Choose your master AKC

This is a reprint from THE DOG PRESS, An Open Letter to The AKC Board Chairman. BOTTOM LINE questions On Moral Integrity, Financial Future, by David Arthur Dec 08

I don't agree with everything Mr Arthur writes to Mr Menaker here (ex. the admitance of unregistered dogs - I think there is a time and place and the AKC should expand it) but I agree with the vast majority of it. The letter is very long, but worth the read.

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Dear Mr. Menaker,

In the September 2008 Chairman's Report, you expressed concern about losing revenue to the “retail sector”. I understand the American Kennel Club (AKC), like any organization, can not sustain itself while hemorrhaging red ink. But your anxiety and resulting philosophy concerns me greatly. I can’t imagine you are unaware that responsible breeders never sell to retail outlets, even though they know well that the returns on any given litter will never exceed the expenditures to produce it. Yet they continue out of pure devotion to their breeds. The AKC, however, has seemingly reduced the fancy to little more than figures on a balance sheet.

I’m sure you realize that producing quality puppies and chasing the marketplace are not parallel directions, but rather, are diametrically opposed concepts; one based on increasing quality, the other on revenues from greater volumes of inferior goods.

We all recognize fuel costs have soared, food prices have all but leapt off of the countertop, and the whole economy is sluggish at best. But increasing revenue is not the only option, as most financial challenges are best met by cutting expenditures and offering a better product. Sadly, you seem to be seeking the former with no reliance on the latter.

As you say, “The declining registrations and associated core revenues, if allowed to continue, will fundamentally change our organization going forward. Make no mistake, the very future of the AKC and our sport is at risk.” Loss of income and core revenues means only one thing; your customers are finding a better product elsewhere. You state that the AKC was a premiere brand. Courting the commercial market does nothing to restore your brand’s value. Walmart has an enormous market share but you’ll never find Rolex watches at their jewelry counter. If you want to restore the AKC’s reputation, you must
support superlative breeders instead of chasing the industrial market. Quality breeders will never risk associating their reputation with the likes of Petland.

At one point, you state, “there are at least 30 All-Breed registries in addition to the AKC, whose combined registration numbers exceed that of the AKC.”
The truth is, there is only one other credible all-breed “registry” in the U.S., the United Kennel Club (UKC). The others are pseudo-registries, with nothing to
offer reputable breeders. Becoming like them only cheapens the AKC’s value. (See “The Problem With Papers”.)

Yet you persist, “If this trend is allowed to continue, if we do not stop the hemorrhaging of declining registrations, we will no longer be the premier registry in the world, let alone in our country.” I’m afraid you have misunderstood the public’s desire for the quality superior breeders produce. If by “premiere” you mean being the biggest registry in the world, then “hemorrhaging” is a problem. If however “premiere registry” means being the world’s best, then the obvious conclusion is that you can never also be the biggest. It’s a matter of quantity or quality. In this market, you’re either the biggest or the best. That, sir, is your true dilemma.

You said “Management has been directed by the Board to aggressively pursue all dogs eligible for AKC registration. We intend to reach out, communicate, and educate those in the retail sector as to why an AKC puppy is the gold standard and why they should be registered with American Kennel Club. In achieving this objective we intend to continue to ‘raise the bar’ by vigorously enforcing our
policies. This action is essential to protect and preserve our leadership.”

This is in fact, a complete oxymoron! The “retail sector” is the puppy mill industry, noted for the least quality possible. You intend to educate THEM? I believe you have tried ever since you became CEO but they have no interest in
AKC’s “gold standard”, which is bronze at best because of your unfettered efforts to cater to them. They will never replace quantity with quality, and in the meantime you have denigrated the work done by reputable breeders. As you seek to enfold the pet production market, it signals the public and the dedicated breeder that the AKC is not the Neiman Marcus of our sport, but rather the canine version of K-Mart.

You can’t “raise the bar” by lowering it! AKC tried to woo back the industrial pet market with special inducements not offered to show breeders. That too backfired. The millers didn’t need AKC but your actions so soured premier breeders that many left the sport. I know it is a quandary for AKC. If you enforce policy and uphold commitment to the original AKC mission statement,
registrations would reduce even more as many retail breeders would not be able or willing to meet your requirements. But that also identifies the heart of the
issue. Will AKC be the biggest or the best?

