about everything you have said on the subject, Tussock, for what it's worth.