Disclaimer

This is a story about Standard Poodles. In the Poodle, we are fortunate to have a breed with ancient and diverse origins. They are intelligent and versatile, and a recent German study has suggested that they are among the longest lived. My own study, though not complete, suggests that a Standard Poodle should live 14 years or more, given reasonable luck, and a Miniature about 2 years longer. (The averages are actually closer to 11 and 13 years, respectively.)

I would like to believe that you can have healthy, long-lived, championship-quality dogs in any breed. However, this may be a function of their inherent diversity. Many breeds have been established with a much more limited number of founders and, therefore, may never have included the best alleles for certain genes, or may have lost them as a result of random events.

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Is Inbreeding Necessary?

Many breeders still cling to the idea that inbreeding is the only route to success, and that they can use it as a tool to identify and weed out genetic problems in their line. They will cite the success of certain breeders who inbred extensively, unaware (or conveniently ignoring) that the most successful litters from these kennels were often the least inbred. They also seem to be unaware that many studies on a wide variety of species have demonstrated that highly inbred individuals frequently live shorter lives and have fewer progeny. This is called inbreeding depression.

Inbreeding depression results, in part, from the bringing together of deleterious recessive alleles inherited via both parents from a common ancestor. In humans, where genetic diseases of this type are relatively rare, the frequency of affected individuals is often higher in small populations that are culturally or geographically isolated. In dogs, man has created similar isolated populations by restricting genetic exchange between pure breeds. However, given a sufficiently large and diverse group of founders, there is no reason why the average purebred should not lead a long, healthy life - if responsibly bred.

Why, then, do so many die young? I have been collecting data on causes of death in Standard Poodles since last February, and now have enough for some preliminary conclusions. Excluding accidents, the most common causes of death were cancer (34%) and bloat (20%). Bloat was more common in dogs that were highly inbred. The lowest inbreeding for the bloat group was 13%*; the average was 30.7%, and they lived only 8.3 years. In contrast, Standards that were reported as dying of old age lived, on the average, 14.1 years and their average inbreeding was only 11.6%. (Cancer, however, strikes dogs of low inbreeding just as frequently as others. The average lifespan is about 10 years.)

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* 10-generation inbreeding coefficients (IC), calculated by Wright's method with CompuPed software.

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English Chocolate

Low inbreeding does not mean giving up all hope of winning championships.

In England, Julia Taylor (Greekmyth) has been breeding brown Standard Poodles for many years, and has taken particular care to avoid introducing "contamination" from the North American lines. In 1976, Roy Flowers imported Greekmyth Olympia and later bred her to "DJ" - Am. Can. Bmda. Mex. Dom. (FCI) Int. Ch. Stormy Lane To Sir With Love - an outstanding brown primarily of Bel Tor heritage. The two shared only 20 ancestors over 10 generations.

One of the puppies was Stormy Lane Send In The Clowns, CD (Abby). Abby had an IC only 1.2%, and lived to 16 years of age! In 1979, Abby was bred to Greekmyth Hercules (Lute). From the all brown litter came Fran Fischer's foundation bitch, Cadbury's Chocolate Clown (Caddy). Fran is now 5 generations past Caddy, and has carefully chosen mates as she went that she believed would both complement her dogs and, at the same time, minimize common ancestry.

In 1995, she bred Cadbury's Kate Hepburn (IC 2.7%), the great granddaughter of Caddy, to a black male known to carry brown - El's Total Package (Bucky). Fran later admitted to me that she had some misgivings about the match. Bucky's origins are predominantly Wycliffe black. However, she saw many things in him she liked, and because Bucky and Kate shared little common ancestry, the inbreeding would still be low (5.4%). The combination seems to have been a spectacular success. Of the pups, all breed BIS Ch. Cadbury's Ruby Tuesday was the first to achieve recognition. Cadbury's Play It Again Sam (Bogie) is now being shown, and recently took Best of Breed & a Group 2 at Santa Fe. Roy Flowers wrote "She certainly got what she was looking for in breeding Kate to El's Total Package. If Ruby's brother, Bogie, does what he can do, Kate Hepburn will have two Best In Show brown offspring as well as a black daughter (Ruby's litter sister - Reika) who will do a lot of winning once she gets going in the ring! She stole my heart and I only have eyes for brown!"

Fran Fischer's task has not been easy. The remarkable success of the Wycliffe blacks sent almost every breeder in search of Wycliffe and related dogs to breed to, and created an artificial genetic bottleneck - so that the vast majority of the current population are more closely related than first cousins. There are standard poodles with distinctively different heritage out there, but there are not a large number. If they are indiscriminately bred to the mainstream, it will be like adding a spoonful of white paint to a gallon of black - the effect will not be noticed.

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Danny's Tail

Bringing down the IC.

Another notable poodle with a low inbreeding coefficient was Connie Rodgers' Ch. DeNevillette Dapper Dan (1981-95), IC 3.3%. Danny's sire was the black Ch. Gervais Tabu; his dam the white Ch. Alekai DeNevillette Wahine. Though many would likely have predicted disaster from the line and color mixing in Danny's pedigree, he was not only a long-lived and respected champion, but has over 180 titled descendants.

Danny's male "tail line" (the sire of the sire of the sire...) goes straight back to the great German black Champion Anderl von Hugelberg (b. 1923), as do most black pedigrees. Inbreeding and linebreeding, particularly on Sir Gay (b.1949) has been common, and in this line reached a high of just over 40% at Country Gentleman (Gentry).

Following that high, the inbreeding coefficient was been reduced to a more reasonable level through a series of partial outcrosses, or what I would prefer to consider intelligently-planned assortative mating (see The Argument for Assortative Mating).

One of the most notable was the mating of Gentry to Jocelyene Marjorie. Marjorie's sire was Wycliffe Virgil, who shares common ancestry with Gentry (which is why I consider it a partial outcross), but her dam is only distantly related. Thus Marjorie has a low inbreeding coefficient, which again illustrates my point that you don't have to inbreed to get a good dog. She was Best Puppy in the 1965 Poodle Club of America Specialty and Best in Breed in 1968, and was the mother of 17 champions.

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To be continued...

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Thanks to Fran Fischer, Roy Flowers and Connie Rodgers for giving me permission to discuss their dogs.

© John B. Armstrong, 1997

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