You assert “As the pre-eminent and only not-for-profit registry, we live our values everyday with our commitment to the integrity of our registry and the excellence of our inspections program.” It appears that you intend to
register any dog that the owner states has an unbroken line to registered ancestors. Where is the assurance of integrity in that? Can you not see that once pups are placed, even reputable breeders have little to no control over their future propagation? More than just a few of us have experienced situations where someone has violated a contract, took their AKC registered dog(s) – including those with limited registration – and bred them in a corrupt manner or registered them with a puppy mill registry. Some even switch sires or add ghost puppies to litter paperwork. I know DNA profiling was meant to prevent that, but it occurs regardless. And once you open the door to puppies from unregistered litters, then both Limited Registration and DNA profiling become meaningless, along with the AKC stud books.

The new registration service offers absolutely nothing to your core breeders. Instead, it drives us away from AKC. Do you then plan to replace us with the people who bought pet puppies with no papers? You will undermine the only thing that makes an AKC registration worthwhile, the purity if your studbooks, and that is the unmitigated surrender of your integrity, and ours.

As to requiring adherence to your “compliance and inspection programs”, again, you speak of elevating the quality of AKC puppies. You do realize if you truly held to a strict quality assurance program, you would lessen the number of registrations? Again, it’s either quantity or quality. You can not escape this principle. Your largest producers will deem AKC too restrictive and be unwilling
to submit to your inspections. You are an astute businessman. So let me ask you. Will they loose money by lessening output or spend money to raise the level of
care?

I doubt you will be able to suddenly turn the commercial market into a front from which happy and healthy show quality puppies spring forth. The commercial market that you seek doesn’t care about puppy socialization, genetic health screening, exercise requirements, grooming, and least of all, adherence to breed standards. It cares only about hard, cold cash, which is alarmingly close to the
core value that seems to fuel your most recent efforts.

Then you assert, “The American Kennel Club provides what no other registry provides" I’m not sure what the AKC is able to give us that the UKC can’t provide. You speak as if the AKC is the only venue exhibitors have. Granted, an
AKC championship still outshines nearly all other titles. But in most breeds it is also less difficult to obtain than a UKC Grand Championship, and the UKC shows are more fun to attend. They are far less stressful, wonderfully informal,
have no professional handlers, and use many of the same judges as does the AKC. UKC also offers something your registry does not, the Total Dog title, which requires qualification in both performance and conformation on the same day. UKC dogs are required to do much more than just look the part; they must also be able to perform. So as exhibitors, we are already experiencing, “the same
joys and passions we have so fortunately enjoyed for more than a century,” and are doing so at considerably less cost.

(blogger's note - I added the bold italics in this paragraph)
When you talk about a “staggering 53% decline” in registrations, this has little to do with other registries. Are you oblivious to the fact that those of us in the show fancy often have multiple registrations on our dogs? My own are AKC and UKC registered, with conformation and performance titles from both. When the UKC invited the nation’s most respected single-breed and all-breed registries to a summit, it was the AKC who declined to attend. By acting as a separatist, AKC cut off potential allies and breeders who would have benefited through dual registration. And let’s not forget the firestorm that arose over your decision, now reversed, regarding judges holding dual approvals.

All of this leads me to wonder if you are seeing this situation correctly. Maybe the reason AKC registrations are falling is because of brand value. The AKC must become something more than just an advertizing tool in the local classifieds. You will never be able to hold sway over the likes of the American Pet Registry, the National Kennel Club, the Universal Kennel Club Inc., or any of the paper
mills. They will always be the darling of the commercial market, and in the eyes of many – if not most of us within the sport – they are spouses within a marriage made in Hades.



The unscrupulous will always take the track of less effort. So compromising your standards for the sake of increasing revenues should work. For example, AKC’s deal with
Petland would have clearly padded your bottom line. But as we made abundantly clear, it would have sold out we who hold our reputations in the highest regard. You surely would have increased your commercial share, but the AKC brand would have been trashed.

