 Welcome, we are going to go through a program that I put together. This is originally designed for actually use with young people that we're teaching more information to, so it's a pretty foundational force. I think there will be people here who will find this new information and people here that will find it old information. So answer me a question with a raise of hands, how many here has bred at least one litter of puppies? Okay, good. Good, good, good, good, good. How many has bred, say, five litters? Good, excellent. All right, how many has been doing it since you could walk? Since you could walk? Okay, excellent, breeding dogs. So this is really going to be a good refresher course and hopefully have some interesting information. My goal is to go through the slides, do the talky talky part, and then we can have a conversation, because I think that's how we all get our best information. All right, so basic concept, we're going to talk theory. Then if we have a little bit of time, we'll do some hands-on stuff and we'll get into some questions. Reading pedigrees is something that I think too many of us don't do as much of as we could, right? I know in the dog show world, a lot of people are busy breeding to ribbons, and I know enough folks in this organization that are breeding to scores. And I think it's important that we be able to get information, gather information, know about the dog's genetics matter, okay? So I don't have pedigree programs. They only run on IBM's. Macintosh is not designed for it, but I have friends in high places. They're really helpful. They're going to help you be able to see COI, right? So the coefficient of inbreeding. This has gotten to be sort of a hot button topic. So if anybody's ever read this book, Bob Wheelie's Snakefoot, he's all about inbreeding. He's not real worried about COI. I think there's a lot to be learned in this book. If y'all don't have it, I recommend it highly. But what COI, sort of today's concept of COI is that too high a COI can be correlated with an increase in health problems and a decrease in reproductive ability. In other words, your litter sizes go down, your puppies aren't as thrifty. So that is the current science. I, you can't fight science, but I think there's a lot of background and a lot of knowledge that we lose if we go too low with COI. Now we don't have a purebred dog, right? You can get too low on this. So I think there's a lot of balance in that part of what we want to talk about. These programs are handy because they highlight different things. So I love doing photopedigrees. For those of you that have the capability, it's a lot of fun. You can even pull out pictures, right? Pull pictures out of your files and lay them down in a pedigree system. Because then you really see what you're actually getting. Whether you want to see pictures of these dogs standing on point. Whether you want to see pictures of these dogs standing so you can see their structure, whatever you want to see. It's really helpful to be able to have those photos. So if you don't have, like I do, seven generations of your own dogs in these pedigrees, go find pictures. Go look at old magazines, right? Go look at your old breed magazines. There's places you can find some of these things online and make yourself a photopedigree even if you're just laying it out on the dining room table. Of course, if you do that, you should definitely clear the table before dinner set. Because I'm saying they get a little grouchy about that. It's one of my mom's old pedigrees. So this is the way a lot of us learned how to do pedigrees is writing them by hand. And she would write out a pedigree like that for every single one of the puppies in the litter. You really get that brain to hand connection when you write 10 pedigrees for five generations of that. And there's a lot to be said for that in terms of really knowing where those dogs are placed. So now we're going to get a little more in the nothing bolt. Inbreeding, linebreeding, and out crossing. And a lot of people will argue whether inbreeding and line breeding are actually different. It's the difference in inbreeding and linebreeding is in percentages. So how close are your related individuals? How far back are your individuals? Out crossing is when there are no individuals related. So let's look at some of those pedigrees. Inbreeding, the way I think of it. Father, daughter, mother, son, half brother, half sister. In 40 years of breeding dogs, I've done one half brother, half sister of breeding. And I waited to do that until I knew I was doubling up on a bitch that I knew to be sound mentally, sound physically, healthy, good bird dog, proper structure. That's how long it took me to feel confident enough to do that much linebreeding. I did Uncle Nice and really love it. And I think that is the, if you will, safer way to do a lot of the same basic concept. So then when we talk about, so there's that letter that I just did. And that shows you, you couldn't see. Sure, well I hate trying to do this without a pointer. But you can see the yellow, that's the bitch that I doubled up on. And this was actually even a bit more than just the half brother, half sister. Because you'll notice that the tiger of the dam and the sire of the sire extra time and extra postage are litter mates. That's a really tight pedigree. It produced what I wanted it to produce. It told me what I needed to know. I've got good health. I've got great coats. I've got great minds. So I was taking with that pedigree 25 years worth of everything I know about my pedigree and putting it into that one breeding. But I think that's the responsible way to do in breeding. Because you are concentrating both the positive and the negative. All right? So you've got to know what the negative is before you get there. So breeding within the family of dogs. So you've got dogs that are similar, that appear, that they're usually maybe three generations back. I did a lot of line breeding on a wire hair pointer named Cascade