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Chapter X - Advanced Breeding It is easy for someone like myself with a fluent pen to sit down and tell you in theory how to breed a top Labrador, but a very different thing to be able to do it. Indeed I don't think anyone can teach you that, because I have no doubt that like many other things in the breeding and rearing of Labradors the top breeders all have their own methods and ideas. So the only thing I can do is to give you my methods and ideas for you to follow or discard as you think fit. I do think though that there is one thing that all top breeders will agree on and that is that to produce a strain of good ones, you must carry out a degree of line-breeding, possibly using the dangerous practice of mild in-breeding in special cases. Top breeders hate the moment they have to use a complete outcross and luckily that is not often, because an outcross is the most difficult of all things to handle when breeding a line or a strain. Here I had better explain what I mean by the terms out-crossing, line-breeding and in-breeding. When outcrossing you introduce a dog that contains none of your own strain whatsoever and none or very few of the names appearing in your bitch's four generation pedigree. An example of this is to mate a show bred bitch to a completely Field Trial-bred dog. Granted that they may come down from the same stock originally (although both will have a few drops of alien blood, the Labrador being a manufactured breed) but to all intents and purposes they are of entirely different strains and almost entirely different bloodlines. Line-breeding is a gathering of lines leading back in three or four generations to a known good dog or bitch or very often to one or two good dogs and bitches, with the rest of the pedigree filled with outcross names. A line bred Labrador will go back to one dog such as Ch. Sandyland's Mark or Ch. Sandyland's Tandy up to five or six times in five generations. This is the best method of all, so long as you are sure of the goodness of the chosen dog or bitch to which you are line breeding. But there is danger if you merely know this dog or bitch by name and not personally, because it may have had a fault such as Entroption which you did not know about (see Part III). Every good strain is linebred, usually to the strain itself, because top breeders know their stock from tip to toe so know exactly how to use their own bloodlines. In-breeding is easier than outcrossing so long as you know your own line, but even then has it dangers. This is mating the animal to one of its own immediate ancestors without introducing any fresh blood at all. It is extremely useful in telling you what faults may be hidden in your strain, and also fixes the virtues, which may outweigh the faults, because presumably you will not in-breed the dog riddled with known faults. However in-breeding should only be used by extremely experienced breeders and then if only necessary for an essential fact such as that the bitch will not allow an outside dog to mate her, or will not 'hold' to any other dog, possibly because of blood groups. Very close breeding is also used by experienced breeders, but again has its risks and should only be resorted to for good reasons. In this I include half-brother and half-sister, provided always the other part of their pedigrees are different. Many years ago the great doyenne of Golden Retrievers Mrs. W. M. Charlesworth told me which matings she considers good and bad. She very much liked bitch to nephew, telling me to mate a bitch to her litter brother's best son and I have used that with success. My Ch. Midnight was bred on this recipe. She did not consider half-brother to sister as good, and warned me completely off brother to sister matings. Another recipe she liked was putting a bitch back to its grandfather or grand-uncle provide of course that the grandfather was a very good dog, but of course that goes to any of these suggested matings. When I asked her if putting the bitch to its grandson was as good she pointed out rather sarcastically that it was not as easy, because the bitch would probably be too-old to breed from. It is however a mating that has been used successfully. They say in racing circles that it is never any good putting the winner of the Oaks to the Derby winner and I am sure that the same thing might apply and indeed does when the Field Triallers mate a F.T. Stake winner to the winner of the F.T. Championship Stake, if that is the only criterion taken into consideration. But that goes for any mating. Lots of things must be weighed up before choosing the sire, or which dog or bitch to line-breed to. Here again we are on path three because the Path Two breeder would undoubtedly mate the Oaks filly to the Derby colt, which is why he remains on Path Two and never quite reaches the top. So to carry out advanced breeding you must line-breed and the nearer you get to the top, the more you will line-breed to your own stock. I think most top breeders will be with me over this, but now I must branch out into my own experience, and try to tell you how I myself try to breed Champions, or good ones at least. To start with I have a dimension to think about that does not affect every Labrador breeder, indeed rather too few. I have always been in shooting circles and every dog I have ever kept has to be able to go to a shoot and be an asset and behave itself, or it is out. So that as well as breeding a nice pleasant black Labrador suitable to be a nursery pet, a companion and a good-looker I have to add all the working qualities as well, i.e. tender mouth, retrieving instinct, ability to work, agility, speed, steadiness of temperament and the elusive quality, game-sense. They have to be able to mark, make good swimmers, and be sound enough to turn out day after day and have good enough coats to be in icy water and freezing conditions on a winter's day without taking harm. Add all these things and a few more and you will see the difficulties we dual-purpose people who really do it and not just talk about it, are setting ourselves. So because of all this I simply have to line-breed to my own strain pretty closely, and because I find it difficult to find a dog with these known attributes and yet suitable in other ways for my bitches I dread an outcross. So I take careful steps when breeding to consider before I use any dog