Karelian bear dog - How IT became part of dog breeding

Mike · Karelian bear dog - How IT became part of dog breeding

During some lengthy discussions about the pros and cons of line breeding / out crossing on another forum I happened across the work of Anna-Liisa Syrjänen who as part of her thesis on "end user developed systems" has written about how the Karelian bear dog community (hunting dogs from Finland) got together and used computer based systems that they as lay people (i.e. not IT experts) developed to improve the hunting ability of their dogs.

One unexpected and perhaps significant finding was that dogs with low COI's had higher assessment scores (in the hunting tests) than more tightly line bred dogs, this was despite the accepted wisdom that tight line breeding of the best dogs to the best bitches was the way to produce top class hunters.

Chapter 4 is the likely on of interest for most of us.

http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9789514285912/isbn9789514285912.pdf

Be warned it is a fairly lengthy document!

wildman

Hi Mike

It does make interesting reading but my understanding of the text was that inbreeding for stabilisation of type, rather than hunting ability led to the high inbreeding coefficients and subsequent genetic bottlenecks. Reading between the lines, certain high profile stud dogs were used extensively from kennels who had some success (albeit from extensive breeding effort) and crowed loudest to the detriment of smaller breeders who perhaps had dogs of equal or better (hunting) calibre.

Only when information was made freely availible via IT concerning Working Test results and Health Issues did the smaller breeders find ways to communicate and pair up their dogs without resorting to using the current 'dog of the day' that everyone new about.

The result of this was a decrease in Inbreeding Coefficient and better working test results.

I believe that the better working tests were a result of improved selection for the required hunting traits from a greater population of prospective sires rather than as a subsequence of the IC No. dropping itself.