 Hello everybody, thank you for coming tonight. I'd like to introduce Katie to the council. She's giving one of our speakers along with Andrew's source group. Katie comes from a family of dog breeders. She was a breeder of merit in three breeds. The Sanjay, most well known for, Ibiza Towns, and perhaps the Prisewood of the Cougs. She's a breeder of over 150 titles. Katie has been involved in a hundred plus of the Sanjay breeders over the past 30 years. Her totality breeding program has been ranked in her breeds top 10 to 20 in both the Sanjay's and Ibiza Towns. She's been a parent club for the mentor for 25 years. Recently she has also been the representative of the Sanjay Club of America as their AKC delegate and serves on the AKC Breeder Development Committee. This year Katie was honored enough to be asked to join for the Ibiza and the Sanjay National Specialties. And thank you again for everybody watching tonight. You're on Katie. Okay. Thank you for coming. I have, years ago when I started breeding I was one of those people that really liked to check the boxes. I've always been a real type A type of person. And I needed to get something that was kind of concrete so that as I evolved as a breeder I had something tangible that I could work with like a framework. So I put together this what we call, what I call the Tashi Technique which is my kennel name. And I think it'll work over the course of other breeds because it's worked for me when I'm working on other breeds. So as I get started I want to just gloss over a couple of things with vocabulary because I want to make sure that everybody understands what, how I'm using the words that I'm using. So phenotype, phenotype means that when you're looking at the dog it's what it looks like. As opposed to genotype which is something that's coming in through their physical genes. So genotype and phenotype. What we see as phenotype when the judge is going to rang me to judge on phenotype and breeders are more concerned of course not only about phenotype but also genotype because we're able to run tests and things like that that help us breed the most healthy dogs we can. I'm going to talk about assets and liabilities and it's very much like a balance sheet. We're talking about what the assets and the strengths are of the animal versus the liabilities which is commonly called a fault but I hate to fault judge so I like to consider them more of a liability. Objective versus subjective. Objective is like when you get a test you get a numerical test result like what the number is on a pre-graded progesterone test you get a number that's not subjective that's an objective number versus a subjective which is when the judge makes a choice in the rain that's somewhat subjective of how the judge is interpreting your standard. Inbreeding versus out crossing versus line breeding quickly to me inbreeding is to me means really tight like father son or father, daughter, mother son, litter mates that type of thing I consider inbreeding out crossing is when you see nothing on there's no other common ancestors on a four generation pedigree and that's just me and then line breeding is when you see the same dog come up multiple times on four to five generation pedigree like maybe three, four times at least two. So you will hear different people talk about having different values for values on those words and there's no concrete way to interpret it. I'm also going to talk about fix versus correct in when we're looking at changing something in a dog correct means we've got something that's a liability and we're trying to correct it and fix what to me fix means fix is when you're you're really pushing a particular trait and you want to lock it in you're going to fix it so it's going to stay consistent get is what the children of a stud dog is get and produce is the children of a dam and then I hope everybody in the room knows how to read a horizontal pedigree and if not we'll talk about that I'll talk about anybody about that later and the vertical pedigree are the siblings of the dogs on the horizontal pedigree that you don't see vertical pedigrees are really important too and then of course there's having an eye for a dog and that's kind of the artistic visual of seeing something in a dog that is cultivated few people are born with it most people are lucky to cultivate it so that being said the first thing that I think is the most important thing to do is to reach your standard with fresh eyes pretend like you've never seen it before sit down and read it with a cup of coffee on a slow Sunday morning and highlight the key points take heed of what the disqualifications are of course and choose what you think are the most important points of that standard also that I go back and I circle words that have strong implications like should or must and yet if they say must not have and it's something and then not have a DQ you know that it's not desirable so once you've read your standard with fresh eyes you just kind of check your emotions at the door don't you have to be objective it's the assessment of the bitch that you intend to breed and you need to take a look at your bitch and think I'm going to evaluate the phenotype of my bitch use words from standard directly to talk about what it is that you have that are assets on the bitch and make sure that you are the worst critic that you can be what you don't come up with to critique your own stock judges and your competition will do it for you so learn how to do it for yourself it's always easier to accept and digest and be honest about it when you will come forth with that on your own it's important to stay objective and not be emotional when you're evaluating your stock so then what I do is I make a really simple