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Date Posted: 12:43:51 09/16/03 Tue
Author: JB
Subject: Re: It DOES become clearer
In reply to: Dan G. 's message, "Re: It DOES become clearer" on 11:59:11 09/16/03 Tue

Dan, I understand where you are coming from and do not take your concerns and opinions personally. I agree with many of your points (hence, appraisals are detrimental to the breed in the long run.The NABC judges conformation but only on a fairly broad pass/fail score. Never saying one dog, or one type, is better than another, thus not restricting the gene pool), and where two breeders might differ in their approach to their breeding programs, the dogs, in the long run, will give the passing or failing grade, not you or I.
In your use of Bossman as an example please do not characterize him as having bad hips. One was as close to average as testing accuracy will allow and his other hip was considerable better. I considered his hips as "average", but since my goal is not to produce "average" Boerboels I declined to use him and sold him as a pet.

For the sake of arguement let's say that we have a dog with perfect hips. Both his parents have poor hips and all his siblings are just as bad. If hips are the results of genetic combinations then it is obvious that this particular dog just happened to catch the ideal combination of genes required for perfect hips. Well, all he can pass on to the next generation are the genes he possesses. Therefor, he will contribute half of his "perfect combination" on to his pups. That is all any dog can do, pass on half the genes to the puppies, the other parent is responsible for the other half.
A dog from a family of good hips that does not have good hips himself is very unlikely to pass on genes he doesn't have in the first place. Since we know that two poor dogs can produce good hips occasionally we have to assume that every dog has some of the good genes, just not in combination with other good genes. Still, we are more likely to get good genes from the dog that we know has them as opposed to the other dog that shows so evidence of this.

The general breeding program suggested by PennHIP is that if we breed only from dogs in the better half of the tested population we will bring the average score down (read-produce better hips). Breeding to a dog with known bad hips might by sheer luck produce a good pup now and then, but chances are that if we breed the better dogs we will get better pups.
As far as restricting our breeding dogs to imports--the cull rate I've encountered (and heard about from folks in Europe) would indicate that most of the South Africans either don't know how to produce good dogs or don't care. There are exceptions, but then we will be breeding again from just a few bloodlines. I agree with your idea of using many diffenr bloodlines if possible. The first 12 Boerboel pups I bought were from 11 different "top breeders". Your theory is sound. Actually, there are enough good Boerboels here in the US that too-close breeding should not really present a problem. Time will tell.
Do you know how the greyhound racers keep producing good dogs-and better and better dogs? They appraise with a stop watch. "Breed the best, cull the rest".

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