Bloodlines and health issues - Page 2

Sorry, it is late and I apologize, SS, for not acknowledging your post. Thank you. I too was wondering someone disliked your post.
I had a West German SL dog and he had allergies too. In all fairness he had Lyme disease when i got him at 15 months of age, so that may have been a contributing factor. He also had breast cancer, but it was caught early. He lived to be 14 years old and died from mitral valve prolapse/ congestive heart failure. His hips were good and his elbows were normal, but I never submitted them to OFA because I had no intention of breeding him. His thyroid was normal too.  Here is his pedigree. ​http://www.pedigreedatabase.com/german_shepherd_dog/dog.html?id=344637-bruno-von-kohs.   

i will just say this about genetic disorders:
when people refer to lines, they are most often talking about the sire & his pedigree.
a lot of perfectly good males get a bad rap because of a couple of lesser quality females
they were bred to.  when assigning traits, good or bad, be sure which half of the pedigree
those traits originate from.  i think, if people were truly honest, they would find that their
dogs have inherited more from the dam than the sire line.  jmho.
pjp

The problem Ziegenferm's is in some lines the lines of the dam and the lines of the sire are all first, second, and third cousins.....it then makes it more difficult to isolate and it also entrenches the malady stronger in the progeny. With some pedigrees I can do exactly what you said and pretty much pinpoint origin of something( or at least the resurfacing) so I know where not to go back to with that progeny. But some pedigrees you can't do it because both sides are pretty much the same. Maybe this in itself is a teaching moment.

Genes are inherited in pairs, one half of each pair from each parent. It's a random pairing. All dogs are one half their sire, one half their dam and no 2 sibs have an identical gene pool unless they are identical twins.The more disease/conditions we can test for and try to  avoid producing , the healthier our dogs should be. No test for a specific disease makes it a lot  harder.

Blitzen, Ursus v. Batu, the 2000 Sieger.  He was so popular as a sire at that time that the gene pool was getting saturated with his bloodlines. You would even see breeders advertising 'Ursus-free pups'!

Charlene, I LOL'd at you apologizing for not acknowledging my post. After hanging out here for a number of years, it takes waaay waaaay more than that to hurt my feelings!   {{{{HUGS}}} to you, old friend!

ROFL.....Yes, I know that, Sunny. It was rhetorical.

Ah, I thought you did! 

blitzen, i will agree that genes are inherited in pairs & that theoretically, a dog should be half its sire & half its dam, but.......we all know it doesn't
actually work that way.  i've known breeders with supposedly "proponent" males where all the pups end up looking & acting just like the dam.
ofcourse, there are also examples of pups being the spitting image of the sire.  and i also agree with gustav when it comes to linebreeding, it
becomes much more difficult to nail down specific traits. 
i have no scientific data to base my opinion on, but rather many many years of breeding
animals---not just dogs, but i have found that genes play some tricky games sometimes.  progeny very often seem to be clones of grandparents or
gr grandparents.  meaning certain traits will skip a generation & reappear.  sometimes siblings are more proficient at passing on desirable traits than
the show animal itself.  there comes a point in linebreeding where the animals back-massed upon become more influential than close-up ancestors.
there are other comments i could make, but my point is that breeding animals is nothing like mixing paint.  i dislike the expression: "breeding dogs
is a crapshoot" but i do understand what people mean when they say it.  the genetic outcome is never really assured.  inheritability is not guaranteed
and puppies are certainly not a 50/50 mix of their sire & dam.
as far as bloodlines & health issues are concerned, i have to stick with my original comment about determining where those issues are coming
from.  far too many people place far too much emphasis on sire lines.  they attribute good traits as well as bad almost automatically.  when they
talk about their dogs, they normally describe it in relation to the sire line.  health issues could very easily come from something that is not even
recognized as a "line."  it could be coming from a bunch of barely recognized dogs who were bred loosely, with no real plan in mind other than
breeding to trophy winners.
pjp