So maybe this isn’t about the sport. You say that, “as we lose registrations, we also lose our core revenues, our ability to generate alternative revenues and our legislative influence.” Is it really all about “core revenues”? You say
you want to, “get back on track growing our influence as the premier registry in the world.” I grant you, the AKC was the premiere pride of our sport. But the reason you have lost standing is because you sold out chasing those “core
revenues”. You should be striving to ensure that the buyer of an AKC puppy owns something above those bought in pet stores, flea markets, and back alley parking lots. By your present policy, the next door neighbor’s sex education project for their children is suddenly placed on the same level with our highest show champions. To have an AKC registered dog means little, if anything, these days. And this is all because of your focus on fiscal returns over the quality of our Best In Show specials.

You say, “AKC puppies and our breeders are the best”; that, “they are the ‘Gold Standard’ in the marketplace.” Reading this makes me wonder if you have been out in the trenches as of late. The average person sees no difference
between AKC and the Continental Kennel Club. In the near twenty years I’ve been a breeder, an AKC registration only meant the dog was purebred, not that it had any inherent quality. And the reason the other “registries” are weakening your position is because you are seeking to emulate their practices. You are not bringing the sport up to a higher standard, but rather, you are sinking the AKC’s reputation to a much lower one.

Then, when you say, “No one is suggesting we lose sight of our rich heritage and traditions,” sir, it has never been part of our rich heritage or traditions to supply fodder to the pet market! Have we not always been dedicated to producing only the highest quality and most healthy specimens our kennels can generate? “Pets” come from sorting out the exceptional, and then placing the rest into the homes of average pet buyers who should have a puppy that is, in
nearly every aspect, the equal to our champions. Again, you have contradicted the very direction you now propose.

I also beg to differ that the millions of registration dollars you collected from AKC pet owners, “overwhelmingly subsidized our sport.” Other than sanctioning events, and the AKC Canine Health Foundation (CHF), what services do you really provide? Ironically, when we send information to help identify puppy mills, we are told that you are just a registry and that it is not your function to police the breeding community.

When I was on the board of a breed club, AKC never once sent us a check to cover any of our expenses. We expended our own club’s resources for our events. The
judges pay for their required seminars and other education. The clubs pay the judges, pay for the facility, the superintendant (if one is used), the equipment, food, advertizing, printing, postage, and in the end, when all of the entries fees are collected, we send a check to you!

You say, “let me make it clear to all, that the AKC will continue to enthusiastically support the Parent Clubs' Codes of Ethics including, as it relates to their members' sale of puppies through commercial entities.” But
wait, isn’t that the very market you intend to pursue? Or are you looking to make headway with the backyard breeders, who are equally as abhorrent to your AKC member clubs? I’m not sure how you can reconcile your concept, as even local breed clubs have stipulations that members can never sell puppies to brokers or commercial outlets.

In the end, I guess the most telling aspect of your report is as follows:

“If the current trend continues and dog registrations decline to 250,000 over the next several years,AKC will face an annual revenue shortfall of $40 million. To put this in perspective, if this scenario occurred, and we relied solely on raising the event service fees to make up for this revenue shortfall, the fee would be a staggering $20 per entry. Our preference would be to grow our registrations to the point that we could lower, not increase event fees. Some would say the obvious solution is a significant reduction in expenses.However, a $40 million revenue shortfall would necessitate a reduction of our expenses by two-thirds. This is totally unrealistic.”

Either way, you lose market share. And the question begs an answer as to why you have such high expenses. Yes, you reduced the number of employees but AKC still resides in some of the country’s most expensive real estate. Shouldn’t you have moved your entire operation to North Carolina where the cost of living is so much lower? AKC may well have a revenue crisis, but you also have a serious expenditure problem.



I do believe our sport faces great risk, but I dare say it is not from lost revenue to any single registry. We are in far greater danger from Breed Specific Legislation (BSL) than from the fiscal trials facing the AKC. By fostering commercial breeders, you actually feed into the pet overpopulation hysteria. Your desire to increase funding is the very attitude that puts the sport in greater peril! Embracing the commercial market ushers in the likes of Petland, Jack’s Pets, and the whole of the Midwestern milling industry. They flood the country with countless hoards of substandard pups – complete with genetic and
health problems – lending credence to PETA, the Humane Society of the U.S., and even such fanatical groups as the Animal Liberation Front. If you succeed in this unholy alliance, these organizations will gladly push us over the edge to destruction.