chart and we were going to have an overhead tonight and then I had my whiteboard and then all four of my dry erase markers are dry so I can pass this around if you want to see it or we'll show it to the Facebook audience here really quickly but it's a matter of just you put Susie Q at the top and then just here so you just like put Susie Q at the top and then you put assets underneath Susie Q and liabilities under Susie Q and then you list these assets of Susie Q and then you come up to her liabilities some of you may want to call it false and you list the liabilities of Susie Q okay now you've got that set up and now you go back and you take a look at her pedigree horizontal pedigree as we know each generation that goes back you know you've got each parent is worth 50% grandparents 25, great-grands 12 and a half right so go to each of those dogs on the pedigree of your own bitch and say what are the same thing what are the assets and liabilities of each of those dogs and just simply go through it as if you were judging that individual that shows up on your pedigree so now you've got that list on that and if you don't know all of those dogs you've not seen them before and you need to start researching because nobody's going to hand you this just right over go call up those people find out who they are, reach out to them find out who owned that dog and have a telephone conversation with them ask them about you know super stud dog boo boo head what was you know what was so great about him what did you like the most when he was used at stud what did he throw what did he not throw what do you think is really important in a bitch that was bred to him these types of things you get that data for as many dogs on that pedigree as you can out of the 64 dogs on the on a 5 generation pedigree the more dogs and the deeper your data is on this particular step the the better the more information you're going to have to move forward so then then the next thing that I do is I take I go back to my bitch and I've got all of these other you know assets and liabilities of all these dogs around her then I can say okay from her assets list I can split that assets list and say here are the asset points that she is genetically prepotent for because here all of you know several of these grandparents and great grandparents behind her had those assets so she's genetically prepotent for her pretty head or her good coat or her thick pad feet or whatever it is she's genetically prepotent for that and then you make another call that the rest of those in her asset column are going to be her genetically subordinate assets meaning she got lucky she's got this asset she possesses it but you can't really show that it's coming strongly through her category she just got lucky now you go through the same thing on the liabilities list you go see what she's genetically her genetically prepotent liabilities you've got a whole bunch of low tail if you don't want a low tail set in your breed my breeds have two of my three breeds have higher tail set you go and you're looking for a proper tail set and if you've got or I'm sorry you've got poor tail sets behind you you're going to be prepotent for that and then there's also the genetically subordinate liabilities and this is sort of the list of wow where did that come from you know you can have two dogs that you know you think are going to be perfect and they're strong for certain things but then the individual that you wound up with didn't get that feature and got a fault instead you the more the deeper you go back on that pedigree with making those assets and liabilities list then you're going to see where it came take notes of all of this work that you do study photos and archives ask long time breeders and this will help put it together for you of what where the genetics are the phenotype that you see in front of you consistent or fluid features that are repeated you can assume that she is prepotent for those assets and liabilities of course and those that seem to have come out of nowhere or lack information you know are the ones that are more fluid so when you put all of this together in essence what you're doing is you're creating your essential stud dog shopping list you're now taking a look at this asset and liabilities list of what she's genetically prepotent for in both assets and liabilities and you can see which liabilities you must correct and if she's prepotent for those you want to be breeding for a stud dog that is particularly potent for correcting that fault so that when you're creating that list I'd say probably you know your top three things that you have in your liabilities that are important that you wish that you could crack the stud dog that you're going to must possess those two things and even though you may really adore the eye shape of your bitch and she may be very prepotent for that eye shape and it's so important that you get that eye shape going forward if she's genetically prepotent for it you can probably make the risk and wager of breeding to a stud dog that really has what you need and don't worry so much about the genetic strength that she has also in the same breath you the top three things that your that your bitch has his liabilities you want to make sure that he does not have those and especially genetic prepotency for them be aware that if he has an asset that you're looking for but he's not genetically prepotent for it and you needed that feature you're unlikely to get it from that dog does that make sense so now you've got this list and you know where it comes from you really studied every dog on your pedigree you know what you're looking for now what do you do now you go shopping the actual shopping finally and best that you go and you attend