exactly how I am going to use the progeny in the future years to members of other litters I am breeding or have recently bred. So I am considering the suitability of my various litters one to another but also their availability. I breed every litter to get either a bitch or a very rarely, a dog, for myself, breeding differently as to which I require and then I run on the best two of whichever sex I have bred for putting out the best puppy of the opposite sex somewhere nearby where it may be readily available when I want to use it. To give two examples, I bred the Sh. Ch. Sandylands Storm-Along x Ch. Mansergh Ooh La-La litter to get a bitch for myself so ran on Ch. M. Ships-Belle and Indian Ch. M. Sea-Breeze, which I considered the two best bitches, until I knew for certain which I wanted for myself, keeping Ships-Belle. At the same time I selected M. Stowaway as the best dog in the litter so put him out to Mrs. Mary Halstead of the Mesterford Labradors and thus bred a very nice litter of his from Ships-Belle's daughter. From this litter I kept a bitch and have 'placed' the best dog so that I shall be able to get at him for a mating if I want to in the future years. This is of course a niece to uncle mating, a good one. I also did this very successfully with the Sh. Ch. Martin of Mardas x Am. Ch. Grande Dame litter putting a lovely quality dog out in a pet home in the North so that I could get at him. Sure enough when I eventually put Ch. Ships-Belle to this dog, M. Marconi, I got the beautiful Ch. M. Mayday who had the stupendous win of Best in Show at the Labrador Club's Jubilee Ch. Show 1984, the best win I have ever had. This was a grandson to great grandson to great grand-daughter mating, the common ancestor being Ch. Groucho of Mansergh. So to sum up I decide which sex I want for myself, running on the two best and put out the best of the other sex as a lifetime for when I may want to use it. So often one is tempted to send the best abroad because of the money, but if you have a special litter that gives you particular interest, then I would advise you to follow my method if you intend to line-breed to your own stock and bloodlines. I believe very strongly in 'Better the devil you know' . . . especially where working ability is required. It is no good asking people who do not really shoot whether their dogs are will work because unless they have actually done it, they just do not know the many things that have to be bred into a good gundog. As I have said, the same thing applies to any dog to which you line-breed. You must know it well and deeply yourself, which is why it is safe to use your own good stock whenever possible. At least you like them personally. I reckon that it takes me four years to plan for and breed a good one; I don't know if that is slow or fast, but by method just explained I have to breed the good dog or bitch and then breed one far enough away yet of the same lines eventually to mate to that good dog or bitch. Another thing that I myself do, or rather don't do is to repeat matings, that is useless unless I have to, as in the case of Ch. Mansergh Antonia who suddenly decided she would only have pups to her half-brothers Am. Ch. M. Merry Gentleman. Never mind, it produced Ch. M. Ooh La-La which I rate as one of the three best I have ever had. This very close breeding however meant that I had to be very careful how I mated Ch. M. Ooh La-La herself, but a bit of line-breeding to an outside dog that appeared in her pedigree did the trick and produced the three bitches Ch. Ships-Belle, Sh. Ch. Sailors-Beware and Indian Ch. Sea-Breeze in the litter. One of the things I have found absolutely necessary is to cull my litters, putting down the puppies I didn't want at birth. This sounds terrible and I met a lot of opposition when I wrote this in my book, The Dual Purpose Labrador. At that time we were all getting litters of eight, nine and ten puppies or even upwards, and of these we were getting a large proportion of dog puppies, as is the way with Labradors. Now not only does a litter of this size pull a bitch down considerably but it also means that the puppies are having to struggle for a share of the milk. i found that the big strong dog puppies got the lion's share, pushing the smaller bitches off with their thrusting paws which work in synchronisation with their lusty sucks. I believe this to be a method of culling the weaker ones in nature but as I nearly always wanted those bitches I had to cull the dogs down to two or three to let the bitches survive and have the food they needed. So I used to cull to about seven puppies or even to five depending on the sexes and the bitch, i.e. whether she had had puppies before or was a maiden. Thus I ended up with three or four good strong bitches having had all they needed without too much struggle, and a couple or at most three of the best dogs. Times have changed and with the advent of Parvo we are at the moment getting much smaller litters. I am delighted if I get five now and three bitches in a litter is an absolute bonus. So for me culling is a thing of the past. That is very nice because nobody likes culling, but small litters give you much less choice so that you have to be even more careful to use the right dog because you are limited as to the choice of bitch puppies. I do not know whether this will alter my average of a good one or a Champion every four years, and as I am now getting on towards old age, I may never find out. But hope springs even at my age and I am looking at that carefully line bred bitch puppy I have in the nest as my next potential youngster, and if not, there is yet another litter on the stocks. I would very much like to know how much Blood Groups account for small litters, litters of one sex in undue predominance, or even no litter at all. In humans the Rhesus Negative factor works so that roughly speaking the woman has one good baby, then the factor occurs and she either aborts the next attempt at around four months pregnant or if the baby does survive in the womb till birth, it is a 'blue' baby and dies unless it has blood transfusion, completely changing the whole bloodstream. This has always seem to me to be reflected in the bitch. There is many a bitch that has one excellent litter, but next time has only two or three, or she has a full litter that fades in the next week or two, and after that the numbers and viability