My advice is to simplify your operation and cater to those who will bring you the most honors. Our future should never include legitimizing industrial puppy breeding! It should remain as the home-spun sport we, the reputable breeding community and the astute puppy buyer, have supported for ages. Our sport should not be professionalized to the point where it turns off the average
breeder-exhibitor. AKC must address the puppy mill problem, not contribute to it. And most of all, it should protect us against the ravages of BSL by uniting with other organizations dedicated to our cause. Do this, and we will gladly bring our registrations to AKC.

If you truly want to regain being the “Gold Standard” of our sport, then give us a registry whose aim is to follow your own mission statement. If you continue to chase after market share in place of strengthening your bond with us, AKC will shrink to nothing more than a top-dollar pet registry, with little support or respect from anyone. Backing the mills means abandoning us, along with your own
parent clubs. My hope is that you will listen to us, lest you find in the end that the AKC has traded its status for money without value, such as is exemplified by the collapsing banking and insurance industry. As the CEO of AKC and someone formerly in the banking business, you should know this principle better than anyone. You should
also recognize the greatest treasure of all is the ability to validate our fine and noble breeds.

I guess the Bible says it best, "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” (John 2:13-16) In the end Sir, whom will you serve?

Sincerely,
David J. Arthur
Aircastle Standard Poodles

Time, Volume, or Concentration

- - Why line breeding works, and works so very well if done correctly.

There is a pervasive notion in the dog world, especially among some of the FCI countries and in some working dog circles, that canine in-breeding is inherently "bad" and should be avoided. However, in-depth study of numerous successful breeding programs makes it clear that this notion simply does not hold up to objective scrutiny.

Some working houndsmen are quick to argue that many working dog breeds have developed "just fine" into their various functional types without inbreeding. What they fail to realize is that animal husbandry has "dimensions", and fixing breed quality in any domain(s) - functional, conformational, temperamental, etc - only comes with significant investment into at least one of these "dimensions." These dimensions are breeding "Time," breeding "Volume," or breeding "Concentration."

Straight away it must be understood that all of these so-called breeding "dimensions" are simply different ways of achieving the same goal--evoking the desired traits, and then hopefully fixing them in your line (or the breed population) through what would commonly be referred to as "Depth of Pedigree."

These dimensions, then, are the proven paths to achieving that depth of pedigree.

TIME - One way to achieve positive selection is to budget copious amounts of time to the breeding program. This only works with multiple -human- generations. Let's be clear, we're talking about centuries, or more often, millennia... not decades. A classic example of this is the Short-haired Borzoi, or more properly, the "Hortaya Borzaya." A truly ancient breed selected purely for field-proven function over millennia.

The Hortaya is considered to have been perfected hundreds (if not thousands) of years ago. As a 'perfected' breed, contemporary Hortaya breeders are strongly discouraged from line breeding (in-breeding) because functional selection is forgone; modern matings are instead determined by minimal inbreeding coefficients.

For the Hortaya, this makes sense. In a breed so old - and so relatively small - a population in which only field-proven animals are even considered for breeding in the first place, determining final selections based on maximized genetic diversity is an advisable course. That said, it needs to be very clearly understood that the important "take home" from a study of the Hortaya is that the breeders do not want true and absolute uniformity of type.

Hortaya breeders expect, and indeed want, several different types within their single breed.

Beyond the fact that most other breeds' breeders strive for absolute uniformity (at least in theory), the problems in attempting to apply this approach to most other breed populations is many-fold.

Most breeds are not nearly so old, and are not therefore, considered -perfected-. That is to say, dedicated contemporary breeders believe that they can not only maintain breed type, but further refine or improve it with future generations.

There is also breeder Ego to consider. Most folks want to live to see the fruits of their efforts to contribute to the breed. Individual humans have a finite life span. This means that they aren't willing to pursue a course in which they are merely an insignificant link in the chain of the breed's history. They want to produce the best dog possible... in their lifetime. For these breeders, the option of investing in the Time dimension, is not an option.

