hybrids - Page 3

LDD:  The dog lived in his home when it was a pup till he started the training and all the problems started at 8 mos old. He had three children, wife and many  family members. lived in a mansion on the hill and he had many hours with the dog , and I personally lived about 5 miles to the south of him on my 6 acres/. Almost every day he and the pup and the kids came to my road thru the woods and back roads and visited and then went back to many hours of trying to make this pup calm and acceptible for company, noises, and many other problems..no he spent and is kids and wife exhausted many an hour and many dollars getting this pup trained, behavioural modified and sent back to breeder three times.

Major problems and the dog they guaranteed him was under the skin and they could make him. never existed..They just kept charging him 2,500.00 for another 3 months of training.

I knew the day I met the pup it was a basketcase..I warned him , he assured me the breeders were famous and reputable...and they could FIX it.

Jayne, "Hybrid vigor" is also used in relation to out-crosses within a breed, as well as between different breeds. An intra-breed out-cross is considered to be one in which the two mated dogs have no common ancestor in 8 generations. You might want to read "The New Knowledge of Dog Behavior" by Clarence Pfaffenberger regarding the temperament differences in intentionally produced mixed-breeds. The book was out of print for a long time. But, Dogwise has been reprinting rare and out-of-print books. You can order a copy from Amazon. It is well-worth reading.

Even an 8 generation outcross won't safeguard a breed from outbreedig depression. Technically, the selection pressures of mankind breeding dogs, can be categorically placed under the label of "natural selection". It's my personal opinion also, that nothing in nature is completely "random".

The "allelic richness" of wolves can be expected to be greater than that of dogs, their various differences due to domestic breeding for "type", which has presented itself becuase of inbreeding/linebreeding which has created various homozygous allele combinations, narrowing the "richness" of allelic types available to our domestic breeds. Each species has incured some degree of mutations that is not shared by the other, but mutation alone is not the sole cause, or even the major cause, for phenotypical differences. As an example, in the Russian "silver fox experiments", major phenotypical changes occured within 3 to 5 generations. It should be reminded also, that the modern wolf is not the same as the early predesessor of domestic dog.

Domestic dog has surely contributed to the wolf genepool since those times, and perhaps even more recently. Genomic mapping evidence concludes that mutations earned in dogs, have found their way back to wolves through prehistory backcrossing, as in the example of the black coat pattern increasingly found in wolf populations of today. Some species of wolves have been known to profusely intermingle with it's coyote cousins. Even so, two entirely separate species can spontaneously emerge with the same mutation, as in the case of degenerative myolepathy in canines and that of Lou Gherig's disease in humans.

Some phenotypes are more equally dispersed, each being favored by different handlers. One person may favor black coat color over sable, another person the inverse. Among character traits, one particular gene, COMT, has an invariable tradeoff that contributes as a major component to the sum of how a well a dog handles stress and it's tolerance of pain, vs. better memory and attention control. One handler may prefer "hardness" over "focus", but that's not to say that the COMT gene is the sole contributor of such character aspects.