your national specialty the large regional specialties go to as many as you can pledge to sit ringside and pay attention all day long watch the whole thing take notes in the catalogs that you get make notes in the margins about particular dogs you have the opportunity to have your national specialties the regional specialties streamed go get them review them you know before we had streaming we had DVDs maybe your club has copies of them in their archives if you're a member of your parent club you might be able to literally check it out like a library bring it home see these dogs that lived 20 years ago that are on your pedigrees I really encourage you to take real notes on going further back it's not enough to look at parents it's not enough to just look at grandparents you have to go at least to the great grandparents and in order to keep more mystery out and have more certainty you've got to go back to great great grounds I always encourage people to stay away from the dog of the day who's ever really famous in the common time the dog that everybody's breeding to the one that is having a lot of money thrown at it to be shown that isn't at all necessarily what's best for you if you study your pedigree and you get these kinds of notes and you create the shopping list that I'm proposing you're very clear and you're very articulate when you're going to look and you will really blow away some stud dog owners when you can be this articulate about what you're looking for as a newer breeder and a younger breeder if you're coming along and you can speak to the assets of the liabilities that you're after and what you've researched and what you know then whatever you're whatever you wind up deciding on and what your plan is you're going to win the respect of many breeders in your breed which will only help you go further because most people just breed to what's winning what's easy for them to breed to who their friend owns the dog that is sadly the bulk of what a lot of the breeding has happened and in order to become a really great breeder to become a master breeder you need to be able to have your own ideas and know why you're doing what you're doing why you make the choices you make and then you need and you get to own it a tip that I'd like to share with you and this is something that I've told numerous people people come up to me and say oh I have my Susie Q bitch Katie who do you think I should breed Susie Q to and say well you know have you done some homework what do you think you want to do and I said I'm not going to tell you who you should breed Susie Q to if I told you who to breed Susie Q to and then you take my advice then I'm the breeder on that litter I'm the one who thought about it it's not you if you want to own that glory and trust me it's glorious to have these bred by champions and to really produce well it's a thrill you don't earnestly own that unless you do this homework yourself and you come up with your choice on pretty much on your own with the advice of searching out the people behind you on the categories so you come up with your dog always have a backup stud lined up and always be very clear to the person that you're my backup stud I've already chosen so and so and I don't I'm choosing him for these reasons but if I can't fly my bitch out when she's in season because there's a snow storm on the east coast then you have something else that's available to you this is also another really good time to always have some theory of a backup decision with frozen semen and I know that Anders will speak to that soon but frozen semen if you've done your progesterone all the way through like most of us should I do then if you can pivot you can go from having the front doing live cover you can pivot and go do fresh extended or frozen also with stud service always make sure you have a written stud service agreement everything's really nice until something goes wrong and it's a terrible thing some people are giggling over here because you know what I'm talking about the best of intentions can go and friendships can go sour don't have a stud service agreement so always make sure it's there think about all of the what ifs what if this happens what if that happens and just make those points into it doesn't need to be done by an attorney it doesn't need to be that it's really more because you know when it comes to dogs and agreements most of it is just the character of the person but at least at the time of the stud service agreement these were the points that were agreed and everybody signs for it also if you're in if you co-own the stud or the bitch with it somebody else make sure that they're named and are known to be in it as well so the only other quick thing is just having an eye for a dog just in brief one thing I wanted people ask me about that a lot and I think that it's something that comes over time but if you really want to get an eye for a dog it goes back to some more basic things about design spend some time in the museum take a look at how like what we were talking about at the table earlier today perspective what happens artistically when something is moved when you see something from left to right close up and far away those types of cultural enrichment will definitely help your dog gain and I think that that's part of what brings an eye for a dog balance cohesiveness the synergy that happens when after you check off all of these things that you want to have and you can check the box the next thing is does it all fit together with synergy where the dog is actually you can see why the standard is written the way it is because when all of those parts work together in balance and harmony it makes for a beautiful dog so all that being said with phenotype and such is the