Sable puppy showing in AKC - Page 11

Ok Hund , gotcha & thanks I get it because I hear my friends talk about the the same thing. Lol I'm slowly learning & now will look at the link. 😉

Which bit are your friends discussing, bottlenecking or the heads ?

The heads & also dogs being overused for breeding

[Hundmutter] 31.7.2016 - 08:07

● "Ohh, NOT ANOTHER PHILIPP FAN."

Why not? His stock - especially when out of British bitches - DO have their joint problems. And he himself likes to get close to the ground when gaiting. What else have you got against him?

[Hundmutter] 31.7. 2016 - 14:07

● "LadyBoss: the link Les posted is to a litter sired by a dog called Philipp who has been used A LOT as a sire for UK litters, the past couple of years the UK showrings have been full of them."

Couple???? I forget exactly when he reached NZ, but his first litter here was 4 December 2007 - so he's been gone from Britain for at least 9 years! Admittedly he was one of the 2 top studs of British GSD litters (the other being a German Sieger) for at least 4 years in a row over there.
Here, he became the 2008 Grand Victor aka National Gold Medallist (under Ernst Seifer, SV), and sired the 2013 Grand Victrix (under Rainer Mast, SV), Ch. Toatahi Outrageous Fortune: http://toatahi.org/index.asp?ID=38 (sorry about Janet's taste in gimmicks & sound tracks) and her younger full-brother Toatahi Devils Gait: http://www.toatahi.org/index.asp?ID=31
http://www.pedigreedatabase.com/german_shepherd_dog/dog.html?id=706799-toatahi-devils-gait for those who want their pedigree.
I didn't see Philipp win the GV title, but I did see him win BIS at my local club's show under Margit van Dorssen, SV, 7 months earlier.

What heads LOOK like is vastly over-rated by show-is-all people. What matters is how what's INSIDE the head works.
I have a photo of Philipp standing free in a paddock at, I think, 13 years old. His hocks look PERFECT to me. I doubt that the same can be said of the Sieger who was his main competition at stud while Philipp was still in the UK.

That may well be true, Les. My opinion was purely a personal reaction to heads I had seen in the ring. Gawd, was it that long ago ? I am still seeing his name as sire on Survey Reports and Show Results, however.
I think you may already have gathered I am emphatically not a "show is everything" person. Do you agree with me that his offspring often have a rather distinctive head, though ? And do you not consider there are some dangers in the overuse of any one dog ?

Hundmutter, I agree about his head. He has an apple-domed skull, which used to be considered a fault, but now seems to have become a virtue, His koer report says he has a very good head. Not by MY standards he doesn't!!

Here's what the breed standard says: The forehead when viewed from the front or side is only slightly arched.

 

As for the overuse of sires, here's the story of Old Blue:

The Fable of Old Blue

by C.A. Sharp editor of the "Double Helix Network News"

 

 

THE FABLE OF OLD BLUE Consider the hypothetical case of Old Blue, Malthound extraordinaire. Blue was perfect; sound, healthy and smart. On week days he retrieved malt balls from dawn to dusk. On weekends he sparkled in malt field and obedience trials as well as conformation shows, where he baited to - you guessed it- malt balls.

Everybody had a good reason to breed to Blue, so everybody did. His descendants trotted in his paw-prints on down through their generations. Blue died full of years and full of honor. But what people didn't know was that Old Blue, good as he was, carried a few bad genes. They didn't affect him, nor the vast majority of his immediate descendants. To complicate the matter further, some of those bad genes were linked to genes for important Malthound traits.

 

A few Malthounds with problems started showing up. They seemed isolated, so everyone assumed it was "just one of those things". A few declared them "no big deal". Those individuals usually had affected dogs. All in all, folks carried on as usual.

 

Time passed. Old Blue had long since moldered in his grave. By now, everyone was having problems, from big ones like cataracts, epilepsy or thyroid disease to less specific things like poor-keepers, lack of mothering ability and short life-span. "Where can I go to get away from this?" breeders wondered. The answer was nowhere.

 

People became angry. "The responsible parties should be punished!" Breeders who felt their programs might be implicated stonewalled. Some quietly decided to shoot, shovel and shut-up. A few brave souls stood up and admitted their dogs had a problem and were hounded out of the breed.

 

The war waged on, with owners, breeders and rescue workers flinging accusations at each other. Meanwhile everybody carried on as always. After another decade or two the entire Malthound breed collapsed under the weight of its accumulated genetic debris and went extinct.

 

This drastic little fable is an exaggeration--but not much of one. Here's similar, though a less drastic example from real life. There once was a "Quarter Horse stallion named Impressive. The name fit. He sired many foals who also exhibited his desired traits. But when they and their descendants were bred to each other, those offspring sometimes died. Impressive had been the carrier of a lethal single-gene recessive trait. No one knew it was there until they started inbreeding on him. The situation of a single sire having this kind of drastic genetic effect on a breed became known as the "Impressive Syndrome".

