starplott
UKC Forum Member
Registered: Oct 2003
Location: SW Missouri
Posts: 1405 |
quote:
Originally posted by jackbob42
And there again , narrow-minded thinking.............
There never would have been a poodle and a walker to put together if it weren't for "human intervention" in the first place !
Which only proves my point...........When people start breeding for looks , instead of ability , the breed goes downhill.
Mother Nature breeds her canines with only one thing intended , TO SURVIVE BY BEING GOOD AT WHAT THEY DO.
And , I'm not saying that a dog is worth breeding just because it can tree a coon once in awhile. I'm talking the best to the best.
Like I asked before , can you breed a better hunting and killing machine better than the wolf?
It is not narrow minded at all. Drop your best coon hunting bitch off in full heat down at the dog park and see what type of coonhounds mother nature breeds.
I don't get your logic of people breed for looks and mother nature breeds for coonhunting ability. LOL. Don't see anybody coonhunting with wolves, yotes, foxes, or dingos. Mother nature left alone, we wouldn't have coonhounds.
One of the best minded hunting dogs I ever hunted with was a hot little number for.three years that a friend had. That gyp had it going on upstairs. Due to poor angulation in the shoulders and a super straight rear she had to work twice as hard to get to a tree. BUT, she was first strike on the box and was starting bear tracks for the pack on her own as a yearling. When he got her as a pup you could see the hunt desire in her, but you could see the bulldog front, she was out in the shoulders, super straight in the rear and there was tons of wasted movement when she moved.
Her dam, sire, and she herself would flat grab a bear. Saw her several times catch, roll down the hill in a pile of bear and dogs, get knocked off and back up and on it. Unfortunately, she followed suit were her sire was concerned in other ways. By the time she was 3, neither could hardly get on or off the truck. Vets at that time wanted 2000 to repair both shoulders. Not because she was tore up by a bear. Because the hard hunting tore her up because she wasn't built for it.
Wasn't known her dad had issues either until he was 4. He was bred as an awesome young dog. Breeder bred the best to the best in hunting ability. Last litter I saw out of his dogs he gave to a guy to help get him started about 3 weeks before whelp. When I went to see the litter at 8 weeks I about took care of the litter myself. 6 out of 8 pups had fused sturnums. Which meant the last two ribs connected are one piece of bone fused together rolled up inside of the chest cavity. At 6 mos you could reach between the front legs and pick each puppy up by their 'handle'. Most of them, only one had proper angulation, had loose shoulders and bulldog fronts. BUT, for 30 years this guy bred the best to the best on hunting ability alone. He turned out to be another old timer who didn't understand why his breeding program all the sudden started producing dogs who structurally couldn't hunt more than a couple years before falling a part at the seems or why he was getting such severe physical defects (no, he was not inbreeding).
There have been other ol timers who bred awesome hunting dogs when I was a kid that went by the wayside 20 or so years later. Not because they couldn't hunt themselves, just couldn't reproduce the quality of dog in their breeding programs they had in past decades.
Even top sled dog racers look at conformation structure of pups and can tell what ones have structural defects to limit their ability to do the work asked of them. If they aren't conformationally correct, the amount of drive to work doesn't matter. It only matters in the dogs that are structurally sound. If a pup is structurally sound, then they move on to judging working ability.
As pointed out, there are a lot of big game hunters who have accepted dog hunting years ending at 5-6. New people coming in will also learn to accept such just like the GSD people. Hunting 10, 11, 12 year old dogs with sound bodies and minds is a treat that is going out of style.
How can you tell the 2 year old you are breeding is still (outside of accidental incidents) will still be able to hunt hard at 5? Especially with dam and sire only being 4 themselves? Unless you have a trained eye for structure, know the internal health of the dog, and have seen great grandparents/greatgrandparents hunting in their Sr years...it is less than an educated guess.
Most people breeding hounds are just back yard breeders. They think and plan very little when it comes to breeding. They think if they have a bitch in heat that hunts it should be bred to a male that hunts to produce puppies that hunt, right?
Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of decent and knowledgeable breeders of coonhounds! However, the vast majority of litters do not come from breeders. They come from people who have a few hounds and think that breeding them will make them a breeder.
Breeding is a science beyond this dog and that dog 'should' be bred because they hunt. A science that is still researching and evolving. If scientists and vets are still figuring things out, I guess they are working for nothing because of all these fly by night back yarders have it all figured out. Just breed two dogs that hunt and everything is perfect in fantasy land.
To think of all those wasted college courses, pricey experimental, expensive tests, and careers wasted trying to detect and prevent genetic defects that are easily fixed by breeding a hunting dog to a hunting dog because it hunts. Which in reality helped create these problems to begin with.
I find it real funny that in two of my breeds, it is the working lines that carry the majority of the health issues we are fighting/researching that stemmed from breeders who just breed on working ability alone.
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02-08-2012 05:13 PM