Rogue. And he would just keep appearing and keep appearing and keep appearing. And I did that intentionally. And it's called putting the weight of the pedigree at the back. So I wanted to pull forward those characteristics that he produced. He was the top producing sire of field trial, title dogs, show champions, and hunt test. All three, he was in the top 10. So that's a pretty impressive thing and something I wanted to continue carrying forward in my pedigrees. This will do the same basic thing as inbreeding. It just takes a little longer. But in my opinion, it's also a little bit safer for me in terms of being able to keep track of where your health issues are coming from, temperament issues, any of that kind of stuff. So this is that type of pedigree. This is the pedigree that, again, produced very, very well. The dog that it produced was the number one show dog in the country. It did what I wanted it to do. He also has a hunting title. So you can see that on a moon, that's my foundation bitch. So this is just carrying some of those dogs forward, but not right up on top of each other. That's this to me is a really, really safe type of pedigree when we're trying to fix traits and not bring forward some deleterious parts of the gene pool. So up cross. Even Bob Wheelie will tell you, got to do it sometimes. You got to bring in a little bit of fresh blood. And I think one of the things that we lose track of with this low COI concept is if you don't have inbred and linebred lines multiple, you are doing a disservice. Because when I take this inbred line, linebred line, and this inbred line, linebred line, and cross them, it's effectively an outcross. But if I don't have a tightly bred solid line to go to, I've got nothing but mishmash, then I'm not able to reliably bring something forward. What does this mishmash give me? Up guess. Some random whatever thing might pull down, right? If I've got a solid bred line of dogs that I can effectively outcross to, then I'm in better shape. So this is an example of that type of pedigree. This is as outcrossed as a dog can possibly get. The bitch line is an import from Russia. There is no similar dog in here and to the founders. And we could not find a similar dog. So the sire, my dog, slightly linebred, very loosely linebred. The dam, there's a couple dogs that turn up and what is that, the fifth generation. This is a pure wash is what I think of it. I have washed the gene pool. I have deleted all the crazies. I like to do this every couple, three generations to just make sure that I'm keeping reproductive health, all the temperament pieces. I know that I'm going to go a step back when I do it. My mother used to swear that she'd go out to get one thing. She'd get 10 things she didn't want. And that's a fact. And it happens to all of us. But the important part of that then is selection and selecting what you did the breeding for. If you did that breeding to get, I don't know, a better head and you keep the bucket head that looks just like everything else you've always had, you've wasted the litter. All right, health testing. Health testing matters. Why would I test the? OK, we want healthy dogs. And there are no guarantees. I have a litter that I have four OFA excellence, four OFA goods, one that's sort of like a eh, and one that is so dysplastic we had to have her hips replaced. Welcome to it. And that's seven generations of line breeding and testing. But that doesn't mean you don't do the testing. And there's a lot of good information available to us today, Canine Health Information Center. Anyone who's not familiar, your parent club has put together a list of what are the required tests for each breed based on a health survey within your individual breeds. So each of those tests is create the goals or put together by the parent club. It's not generic. It's specific to your breed. So in Warwick Hooners, it's hips, elbows, thyroid. Eyes and heart. And so testing your dog in each of those areas and releasing the results. The releasing the results is the part that matters. So the whole point of the exercise is knowledge, sharing of knowledge. If your dog has bad hips, OK, it has bad hips. Tell people it has bad hips. Then they can make appropriate breeding decisions. You don't have to throw that necessarily out with the bathwater. But you don't want to breed to another dog that has bad hips that you don't know about because nobody told you. That's the entire purpose of the CHIC program. Just because a dog has a CHIC number does not mean it passed all the tests. Go look it up. Just because it says CHIC number, 180 billion. Great. Oh, look, it failed all of those tests. OK, that's a thing to know, too. But it's the sharing of information that is what makes the CHIC program so incredibly important. The next one is DNA. DNA wasn't a thing when I started in this world in the 80s with my parents in clumber spaniels and field trial labs and wirehairs. There was no such thing. The only thing we had was parentage, and that didn't come until well into the 90s and early 2000s. Today we have really specific DNA that can test, for example, furnishings, big F, little S. It can test for various eye diseases. It can test for a lot of things. What it cannot give you is any more guarantee than any of what we think of as the physical tests, right? The hips, the elbows, the heart that we are physically tested. DNA isn't going to give you any more guarantee of that than anything else. The only thing it will tell you is that these genes are present, and you still have to make decisions with that. But it does allow us to make decisions. If you have a disease in your breed that if you breed a carrier to a clear, then you get carriers and clears. You don't get affected. You can do that, and you haven't lost all the genetic material that goes with a dog that's a carrier that otherwise you would not be able to breed. So DNA has a really important place and should be part of your project as you're breeding these dogs, to know what you can and cannot do and where you can go with it. This is a vertical pedigree. How many of you have ever looked at this on OFA? Couple? All right. This is conceivably the coolest free breeding tool you will ever encounter. Did I mention it's free? It's phenomenal. If you're not using it, you really need to because check what you can do. This happens to be my stuff done. It happens to be hips. You can do this on any of the tests that they do. All right? And it's gonna tell you all the dogs. There's big. He had nine siblings. Five of his siblings had good hips. Two of them had excellent hips. When I did this, his two offspring had not been tested yet. His sire had two siblings. One was excellent. Now one, so what happened to the other one? Oh, probably they didn't report it because it wasn't good thing to know. We've got 18 offspring. 