Diversity?

[Wendy Bockman]

I figured since this is going to be an ongoing discussion we should start a forum for it.

[Ann Millington]

OK - What do you mean by 'Diversity'?
To me, absolute diversity in this context, is dogs with no common ancestors in their pedigree... from its beginning.
To develop a 'breed', dogs of a certain type and aptitude are bred together, producing consistant generations. Stud books are closed to avoid breeding with dogs of other breeds with unwanted traits and to 'improve' on the dogs already established. This means that common ancestors become the norm and are, indeed, sought to strengthen a particular trait. Taken to its extreme, this can be dangerous as 'bad genes as well as 'good' genes are concentrated in the dogs and the variety of genes is limited.
Too many 'bad' genes in a breed produce problems so the effective way to dilute the bad and increase the variety of genes is to diversify breeding.
Diversity means adding new genes to the make-up of the dog.

How would you do this?

[Christina Phillips]

Hi Ann,
has anyone done complete COI work-up on current breeding stock/ litters...
I consider COI's only another tool to consider, but could give a better understanding of a breed that evolved from such extreme small gene pool.
It would be nice if with each litter produced a 10 or12 generation COI would be reported :-)))))

Christina