breeder's responsibility to bring to the judges the most healthy dogs and the dogs that are going to be able to move forward and represent the breeding future and so much of that is with the new health testing that we have available to us and to make sure that you have a veterinarian on your team who has experience and interest in therianology so with that I would like to introduce the next speaker Dr. Andrews Thorison who I remember from when he was just the time he taught showing a junior showmanship and growing up and he was outstanding as a junior handler and always so kind to everyone and when he aged out of juniors and went off to college and chose to go into veterinary medicine there were many of the local breed clubs and all breed clubs in the area who were more than happy to donate to his his scholarships to help him along through vet school and we were also pleased that as he graduated he didn't forget all of those of us that he learned to love the dogs and the animals with and he has taken a bright interest and great talent in therianology which is the study with breeding and reproduction so we're also tickled to have him oh and I'll just one last because you probably won't say this for yourself with having a when you choose the vet that you're working with if you're going to work in frozen and fresh make sure that you're not just working with simply the local vet that you've always had left because they probably don't know squat about therianology they don't teach enough about it in basic vet school and it really takes somebody like Anders who has taken an interest in studying further so I'll let him talk all about that but thank you for having us and we'll take questions after he's done that was great really cool information and good to hear about looking at the dog specifically and then you touch a little bit about the genotype there during the genetic testing and so that's one thing that I'm really proud of at our clinic is that we require dogs to be genetically tested according to what the breed club would want for that and if people don't do it then we say you can go to somebody else and that may be a harsh reality but in the veterinary medicine field there's very few people on fewer and fewer every day who want to work with breeders and I think part of the issue with that is it needs to be put on breeders ourselves as well because I'm a big believer the only thing you can control is yourself and at vet schools they're not huge into breeding they think that everything that's purebred it has diseases and when in reality the breeds have just as many diseases as they just don't track them and so breeders I think our job is to change the mindset and so when you're working with your veterinary be their best client when you are make sure your dogs are really well groomed and taken care of when you bring them in so that they don't think oh this breeders dog smell bad or this breeders dog they don't take care of their dogs so that's my biggest advice is just be the best for it instead of trying to be somebody that and then you can develop that relationship with that veterinarian and then finding someone that has an interest in it because right now I get calls all the time from veterinarians who know very little about the very basic things that they should know with breeding like progression of values whether they should be high or low I mean it's just kind of stuff that as breeders you already know all that information and so the techniques have changed a lot and in the US now we're doing more and more with artificial insemination they've developed a lot of techniques in other countries due to limitations on surgery so frozen semen used to be limited to surgical only now we have TCI in this country where it's in probably the last 10 years and become really really prevalent in other countries it's illegal to do a surgical AI so they've developed this technique and it's very very successful but speaking about frozen semen we have to be careful about what do we know about what is stored because what I see is we'll often get a breeding unit they say it's 75% progressively mono which I highly doubt when they say that and then all thought out and there'll be 15 million sperm in there and you need for a large dog you need about 200 million and so we need to figure out what is a breeding unit so all the information we can get from that entity that is freezing it and some are very good and some are not and it's really hard to know what you have and once you have what was the sperm count what were the things that they did at the time and then a post thought 85% makes me really skeptical because most of them are 40% or less in all reality so it's just trying to figure out what do you have I think we're finding more of this because there are more people using frozen than ever before because we have access to it so people froze dogs 30 years ago which is really cool when you get puppies out of the dog that died 30 years ago died before I was born that's pretty cool and you're like whoa and these breeders are getting great puppies out of these dogs that go way back to their stuff from then it's just we have to know what we're getting into and then having a backup you talked about is huge whether it be fresh or frozen or all kinds of crazy things happened in fact the other day we had a stud dog that somebody flew up here and the stud dog passed away just unexpectedly overnight the day it was supposed to be collected so they had a backup and we were able to get that and it's just one of these things that's you know you can't expect that to happen it's just in just one of those unexpected things I don't have a lot else besides I know there are some questions that was kind of the thought that