10 good, five excellent. Wait, what happened to the other three? Thing to know, right? You can do that all the way back through the pedigree. And what you're looking for when you're breeding for things that are what we consider polygenetic, right? It's not a simple recessive. There's a million things that go into hip dysplasia, including environment, right? But you can, with this type of pedigree, this vertical pedigree, you can understand so much more because I would rather breed to a dog that is itself, say, fair, but its siblings, its cousins, its nephews and uncles were good and excellent than I would to a dog who itself is excellent and everything around it is fair. Does that make sense? The depth of the pedigree is what is carried forward, not just the individual dog. This is invaluable and it is free and it's easy. No excuse not to be using this particular system. Okay, science-y stuff. It's gonna be a little science-y stuff, right? Boys and girls. This is another book that I'm gonna recommend to you guys. I'm gonna come up here so everybody can see it. I know it has show-dog stuff on the cover. Do not let that freak you out. This is the single most important book on dog breeding. I believe that exists. There's a lot of stuff in here about show-dog stuff, but there's more stuff about dog breeding that is applicable to everybody. And I'm gonna pull from some of this in this particular section of this program. This is the part that I added for you guys because it was like 102 instead of 101, right? Okay, x, y and x, x. This was when I read this book. So I was a grown-up. I was having my first litter of wire hairs. I was first time breeding something other than with my parents when I read this book. And it became my Bible. I had to buy a new copy because it was highlighted and tagged everywhere. But it was so revelatory to me thinking about what she was talking about, the tail female line and the tail male line. Males are x, y in their chromosome. Females are x, x, okay? The male can only get their x chromosome from their dam. It's the only place they can get it. And the y is what makes them male. Females are getting an x chromosome from their dam and also from their sire's dam. Do the math in your head, right? Math isn't my forte, but I'm saying it. The tail male line coming down from the sire, that's where your y chromosome is coming from. Tail female line, the x chromosome coming up from the bottom, okay? So this is a really important slide and I'm not sure that this is gonna come up but if you guys wanna look at this book later, I can let you take a look at it. Look at that x chromosome. Look at what that's doing. So this becomes incredibly important. That x and that x and they're carrying forward. The top tail male line, all that's coming down is there's the y and the y, but here you're getting an x and an x and an x and you're carrying those chromosomes from the dam line. So again, if I'm looking for a stud dog, somebody I know had mentioned a question about whether they should breed their stud dog, so we'll get the Q and A in a minute, but if I'm looking for a stud dog for my bitch, I want to find a dog that is out of a line of phenomenal bitches, because that's what I'm gonna get from. Does that make sense? It's not so much the sire as the sire's mother. Okay, the only x chromosome that can be passed by a sire is the one he got from his dam. This is what I'm saying. Pategris with excellent breed bitches, those bitches that produce and produce and produce the Adels of the world, the tailors of the world, they come from sires that come from strong dams. Okay? All right, how are we doing on time here? All right, we got time. So hands on. And there's a reproductive vet that's gonna do a lot of more of this stuff, so I'm gonna skim it and leave a lot of the rest of it to him. Heat cycle, we all know, right, that we're not breeding on that first heat cycle because we want to wait to get their health testing done. For one, those hips can't be done until they're two years old. Wait till the dog is strong enough, healthy enough to reproduce and raise your puppies correctly. A lot of times that sexual maturity is gonna be six months, but I've had plenty of bitches that didn't come in season till they were nine or 12 months, not the end of the world, just pay attention, be aware. Twice a year, unless you have a synges, then it's once a year, I'm pretty sure we're safe here, so say it. Generally your full heat cycle is gonna take three weeks, some of them are longer, some of them last what seems like four effing ever if you have boy dogs. Bitches carry their puppies for nine weeks. They say 60 days or whatever, it's nine weeks, count nine weeks. If you are not using ovulation timing, you're crazy. Where's my repro vet that's gonna say the same thing? Okay, you're crazy. Because if you just throw Annie and Rex out in a pen and they do the wild thing, they don't welp from when they did the wild thing. They welp from when they bitch ovulated, which could have been two days before or six days after which I've had happen. Trust me, that was terrifying pre ovulation timing. If you have to have a C-section, you