Assessment of the Breeding Potential of Eurasiers in the Zuchtgemeinschaft fuer Eurasier e.V.
by Gisela Aach
(Any copies, or excerpts, only with permission from the author)
Breeding dogs means you are constantly on your way, heading in the direction of an ideal, an imaginative "ideal dog", as described in the standard. Such an ideal dog will probably never be bred, but you try to come as close to this standard as possible.
There are certain guidelines for chosing dogs for breeding. These guidelines should enable to come as close to the ideal as possible. In order to get a breeding permit, a male or a female must have certain defined features.
Considering our Eurasiers, our first priority is health and the Eurasier typical character, then followed by appearance, colour, etc. As we know, these terms are put together by many single features which are inherited in many different and complex ways and, of course, we must also consider the different environmental influences.
For the assessment of the breeding potential of an animal, or - in other words - its worth in contributing to the breed, there are various possibilities (assessing the animal itself; coming to conclusions through knowledge of the pedigree and family tree; through knowledge about the siblings and their offspring; and, of course, through assessing the offspring of the animal itself). All these possibilities, seen on their own, have advantages and disadvantages.
The decision to breed can only be an asset for the Eurasier breed, if there is enough information about this Eurasier to assess its breeding potential by combining all the possibilities mentioned above, so that the pros and cons can be weighed. Naturally, this is not possible without the assistance of the dog owners, but it is also not possible without the assistance of an electronic database, which makes it possible to sum up all this data correctly and evaluate it.
1. Evaluating or assessing the offspring
Logically, it is only possible to assess offspring, if offspring is there, in which case the parents have already been chosen after having passed the assessment. And the decision for breeding must now be examined again.
If breeding should not be done for quantity, but for quality, to improve the breed by heading closer to the ideal, the breeding potential of a dog is defined by the average superiority of his offspring over todays average population. A simple example: Let's say, we wanted to head for a higher shoulder height. In three litters with three different females, a male produced only such offspring that had lower shoulder heights than he himself had. In this case and for this part, the breeding potential of this male is zero, he may even be harmful to the breeding aim.
By assessing the animal on the basis of its offspring, you can recognize the true breeding potential of an animal, even when considering the fact that an animal used for breeding only passes on half of its positive or negative genes. Therefore, the offspring only show half of the breeding potential of this animal. The offspring of both parents must always be evaluated.
Now, when we look at the breeding potential of a male in his offspring, various preconditions must be given so that we can find an affirmative result (the same procedure is used for females):
a. The male must be mated with eurasier typical females of different origins (lines). Should these females have strong similarities, e.g. concerning their ancestors, this must be taken into account.
b. The offspring that are to be evaluated, must show a good profile of all the offspring, which means they may not be sorted concerning specific features beforehand. Considering our Eurasier population, we have comparably few litters per year and therefore few offspring of one dog. This means we must evaluate and assess complete litters, as far as possible, doing it with only some would certainly give a distorted picture.
c. The environment in which the dogs are raised and live in, must be known and must be considered, as well. An example: A litter is raised responsibly and gets all the nutrition and stimuli according to their needs at the breeder's and in the new home. A second litter is fed unbalanced, only with canned food containing a lot of fat (certainly no sensible person would do that). Everybody will understand the ill effects this can have for example on the development of the teeth; and so, in this case, we would have to take environment into account, considerably.
So, for assessing the breeding potential, many, many single pieces of information must be gathered. This effort is well worth it as it improves obtaining a clear result concerning the breeding potential of the parents immensely.
For some time now, we have been applying this method to chose the males; in addition, we supplement our choice by applying the other methods for chosing (of course, in all methods applied, the database is vital and of great assistance).
Chosing the females is more problematic, as assessing the offspring takes a lot of time: the offspring must be at least 14-15 months old and a female can only be bred from for a limited period of time. In the ZG, therefore, we make an assessment of the breeding potential of the offspring only binding in "problematic cases", when there are good reasons for using a female that might have a fault, but one would like to prevent carrying this fault into the whole population. Regarding the "wellbeing" of the whole population, it must be tolerated that such a female might have to wait another one or two heats before she could have a further litter. This might be disappointing for the breeder, but is occasionally absolutely necessary.
2. The potential of the breeding animal itself
Although assessing the offspring is the most affirmative instrument for evaluating the breeding potential, it lies in the nature of things that, for example, the decision concerning a breeding permit (which means male or female for breeding "yes or no") cannot be applied in this method.
Here we must apply other instruments.
One of the most common methods in dog breeding is the assessment of the potential of the animal itself as a basis to evaluate the breeding potential. Naturally, the performance or feature that should be assessed, must be assessed on this specific animal itself. If this assessment of "performance" is to be successful, depends on two more factors:
a. the obtained and detailed data must be thorough, sound and exact, and
b. the grade of heritability of the features needs to be assessed.
How do we try to achieve this for our Eurasiers?
What do we do with our Eurasiers to obtain data?