we could do ideally like have done every day but that's not going to be worthwhile or that's not going to be practical for a lot of people is there any kind of with the members or when it's important to start or how long do you go how long do you keep testing on your just grown have some recommendations of best practices the question is about progester testing how often to do it and how long do we do it and so part of it is going to someone that knows how to interpret their machine and how to judge when to do the next one because it is sometimes we are guessing as far as if a dog comes in and it's 0.3 you're not going to do it the next day or I would have to do it the next day but then you're also looking at holiday weekends and all kind of stuff because you also have to keep in mind if you're shipping or where the semen is coming from when you need to get it there you don't want it there too early so if someone comes to me on Wednesday with a 0.3 I'm going to say well we should do it on Friday because if we don't have the number and it jumps to one and part of it is how long has the bitch been in heat typically we like to draw the first progression about the first five to seven days assuming we caught them when they came into heat because we have plenty of dogs that have silent heats and they're very quiet about it and we draw a progression and it's 15 then we've missed operation the other thing is just to keep track of what units are being used there's some machines that use nanomoles for leader which is your higher values those are going to be often in Canada or at the mini-vitus machine using a lab like IDEX then you're going to be looking at your five so if someone says my dog was at five what were the units because that's nanograms per mil or if it's nanomoles then they have nodules so you've got to keep that on to perspective I'm trying pinpoint ovulation but I also try and get LH if we can so the LH search happens we're running it hours before ovulation looking there pretty set on that so for our frozen breeding if you'd really like to catch that if we can usually your projection value is going to be about two so if I see a two I usually run an LH if the owner approves it if I get a 1.7 I probably want a projection on the next day and part of it is going to depend on the vitus cycle if you know your history you don't always have that information and then I do like to see it if we're doing any kind of artificial insemination I do like to see it get to 20 or greater because you know then that they've risen they've continued to rise and their projection should be at 20 for the duration of the pregnancy actually it'll get 20 for the duration of the dog until it would have well even if it's not bred so that's kind of a weird thing about dogs is it'll stay high and then when they're about to well that's when it drops down you know and and and and and and and and and and and the question about TCI versus surgical and then kind of a phone about from a stud dog perspective you know shipping all those so kind of rule of thumb is the dog ovulates when they ovulate you breed them the same time whether they you know because they ovulate and it takes 72 hours for the eggs to become mature as far as a stud dog owner your job is to shift the semen when they tell you right you try and think ahead for them but the problem is that people where the stud dog owner said nope that's not the right day we missed the bitch because we wanted to see him in the day earlier so really you ship it when they ask you can have a conversation with them but really if they ask for it you get it shipped now if they need some mentoring and some help that's fine that doesn't know what they're doing that's another thing but it's really it makes it challenging from a stud dog but a simple business transaction is that when they ask for it you do your darkness to get it now you have shipping errors with yes you name it but your job is to get it out as best you can as far as numbers trans cervical insemination has become much more popular it really does depend on the person doing it they have to do a lot of that because it takes a long time to figure out how to do it there's very few that can't be done but there are some but most of the time it just takes experience doing it doing it and doing it over and over again for people that are very proficient at it the odds of pregnancy especially with frozen semen go up opposed to surgical it's about 80% with frozen semen the reason being at least what we think the reason is that you don't have anesthesia you don't have recovery you don't have inflammation from the surgery so but I will admit there are some bitches that for whatever reason they get pregnant on a surgical when they didn't run a TCF I can't explain that necessarily the reason the reason to do a surgical is you can visualize the uterus you can visualize the ovaries and see things that you miss otherwise so that would be a reason to do it you can break up cysts and things like that but there's a therogenologist in Australia that I talked to who all he does is reproduction very successful practice he has not done a surgical examination in 5 years and he's very very successful yeah that's Australia right so but at the same time I mean that's so the numbers are changing and I think skill level has a lot to do with it because if you don't get through the cervix you did not do a TCI you did an AI which is fine that's the reality of it very rarely am I actually most of the time I just do TCI's or surgicals now because owners can mostly do your regular vaginal eyes or I'm happy to do it most people just have me do the more advanced stuff yeah a bitch who had one successful pregnancy we did a surgical with rosin cement from 