don't know. And you're gonna have to do reverse progesterone timing. Is she low enough? Is she too high? If you do ovulation timing, pull progesterone, get blood, have the vet test it, you will know when that bitch ovulates and she will welp pretty much to the minute within 12 hours more or less from that day in nine weeks. Makes your life so much easier. Why should you all be doing it the way I did it when I was 18? Catch up with times. Ultrasound, again, you don't have to. Usually the next week, I know she's bred or she's not bred, but an ultrasound tells me if there's something that looks a little weak, something that maybe they're all in one horn and not the other horn. I like to have an ultrasound. It gives me more information. There is an entire program that I can do on proper nutrition, proper supplements, exercise, all the things that we need to be doing for our bitches to make sure that they are welping as healthy as they can. Mildred Revelle got rest or soul was one of my early mentors in wire hairs. Her bitch is welped in a box full of straw in the kennel. God love her. We don't have to do that today. We have other options. And it makes a difference. Most of our bitches are gonna be easy, but stay close, pay attention. See if they need help. C-section may save your life. Her life, not your life, but the bitch's life. It will definitely save puppies. I've had welpings that were done in eight hours and I've had welpings that took 24 hours. Be prepared. Lots of coffee and probably some wine. All right, puppy development. Any of you who are not familiar with some of the really great programs that are available these days came undone. There's some amazing opportunities to make our puppies develop the best they possibly can. Early neurological stimulation, scent introduction, all of these things are available and we know more. There is more information, there's more knowledge. So, neonatal period, from when they're first born, their eyes and their ears are closed, right? They can't hear anything, they can't see anything. They can smell a little bit and they are basically heat sensing worms. They cannot control their body temperature until about 10 days to two weeks. They are gonna go to or from the heat source and the food source. That's all they're gonna do. We start early neurological stimulation at three days. Okay, so what we're doing is that three days that puppy's getting picked up, tell ups up right, it's head up in the air, five seconds, one, two, three, four, five. Upside down, head down. One, two, three, four, five. On its back, one, two, three, four, five. Set on a cold surface, one, two, three, four, five. Tiny stressors, tiny stressors that start when these puppies are three days old that make them better able to cope with bigger stresses down the line. It is absolutely uncanny, the difference. I've been doing it this way for years because I had early mentors that did army pain ups. And they're the ones who originally told me this one. Okay, puppies not potatoes. Right, the best part. This is the best part of puppies. I don't like the beginning and I don't like the end. But the puppies not potatoes, best. They're cute, they're little, they don't have any teeth, they can't draw blood. It's amazing. Their eyes and their ears are starting open, right? They started to play, you know, weevils wobble and they don't fall down, so cute. About three weeks, the best. Three to five after that, done. Sent and sound introduction, right? So, and it does, it can be a bird wing, it can be a red fur, it can be clove, it can be anything. We're just letting them smell a new scent. They're developing the concept of using their nose. Sounds, my puppies all have YouTube videos of duck hunts that play in the welping box from the time they're three weeks old, the whole time. Clang the pans from the time they're three weeks old. Put their food bowls in different places so they have to do a maze to get to them. Early neurological development of our puppies, what we can impact from zero to eight weeks is incredible. And it makes well-developed, well-socialized, balanced, sane dogs in the end. Now they become explorers and they're really fun and that's where we start doing more of the tests and they have to, they want out of the box, fine, you can get out of the box, you have to go over the slide and through the tunnel and you have to do all the stuff. Okay, that's that four to five week time. Oh look, we even get audio, check it out. I didn't know that was a video, check it out. What? Okay, yes, we can do it. We can go down the slide. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I forgot this was video. Here we go, here we go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Problem solving. So great, great, you're teaching problem solving. That's exactly what they're learning, right? And I'm not doing any of it, that's all them. That's the best part of it, okay? Okay, into the wild blue yonder. So when they start going to their new homes, I know that everybody read that thing where they said that you're supposed to send them home at 49 days. Guess what kids, there's a huge freaking fear period that happens in that seven to eight week time frame. Keep them at home, wear their safe with their litter mates, learning from their litter mates, learning from the other pets in the home, the other dogs, the mom, whatever it is. Send them out at eight weeks, they're past the fear period. Life is so much better, promise. Okay, here you go, more video. Wear your puppies, I mean, what could be better? Yeah, jump. And that's a good venture box. So you see that PVC pipe, it's got things hanging off it and they play with it, you can put tinged hands and banging stuff and all kinds of cool things. All right? And here's the resource shelf. I'm gonna leave this up while we do Q&A. These two books are on it. Anybody who wants to come up later and kind of look at these books, anything like that. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning. Morning.