The major dichotomy of the Time approach is that many breeds which modern fanciers might think of as old, are in all actuality relatively young. Even so, they may in fact be relatively "perfected.” The relatively perfected state did not occur due to time at all, but investment in the breed's Volume, or the breed's Concentration, not all that long ago. A fact which is all too easily neglected and/or forgotten by the modern breeder.

VOLUME - It was not all that long ago that successful kennels produced some phenomenal individual dogs. We all look back and admire these dogs, and the breeders that produced them. What we neglect to remember is that they were, in effect, playing the Law-of-Large-Numbers.

Basically it says that in any process with variable outcomes, -every- possible result will eventually be achieved at least once within the parameters of possible outcomes, if (and only if) the process is repeated often enough. We conveniently forget that the ‘Annie Clark's’ of the world used to maintain kennels with dozens, or quite often hundreds of dogs.

Now before the working dog aficionado looks down their nose at this approach as the exclusive purview of 1920's show dog breeder, don't be naive... or hypocritical.

Especially those of us who admire the "older" continental and British bird dog and hound breeds. Those Dukes, Lords, Squires and Kings who kept and bred these dogs did the exact same thing. Keeping entire staffs dedicated to nothing but overseeing and tending to their kennels and breeding programs which usually included hundreds of dogs on site, and in a few cases, thousands of dogs.

The Volume approach then solves the Ego problem; it -does- produce results, and does so inside of one human lifetime. But there are two problems with the Volume approach as well.

The first 'problem' inherent to pursuing the Volume approach, is that it necessitates mass culling. I don't suppose to stand in judgment, and I am rarely want to ever tell another man or woman what he/she should do with their own dog(s). There is a time and a place for culling. The individual must decide what that means for them... only they know what will or won't keep them from being able to sleep at night.

The other problem with the Volume approach is the lack of an end-game. Followed in its purest form, this approach simply produces hundreds of puppies a year, secure in the knowledge that perhaps one in a hundred will "turn out". This dog (if it's a d-o-g) will be added to the stud stable, and hopefully, each year, he too will produce one in one hundred that is as good as, or better than himself. The other 99 will wash out, and likely become fertilizer.

The solution to this problem is at some point, investing in the Concentration dimension. A Volume breeder can spend the first 20 years of their breeding career producing a proven stud stable, and then line breed based on those foundation dogs for the next 20 years. But if this is the answer, then it also begs the question: If you're going to end up pursuing Concentration half way through, why not simply start there to begin with?

CONCENTRATION – The best way to effect the best results in the shortest amount of time, using the least number of dogs, is intelligent investment in the Concentration dimension. Concentrating is line breeding, yes even in-breeding.

The thing that needs to be understood is that line breeding does not produce, nor does it create, deleterious genes. All dogs - all of them - have deleterious genes. Line breeding simply "shows you what you got".

Let's say you are a bird hunter and by accident or by design you have acquired a dog with truly exceptional pointing ability. You've never seen another dog as good as this one. This is what you know. What you don't know is that this dog is also a carrier for "Three Leg Syndrome" or "TLS"- a syndrome I randomly made up which causes the effected dog to be born with 3 legs instead of 4.

So, in subsequent generations you wisely decide to line breed on this dog. What will inevitably happen? You will produce some affected dogs. That is to say, you will produce some dogs with TLS. That's the bad news.

This is where everyone starts waving their arms and stomping around indignantly. "See!!! This is why line breeding is so awful!!!"

But is it really? What was the alternative? Out-cross this dog to a (presumably) high quality and completely unrelated bitch. Then what? Did the TLS gene go away? Not likely. What will more likely happen is that the TLS gene will continue to hide in the pedigree for untold generations to come. Showing it's ugly head in the odd (seemingly) random puppy, and the breeder has no real or truly confirmable grasp on where in the pedigree it is coming from.

But using the Concentration approach, as effected dogs are removed from the gene pool with each subsequent line bred generation, fewer and fewer TLS carriers are produced, and more and more genetically clear dogs are produced. I refer to this process as 'dilution' to extinction through concentration.