 

 

 

Many species and breeds of domestic animals, including dogs, have suffered "impressive Syndromes" of their own. But cases like that of Impressive are only the tip of the iceberg. A single-gene recessive becomes obvious in just a few generations. But what about more complex traits?

 

This is not to say that those popular sires we so admire are bad breeding prospects. Their many excellent traits should be utilized, but even the best of them has genes for negative traits.

 

The problem is not the popular sires, but how we use them. For a century or more, inbreeding has been the name of the game. (For purposes of this article, "inbreeding" refers to the breeding of dogs related to each other and therefore includes line-breeding.) By breeding related individuals, a breeder increases his odds of producing dogs homozygous for the traits he wanted. Homozygous individuals are much more likely to produce those traits in the next generation.

 

When a male exhibits a number of positive traits and then proves his ability to produce those traits he may become a popular sire, one that is used by almost everyone breeding during his lifetime, and maybe beyond, thanks to frozen semen.

 

Since the offspring and grand-offspring and so on are good, breeders start breeding them to each other. If the results continue to be good, additional back-crosses may be made for generations. Sometimes a sire will be so heavily used that, decades hence, breeders may not even be aware of how closely bred their animals are because the dog no longer appears on their pedigrees.

 

This is the case in Australian Shepherds. Most show-line Aussies trace back, repeatedly, to one or both of two full brothers: Wildhagen's Dutchman of Flintridge and Fieldmaster of Flintridge. These, products of a program of inbreeding, were quality individuals and top producing sires. They are largely responsible for the over-all quality and uniformity we see in the breed ring today - a uniformity that did not exit before their birth nearly three decades ago.

 

Working lines have also seen prominent sires, but performance traits are far more complex, genetically and because of the significant impact of environment. They are therefore harder to fix. Performance breeders will in-breed, but are more likely to stress behavioral traits and general soundness than pedigree and conformational minutiae. The best working sires rarely become as ubiquitous as the best show-line sires. Not every popular sire becomes so because of his ability to produce quality offspring. Some have won major events or are owned by individuals with a knack for promotion. Such dogs may prove to be wash-outs once their get is old enough to evaluate. But a lot of breeders have been using the animal for the few years it takes to figure that out and the damage may already have been done.

 

Use of even the best popular sires, by its very nature, limits the frequency of some in the breed gene pool while simultaneously increasing the frequency of others. Since sons and grandsons of popular sires tend to become popular sires the trend continues, resulting in further decrease and even extinction of some genes while others become homozygous throughout the breed. Some of these traits will be positive, but not all of them.

 

The owners of Old Blue, the Malthound in the opening fable, and those who owned his most immediate descendants had no idea what was happening under their noses. They were delighted to have superior studs and even more delighted to breed them to as many good bitches as possible.

 

Dog breeding and promoting is an expensive proposition. One usually winds up in the hole. But owning a popular sire can change that. The situation looks like a winner for everyone--the stud owner finds his financial burden reduced while breeders far and wide get to partake of his dog's golden genes.

 

No one breeding dogs wants to produce sick dogs. A small minority are callous and short-sighted enough to shrug genetic problems off as the price you pay to get winners, but even they do their best to avoid letting it come to general attention. We need a total re-thinking of how we utilize stud animals. No single dog, no matter how superior, should dominate the gene pool of its breed. Owners of such sires should give serious consideration to limiting how often that dog is used, annually, through its lifetime and on into the future, if frozen semen is stored. The stud owner should also look not only at the quality of the bitches being presented, but their pedigrees. How much will the level of inbreeding be increased by a particular mating?

 

The bitch owner also needs to think twice about popular sires. If you breed to the stud of the moment and everyone else is doing the same, where will you go when it comes time to make an outcross?

 

Finally, the attitude toward genetic disease itself has to change. It must cease being everyone's dirty little secret. It must cease being a brick with which we bludgeon those with the honesty to admit it happened to them. It must become a topic of open, reasoned discussion so owner of stud and bitch alike can make informed breeding decisions. Unless breeders and owners re-think their long-term goals and how they react to hereditary problems, the situation will only get worse. ________________________________________

C.A. Sharp is the editor of the "Double Helix Network News". This article was printed with permission and may be reprinted provided it is not altered and appropriate credit is given.

 

 

 

 

[Hundmutter] 2.8.2016 - 15:08

● "I am still seeing his name as sire on Survey Reports and Show Results, however."
I doubt you've seen more than one appearance of Philipp's name in the last 12 months, but I'm not going to dig out the magazines to check on that.