First of all, those check-ups that the scientists have good knowledge of meanwhile, which are X-rays for a possible hip dysplasia, check for any signs of luxation of the knee-cap, check-up of the teeth, and a check-up for any further illnesses auch as eye diseases, cryptorchism, eczema, etc. These check-ups must be done by a veterinary doctor. All these things can be evaluated by specialists and are easily obtained information about possible illnesses. In no way would we skip these check-ups, although they cause the dogs and owners a few costs and efforts.
Furthermore, we obtain data concerning the appearance, such as size, weight, length of the skull, etc., structure of the coat, gait, bones, muscles, pigment and ..., and ...
Up to this point, data is easy to obtain, if - and that is what would be wished for - the owner can lead his dog easily and if the dog can be persuaded to accept a measuring tape and the Körmeister (a highly trained breed specialist of a Club or conformation judge) succeeds in winning the trust of the dog, if need be with a bit of persuasion, e.g. treats.
All the features of a Eurasier we listed so far, refer to the exterior of the dog, and can be measured and compared. The exterior features can therefore be assessed well. Additionally, these features all have a high grade of heritability and can therefore be managed well in breeding.
It is much more difficult to assess what is "under the coat", this could be a possible, but not exterior detectable illness, but also the special character and behaviour of our Eurasiers. To assess what is under the coat, it is necessary that the "bonding person" of the dog presents the dog, because now a conversation follows in which all those things are addressed and discussed that cannot be measured with a measuring tape, but which are so very important. The conversation is about the special behaviour of this dog, his best and less favoured traits, also about "his home and the environment he lives in" - be it the busy household of a shop-keeper or a quiet family home out in the country -, is there only one person he bonded with or does he have a huge circle of friends and people he knows well. Such and similar information help to evaluate and assess the behaviour.
Only the overall view of all this information will make a relatively safe decision concerning the breeding potential possible.
At this point we are at the limits of assessing the dog itself, because these traits only have a medium heritability - the environment also contributes towards how strongly some traits will be pronounced - and so these traits are difficult to assess for each dog. For this part of the assessment it is advisable to apply another method, the "assessment of the family and its performance".
3. Assessing the family performance
I have already introduced a certain part of the assessment regarding the family performance, the assessment of the offspring. When assessing a Eurasier, this kind of family performance is not considered.
Family can be defined in this case as following:
A dog family consists of the parents, possibly the grandparents, in other words the ancestors, then there are the full siblings, which means dogs with the same parents (not necessarily from the same litter) and half siblings, which means dogs who share one parent, and all the offspring of these. For a sound evaluation, less closely related animals are not really of importance.
When assessing the animal on the basis of the family performance, you have much more data and information to hand as when assessing it only by its own performance. But it is important to have comparable information of the "family". So, when assessing the breeding potential of a dog not only on the basis of its own performance, but on the basis of the data of the whole family, you can be much more sure about the breeding potential especially of such traits that have a low or medium heritability.
What does that mean for our Eurasier Assessment?
As you know, every Eurasier that is presented for an assessment, must be assessed with regard to his own performance. But before deciding about his suitability for breeding or his breeding potential, all our data is consulted concerning the "family", the parents and siblings (the ZG maintains an extensive database of all animals bred in the ZG and can also check the data of the dogs of other Eurasier Clubs joined together in the IFEZ (see Links).
When comparing the performance within the family, we focus on similarities and great differences. Similarities with the parents and siblings point towards a manifested genetic basis of the traits, great differences will not allow a safe conclusion about the performance of the assessed animal.
To explain what this means, here is a simple example: The hunting drive is a trait with medium heritability, at most. And we would like to keep the hunting drive of our Eurasiers as low as possible. When discussing the hunting drive with the owner of a Eurasier we did not get a clear result, because the dog normally walks well-behaved alongside his owner in the town and in the park and does not roam. In the forest, the dog is kept on a lead due to a rabies warning. Occasionally, the owner noticed that his dog likes to make birds fly up, but he cannot say anything in connection with the "hunting drive", neither something positive, nor something negative.
Now we check the data of the family: Both parents are dogs that live in the country and the owners reported that a hunting drive is most likely present, but the more the dogs matured, the more both mother and father can be called back at any time. Concerning the siblings, unfortunately, we only have the report of one sister: "As a young dog she loved to chase rabbits, but always came back within a very short time". Considering all this information, you can most probably conclude that the Eurasier we are assessing would show a slight hunting drive, if he had the opportunity. The information also tells us that in this family the hunting drive is not very pronounced and that this trait therefore need only be considered in a secondary place when assessing the breeding potential.
In this way, the information we have of a dog can either be manifested by looking at the family or put into relation. But one should never give up assessing the individual itself by preferring a close look at the family only, as you would then only work with averages, and these do not show the variances of a trait in its exactness, extremes would not become visable, they would stay disguised in the average.
And so, we will keep on assessing each Eurasier as to its own performance and will supplement this with the "family data". In every case, where possible, the assessment of the breeding potential will be done on the basis of the offspring and will be supplemented as well, as this information gives us the greatest evidence concerning the breeding potential of an animal.
May the Eurasier remain to be a healthy breed!
Zuchtgemeinschaft für Eurasier e.V. : http://www.eurasier-online.de