MIKE CARDER
UKC Forum Member
Registered: Jan 2004
Location: Greenville, Ky
Posts: 4139 |
Makes sense
quote: Originally posted by Oak Ridge
Bruce,
I've been breeding stock of different kinds for most of my life. Started off with hogs and beef cattle, graduated to dairy cattle, horses, chickens and stock dogs, bird dogs, beagles, coon dogs and now squirrel dogs. So while I certainly do not think of myself as a geneticist, I've a student of genetics for sure.
The term that your are using "freak" simply isn't all that accurate, because it is possible to produce a "freak"....problem is that most of us don't have the will and/or the resources to do so.
The "freak of nature" that you speak of actually has a name, it is known as prepotency. Prepotency is defined as the ability of one parent to impress its hereditary characters on its progeny because it possesses more homozygous, dominant, or epistatic genes. I agree that the female of a species certainly is important in breeding selection, but prepotency is normally more appearant in males because of the numbers of progeny they reproduce from different matings.
I learned most about prepotency during my chicken raising days. When we took a rooster that had been very selectivly breed over several generations for certain traits...we could "lock in" those traits. By that, I mean that we could take that selectivly bred rooster and breed it to an unrelated, crossed up mongrel hen....and a disproportionate number of the chicks would end up being like their sire.
I took that life experience and tried my best to apply it in dogs. It's tough because the generation of chickens turns over in about 6 moths, while it takes years to prove reproduction in a performance animal like a dog....so reproducing color is easier to evaluate than reproduction of an animal that has to PERFORM...
To save space and time I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here how we can create those "freaks", but if you are interested, I wrote an article several years ago and it is on my web site at http://oakridgekennel.com/prepotenc...l-degeneration/
But let me say this.....where we as coon hound breeders fail is
1. We have not yet identified what traits we are breeding for. We simply don't know what seperates a dog from a really good dog.
2. We are still breeding to "better the breed" by tying to plug holes in one dog with strenghts of the other, rather than breeding only dogs that don't have holes
3. We have not agreed on a standard for what a good dog is, and we are satisfied breeding to a full page glossy ad in a magazine that declares how good the dog is based upon hunt wins.
Overall, it is possible to reproduce a whole set of "freaks"....and it has happened in the coon dog world in the past. Bone is one, Logan's Wild Clover was another one that comes to mind....but we as coon dog breeders always breed the ability to reproduce out of our dogs over about three generations by not being selective enough.
I liked that article. But like you said, culling all the blue colored balls to get more red ones in your kennel could years and a lot of dogs.
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