10 years prior she sat and had a successful pregnancy through puppies and she has since then been bred twice we have only done AIs however the stud dog has been proven with other bitches in between those breedings what should I be what should I be doing to do a workup to give her the best opportunity to make the next breeding successful and I'm assuming progesterones were okay yes progesterones so one of the heat cycles that she had was a very weird heat cycle and she did not ovulate until day 21 she has had a history of having weird heat cycles the pregnancy that took with the surgical with the rosin was as normal as could be and one of the two AI breedings with the fresh chill I mean it wasn't even fresh chill he was there for one of the breedings and one kind of this fresh chill one of those breedings was the one where she waited close to 21 days to ovulate the other one she had a normal you know she ovulated around day 14 and you know she went well beyond she was at least in the 15 number progesterone so we continued to make sure that it went out yeah so I mean it's always challenging when you have dogs that cycle sporadically as well or that have kind of weird cycles and kind of it depends on how much do we want to breed this bitch how much do we want to put into it just a pure economic standpoint sometimes it's like it's harder than it should be it's not worth it now but it's really worth it for the breeding program how are we looking at potentially doing a biopsy of uterus the problem with doing a biopsy of uterus is you can't breed them on that cycle and that has to be when you can't just do a biopsy at any time it needs to be when they're in diastris in all reality so that means you skip a cycle you're going in you're getting a biopsy you send it to a reproductive pathologist you're going to be at either Ohio State or Cornell you don't want to just send it to any pathologist so then you're I mean they heal from that and all that stuff in all likelihood unfortunately it comes back normal normal is good, normal means that it's not bad it means that there's a potential for her to get pregnant and that you're not wasting more time doing this but it does make it really hard that I mean that is a place to start I'm assuming you've done full blood you've done thyroid pain stuff that you know your normal stuff and then we can try to look at how often are they cycling are they cycling you know every four months are they cycling every six months are they at eight you know that kind of thing if it's four months ideally we would push it the hard part is now we're we don't have the access to check drops so you can't stop the cycle like we used to be able to it's an anabolic steroid and people have used it incorrectly so now we don't have that so those are the things I'm going to be thinking about the other thing you can do at the time of the biopsy is obviously look for cysts ultrasound can find some of that but you need someone who's really good with the ultrasound to look for ovarian cysts and things like that usually again that's going to be best when they're in heat because the ovaries are going to be a little bit bigger you're going to see the cysts about point two I mean there's lots of things that you can do the question is how much do we do how important is this program and that's where yeah I mean each case is going to be a little bit different Stacy asks can you talk about detaching placentas and I suspect they had one happen their last litter and by detaching are they talking resorts as we know or is it detaching so typically placentas do detach at time of welding if you're doing a C-section I'm trying to get all the placentas out if possible just so we don't have any sign at it you can try this as far as resorptive usually you see resorption about the pregnancy ultrasound suspicion is that it's actually 25% of all litters have resorptions so you may see that but when I see that on the ultrasound I usually run a progesterone to make sure that it's high enough that it continues to stay elevated so it should be above 20 to be 19, 15 if it's 15 I'm going to run another one in a few days and just see where we're at because if it continues to drop then we think about supplementation the progesterone has to be about 6 to maintain the pregnancy resorption can happen but I also usually put them on the antibiotics because there's not a ton you can do at the time besides treatable that's why I tell people let's treat when we can get them on some antibiotics see what the progesterone is and then I like to re-alters them most to make sure that we're not seeing more and see if there's any changes going on there okay thank you about how sometimes placentas detach during lobing which then creates stillborn puppies I mean all placentas detach I guess so when I see stillborn puppies I usually think one they were already dead or they took too long coming out would be my guess because the placentas if they're detaching early you're going to usually see green discharge because basically the placenta is their source of oxygen to the body so once that detaches you only have a certain amount of time to get the puppy out whether that be a C-section or just an actual lobing but you also I mean I hear about those puppies from the time where people are like oh yeah it was 24 hours and I had the last one and it was alive yeah not very common but hey you get lucky and you'll take those but you guys the placenta detachment is normal and I guess if it's early then that would be a concern but yeah oh I can see it can you? is there more? nope Stacy was the only one who posted one Stacy was the only one who posted one anybody online excuse me anybody online have any more questions I'm going to go with no thank you