In the modern age, 'dilution' to extinction can also be achieved without line breeding, at least for any genetic disorder for which there is a reliable genetic marker test. However, while strides are being made every day, most genetic disorders still lack a marker test. And even for those disorders for which there is a reliable marker test, what about breed type and functional type and improvement? Even when we can "test out" of a certain disease, out-crossed breeding paradigms still force us to operate in the Time or Volume dimensions to achieve maintenance or gains in those areas.

And herein lay the true beauty of the Concentration approach.

While we were busy producing more and more TLS clear dogs, and fewer and fewer TLS carriers and effecteds, through intelligent selection, we were simultaneously able to "set" that foundation dog's type features which caused us to select him as a foundation dog in the first place.

This is to say, with each generation, we can, if we so choose, get closer and closer to producing a clone of this now long dead ideal dog - without the TLS!

But some will bristle at the term "clone". Clone is not a dirty word. In fact, line-bred near-clones exist in nature. Dr Belkin: In wild animals, you can see specialization for function that has evolved without regard for appearance. People select dogs to be dual-purpose - they just can't help it. The Arabs have selected Salukis not only to be the best dogs for coursing and catching things, but also to be pretty. Nature doesn't work that way because nature doesn't care about pretty. If an animal comes out pretty, that just happens... I like to think of the cheetah as God's Greyhound. The cheetah can do many things better than any coursing dog can do them. The conformation of a cheetah may tell you something about what our Salukis should be like if we breed them to course hares. Cheetahs are interesting in that not too long ago the world population of them was reduced to a very small number, so genetically they are all practically clones. They are about the most line-bred mammal in the world, aside from what has been bred by man. It pleases me to think that God got what He wanted and line-bred it.

Lest anyone mistakenly thinks that this approach is embraced by bird dog breeders and gräoid hound breeders, but avoided by trail hound and tree hound breeders, think again. Richard McDuffie, an old time (and I do mean old) coon-hound aficionado from the Carolinas, and a name worth knowing, recalls the story of "Woodrow's Dogs": When Woodrow returned home in 1945 after 4 years of military service, he was without a coon dog. He saw an ad in the local newspaper, the FayetteVille Observer, for 2 coon dogs. One was a Black and Tan for $50, the other a Bluetick for $100. He asked why the difference in price. The owner answered that the Black and Tan would tree most coons but not all, but the Bluetick treed them all. Woodrow bought the Bluetick and found that the man had told him the truth. He said that the first 32 tracks struck ended at a tree, and he shot out a coon. It didn't matter how cold a track was. If the old dog opened on it, he would put a tree at the end, and a coon would be there. Woodrow bred the Bluetick to some female the first spring. All the pups turned into coon dogs. He started inbreeding and only kept pups that were bluetick in color. The [inbred] dogs he produced generation after generation retained the traits of the original dog.

But wait. This has been been the functional reality of top performing tree and trail hounds since long before the 1940's. I won't detail the points of the article here (perhaps in a future posting?) but I will strongly encourage any of you who consider yourselves to be SERIOUS students of treeing and/or trailing hounds to write to the UKC, and request a copy of the article by Guy Ormiston entitled "A Tree Is Known By It's Fruit", which appeared in the August 2005 Coonhound Bloodlines magazine (vol 32, #8) in which Mr Ormiston details how the:

- Turn of the century (1800) Irish Hounds
- Captain, the foundation stud of the Henry Hounds
- Foundation stock for many running breeds including the Goodmans, Hudspeth, Julys, Shaver, Spalding Norris, and Triggs.
- Foundation stock for many treeing breeds including the the Redbone, English, Treeing Walker and Bluetick Coonhounds.
- "Tennessee Lead", pillar of the running Walker breed
- The leading field trial hound of the 1860's
- Many top field trial hounds of the early 20th century
- The 1928 National Leafy Oak winner

were -all- the product of rather intense inbreeding.


Why would this be the case? Because, I maintain, whether the breeder is consciously aware of it or not, 90% of what breeding quality dogs is all about is the cloning (or near cloning) of the most exceptional dogs. The other 10% is about making minor improvements in health, temperament, conformation and working abilities along the way.