dwindle at each subsequent mating. Is something like the Rhesus Negative factor acting here? Does this account for the false pregnancies, in that the bitch actually gets into pup but the foetuses are got rid of or absorbed at four weeks yet the sequences of pregnancy have already been set in motion and continue, though no actual puppies appear? And does such factor even account for any trouble in getting about seven dog puppies to one bitch puppy down through the years? An expert cow breeder told me that by rights there should be an equal number, give or take the odd one, of dogs and bitches in a litter and that if a bitch produces mostly one sex and very few of the other then there is a lethal factor that actually destroys the female or dog foetus as soon as the sex factors divide off, so that they seldom come to fruition. I have thought about this for many years and feel this is probably correct and that the blood groups being incompatible will eventually prove to be the answer. At one time there was a suggestion that the blood groups of dogs were to be researched to try and find the various Groupings and how they mixed, but after a time it was announced in the Dog Press that the idea had been abandoned because the initial researched had revealed that the Groups were so many and so complex that it would prove such a major undertaking as to be too expensive to be worth it. But believing as I do that blood groups may account for many of the failures, absorption and false pregnancies which probably are not false at all, but clearly abortions too soon to be noticeable, then that is one reason why I do not repeat a mating to a dog form which my bitch has had no puppies. Even though my stud fee is paid and outstanding I feel that the blood-groups have been wrong, I'd rather try another dog and cut my stud-fee loss. And by using my own strain I reduce the likelihood of incompatible blood groups. Another reason I do not repeat even a good mating is that with a limited number of bitches I want as many viewpoints on any one brood-bitch as I can get, also as I will want to intermingle the progeny as I have described in my method of line breeding, so a series of puppies of identical breeding are of no use to me , whereas the progeny of a given good bitch to several different dogs can be 'plaited' together to form my breeding programme three or four years hence. I can go on line-breeding thus for generation after generation because all the time I am using different threads of the same material. However I always mate out at intervals simply to intertwine another thread of genes into my pattern through an outside sire, even though the bitches in this pedigree were mine. However if I am forced to in-breed too closely, that is the time one simply must use a direct outcross and for several generations your applecart will be upset. Mrs. MacPherson of the Braeroys, a wonderful breeder and judge for whom I had the greatest respect, told me that it took her nine years to breed out the faults and failings she got in an outcross. Most certainly, the closer the bloodlines the more difficult is the use of an outcross and this progresses until the strain becomes what is known as a 'closed' strain, a term we have forgotten nowadays when few people actually breed for a strain. The Braeroys were most certainly a closed strain and actually the Mansergh strain, my own, is now a closed strain. In other words I have bred so much to my own blood and my own lines that although I can handle the breedings others find it difficult they do not 'go' well to any and every dog. That is why the show-breeders have seldom used Mansergh sires or even used my bloodlines, because they just don't know how to handle them as breeding stock. I have bred them now for over forty-nine years entirely to suit myself, my line and my shooting terrain, and the Manserghs are bred thus for me alone. Either you like and admire them or you don't and that is all there is to it. You may not approve of this attitude, but it has worked for me and also for those who knew how to handle the blood. I got my happiness out of the good-looking workers that the shooting men loved and the gamekeepers, and out of the fact that my larder was always filled with game and the invitations, as many as I could manage, to take the dog from the grouse moors, duck and pheasant shoots. That was what I bred the Manserghs for and that the ideal they fulfilled, their show winning being a bonus. They have given me a tremendously happy life and I love them. Funnily enough there were three strains which suited my bloodlines as well as my own, although they were complete outcrosses. These three strains were the Heatheredges, the Sandylands and the Reanacres. Using them I had none of the usual difficulties of out-crossing, but they produced exactly what I wanted from my own bloodlines, and if my pedigrees are taken back it will be found that many of the good Mansergh Labradors, both at home and abroad were bred to these three strains and I am indeed grateful to them. The Heatheredge and the Reanacre lines are no longer active though the Sandylands of course go on and at the moment, the Mardas and the Nokeeners are my outcrosses, but I am still too near them to say how they will progress in future interminglings. So far I have had success with both outcrosses, but the next four or five years will tell. I had occasion to do a pedigree for the Poolstead kennel, to go under a photograph in the Xmas number of Dog World 1984. This was extremely interesting because although she has not deliberately planned it, Mrs. Hepworth had actually carried out a distinct pattern of line-breeding to her own stock and was thus producing her great line of Champions. She had not herself analysed her results and was astonished when I pointed out of the pattern on paper. Being a great breeder on Path Three she had followed her eye and flair and had unwittingly hit upon this pattern. It was practically identical with the method I follow and have described. Only thus by line-breeding is a strain made and kept at the top throughout the years until they become a fixed and recognisable type, breeding true to their own ideal. Chance breeding will never do it and you have to have first class stock to be able safely to carry it out. It is the essence of Path Three, the way to the very top. |
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