Re: [PyrNet-L] SAS. threat to Pyrs??

[JGentzel@aol.com]

In a message dated 12/22/99 12:33:13 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
Kshoffman@aol.com writes:

<< First of all, with the help of my computer, all the other wonders of 
modern 
 communication, and DNA testing tools around the corner, I most certainly 
 *can* study it. There will simply be a higher number of ancestors in the 
 pedigree to "study" and as a result, it will be more labor intensive for me, 
 that I will admit. I'm not afraid of hard work.<g> >>

You are going to know the problems and strengths with each outcross when this 
is all you do?  Good luck.

<<Secondly, while I may not have a "true bloodline" per se, I will have a 
program that increases my chances of producing healthy, fit, long-lived dogs 
that conform to the standard and my interpretation of breed type. They may 
not all look like identical "cookie cutter" versions of the same, but as you 
said in an earlier post, that would be kind of boring, wouldn't it?<g>>>

If you only outcross, I think it unlikely you will get in the end get any of 
these.  What I said was that only breeding for problem solving would be 
boring.  Indeed to produce dogs that look like Estat d'Argeles or any of his 
linebred relatives of de Soum, with high frequency would be the most 
thrilling thing I could ever do.

<<If breeding "cookie cutter" dogs is the idea, then why not just clone?  The 
technology is right around the corner.  How many breeders are going to give 
up breeding dogs and just start cloning their favorites?  Cloning doesn't 
bring to the table the inherent problems that linebreeding and inbreeding do. 
 So if one's primary goal is to produce a certain "look" with a high rate of 
consistency, then cloning would be the better way to go.

Has any breeder so far recreated Estat, or Estagel, or Ibos, or Lorvaso, or 
Impresario, via the use of inbreeding and linebreeding?  Not to my knowledge. 
>>

I think you have taken this way past the point of reason or certainly what we 
are talking about.  Cloning indeed and reproducing exactly an ancestor!!  I 
am not sure we are at all on the same page here.

<<I've read in more than 
one piece of literature that Marjorie Butcher of Cote de Neige did not 
develop a true bloodline per se.  Yet both of these ladies in my opinion had 
a significant positive impact on the breed via the methods they chose to 
pursue.  Mrs. Crane's efforts to import specimens from as many representative 
original bloodlines as possible in her an effort to establish the breed in 
the U.S. may quite possibly be the reason Great Pyrenees as a breed seem to 
have fewer health problems than a vast number of other breeds with a much 
smaller and less diverse founding base.>>

Marjorie Butcher only bred for 10 years, not enough time to develop a true 
bloodline.  My computer tells me she did linebreed.  This is objective 
evidence calculated via inbreeding coefficients.  Mrs. Crane rescued many 
dogs she imported.  I spoke with Mrs. Crane several times about what she did. 
 She felt it her duty to get am many dogs out of harms way via WW II as she 
could.  She would have never introduced so many dogs otherwise.  So don't 
jump to conclusions and say she was doing this to create some diversity she 
had planned in her breeding program.  If diversity is what we all want, why 
when you look at significant percentage contributing ancestors or dogs that 
we like and admire do we only see a few potent ancestors behind them all.  I 
can almost name them on one hand.  In other words, most of Mrs. Crane's 
imports play almost no role in our contemporary dog and never did.  Only a 
few and for good reason they were the dogs that breeders naturally used as 
they gave us what we sought.