● "Do you agree with me that his offspring often have a rather distinctive head, though ?"
I've seen only 3 of his progeny. Two of them were Juniors and about 6 years ago, the third was their full-brother 2 years ago:
http://www.pedigreedatabase.com/german_shepherd_dog/dog.html?id=690146-toatahi-costa-fortune
http://www.pedigreedatabase.com/german_shepherd_dog/dog.html?id=689981-toatahi-outrageous-fortune
http://www.pedigreedatabase.com/german_shepherd_dog/dog.html?id=706799-toatahi-devils-gait
and photos of 2 daughters about 80km away from me. I don't see anything DISTINCTIVE (i.e., "different") about their heads except that 2 have a very dark & extended mask, the others don't.

I have 295 critiques from the 51 Philipp progeny born in NZ. I code each of the aspects I am interested in as to whether the judge (even when I TOTALLY disbelieve him/her!) made comments that were positive (+), neutral, or negative (-).
Of those 295 critiques, there were: 

8 + vs 1 - for muzzle, 

6 + vs 2 - for head strength, 

2 + vs 3 - for teeth, 

4 + vs 5 - for eyes.

All the rest were neutral aka normal aka average. So whatever you had in mind hasn't been noticed by judges here. As you are a Pom, if you believe that you know their critiquing well enough to interpret (read between their lines) the comments by David & Joan Hall, Dennis Vessey, Fiona Anderson, Joe Summerhill, Lily & Terry Hannan, Mo Lakin, Nikki Farley, Stephen Cox - and IF you have a database that can import from a .txt file where each data-field is surrounded by "s and there is a , between fields - NAME the judges. (Joan has a VERY "bad" mark from me for "awarding" Excellent Select gradings at a mere CLUB show and without having a clue as whether or not the pooches had even been xrayed, surveyed, whatever). I'll eventually send you that/those judges' critiques on our Philipp progeny.

● "And do you not consider there are some dangers in the overuse of any one dog ?"
Not until you define "overuse".
Narrowing your bloodlines is always a concern - but after our foundation brood taught her son the "facts of life" on her third day in heat, and the only flaws produced were that the dog that was chosen by a show home was a little short in body and stood a little Frenched in front, we mated that son to his older half-sister and were very happy with the results - even the bitch we'd sold as purely-a-pet got a placing with Jeannie showing her. None of the "possible litters" I prepared pdb pedigrees for had any line-breeding in the first 5 generations.
The bitch I'm hoping will have suitable hip & elbow scores has no line-breeding in 5 generations, but picks up Mark vom Haus Beck 6,6,7 - 6,7 and Cello von der Römerau 6,7,7,7 - 7,7,7, then Ninette von Batu 7 - 7. At present I will be very happy if her breeder decides to use AI from her greatgrandfather, giving 1:4 inbreeding on him, a Ch., Ob.Ch., WT.Ch. with CDX UDX WDX TDX, and BIF 3:3 hips (we weren't elbow scoring back then). He himself was a very impressive dog that I WISH had been shown at specialist shows for an Ex. grading - is almost pure NZ.Ch, 3x Aust.GV. Dunmonaidh Junker in type, with the only obvious flaws from Junker < < Quanto Wienerau being somewhat low pasterns - but the bitch I'm wanting a pup from is free of that flaw - her flaws coming from her Australian line and include the almost unavoidable "modern" hocks.


[Sunsilver] 2.8.2016 - 22:08

● "Hundmutter, I agree about his head. He has an apple-domed skull, which used to be considered a fault,"

I can't agree that Philipp HAS that, [Sunsilver]. I wasn't studying his head in any detail when he went BIS under Margit van Dorssen in 2008, but my vision was much better then and if anything had been wrong it would have "hit" me. He DOES have a somewhat steep stop in the photo on his pdp page (I can't FIND my photo of him standing naturally at 13 years old, damnit), and no-one has bothered to create a pdb album of his photos.

 

It isn't whether the dog himself was apple-domed, although I suppose there might have been some genetic twist on that in what he sired; but that 90% of the get of his that I had seen in the flesh had similar, but hard to define, head & expression. Something about the look across their eyes - maybe in the planes of the face, but I cannot describe it in the terms we usually use to define a correct head. Anyhow it was almost always present and recognisable, even if not actually 'incorrect'. They just looked a bit 'odd' , and alike, to me. 'Stop' was present; maybe a tad less than usual ?

I may attempt to define what I meant by 'overuse' later; right now I have a 'new' dog, waiting to go for a walk ! Picked her up on Sunday; 12 yr old fat 'alsatian' longcoat (and I mean long coat) ! Why do I do these things to myself ??? Meet 'Sheila' (really, although I suppose that would be funnier if you were from elsewhere in the Antipodes). I'll TRY to put a photo up soon (but you know my ham fisted luck with those ...).

What about working ability?

You are talking about conformation, very close inbreeding (!), but not about any working ability (no obedience titles, please ).
For someone pointing out the "original" standard that often you seem to forget character and temperament.

Even in Oz there should be some working dog clubs. Maybe you only forgot to mention the working dog traits...