If we stop and consider, clones (or near clones) actually offer us incredible selection options for the future. But how can this be? A line of clones is the apex of a bottlenecked gene pool after all. Well, this would be true of an entire breed population. But in most breeds there is a large population, and a large breeder base, so individual breeders applying the Concentration approach to their individual lines does not bottleneck the gene pool if Popular Sire Effect is avoided between lines.

So each breeder becomes the steward of a Concentrated line. Each of these individual lines becomes a little genetic island of healthy, typey, near clones.

The biggest problem inherent to the Concentration approach is that sometimes the most careful, thoughtful, and intelligent breeder will eventually encounter a genetic cul-de-sac in their line. This cul-de-sac is created due to a genetic defect that despite the breeder's best efforts, simply can't seem to be avoided within the line. Cul-de-sac can also occasionally occur due to the influence of a phenomena known as "inbreeding depression." This is where various reproductive qualities - sex organ formation, milk production, general virility, etc can be adversely effected, usually at a point at which COI's are extremely high.

This can be managed in several ways. Careful "back-crossing", an especially attractive option in the age of frozen semen, or conventional out-crossing.

Conventional out-crossing actually presents the most risk to the established and productive high quality inbred line. The effect of a Concentration approach is to greatly increase general homozygosity, and by default this greatly increases the uniformity and predictability of the offspring. A breeder who has invested many years or even decades into producing a high quality Concentrated line, opens their line up to all the unknowns and uncertainty of the other genepool when doing an out-cross.

That is unless the other line to which they are outcrossing is also highly Concentrated (intensely line bred), well established, and producing quality of type and health. Provided both breeders are honest with each other about what known deleterious genetics exist in their respective lines, they will quickly and rather easily know if an out-cross between the two lines is advisable. With a single infusion of new but concentrated genetic material then, the Concentration approach can once again be applied to many subsequent generations before the previously unavoidable defect and/or inbreeding depression appears on the horizon again, if ever.

As a perfect example of this, we can again look to the breeding program of Woodrow, the old-time breeder of jam-up Blueticks: ...the only problem with his dogs was that they tended to be ill at the tree. To prevent this aggressiveness at the tree, he outcrossed on a string of hounds known as Kentucky Bobtails that were being hunted in the Fayetteville area at the time and were known to be mild-natured. The outcross on the Kentucky Bobtails seemed to solve the aggressiveness at the tree. [As of 2006] Woodrow still had 11 dogs, all bluetick in color, that traced back to his kennel for 60 years.

While numerous varying but recurring archetypes may be considered acceptable or even desirable in a few breeds like the Hortaya, the vast majority of breeds are plagued by these seemingly unshakable variances. Unshakable for everyone except those rare Master Breeders who truly understand that beginning with the highest quality foundation stock available and then investing in that stock in the Concentration dimension of their breeding program is the most advisable course.

How have the Master Breeders come to this conclusion? They have realized that what they are really doing is breeding towards a single conformational and/or functional ideal. When that epiphany is achieved, and the breeder learns to make peace with it, it becomes clear that producing clones is not a bad thing... producing the highest possible quality clones is actually the goal. These are the breeders who throughout history have achieved consistent and long term success.

Once in a great while, a dog appears which is so close to that ideal that it distinguishes itself from the rest of its kind. The 'average' breeder dilutes this dog's quality by breeding it to a worthy but unrelated dog. The Master Breeder concentrates on this dog's quality through line breeding.


Is it a coincidence that true Master Breeders, both historical and contemporary, both working and show - the likes of Dr. Henry, Col. Birdsong, Dr. Belkin, Patricia C. Trotter, Dr Claudia Orlandi, and Guy Ormiston - all advocate(d) a breeding paradigm that achieves depth of pedigree (that is to say depth of consistent quality of pedigree) by spending the requisite amount of focus and attention to the Time and Volume dimensions of breeding, but focusing the lion's share of their focus and effort on maximizing their investment in the Concentration dimension of their breeding programs? Coincidence?

Long term and consistent quality is not achieved through coincidence.