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Hello!

I am beginning my adventure of better breeding to improve a breed. My question is how does everyone breed and progress with their dogs? How do you choose your sires and dams so you get the best possible? Or do you just choose a couple random pairs that look like it would be a good match? What sort of standards do you set for yourself and your puppies? When do you FH and when do you keep?

Thanks for anyone who feels like answering!

Windy

My strategy is basically to keep females for a variety of reasons:

1) a super-good trait
2) high SOP
3) no bad traits

but only keep the best SOP males. That way which ever strategy is currently giving the most pay-off in terms of SOP is quickly spread to most of the next generation.

The other strategy I've had a lot of success with is occasionally breeding to a old low quality but unusual dog (typically for colour reasons) then repeatedly breed the dog to the highest SOP male around and keeping the highest SOP female offspring. It often takes 4-5 generations but eventually you start getting super-good traits in reasonable quality dogs which you can then breed to multiple dogs in your high-SOP lines to get really good dogs. (twice I've gotten new 10.0's this way)

grif,

I am quite new to the game, so it would be a good thread to keep up with

i'm trying not to focus on pure colour.. I breeed mini schnauzers in salt and pepper, which seems to be dominate over black and silver PHEW!!
I started with already lined dogs/bitches. some had a few low traits.
Ive focussed on getting high sops, but focussing on avoiding low scores so balancing out the lower score with a higher one, hoping to get better pups. Doesnt always work.

so if it comes to crunch, id rather keep a lower sop with good general marks then a higher sop with a few really low scores.as ive found these really low sops pop up all the time

Most of my pups sops are now 90+ rather then 87-89's

I pick who to keep from litters by there SOP, I have a cut off number that I only keep higher than that, so say that number is 80 I won't keep 79.99 or lower.

When choosing breedings I try to pair up traits so I look for a stud that has what my girl is lacking while hopefully also trying to breeding matching pairs. So if I habe a bitch with good head but low feet and tnb and I habe two studs one has good feet but low head and the other had good head and good tnb I'd rather use that second one. But if I had a stud who had ok head and better feet and tnb I'd use him.

I check for a dog strong in one or more trait requirement for the breed and match that with a girl who is low in that trait or the same as him, over all sop is important to me i also get weird and try to work on the traits nobody pays attention to (if the trait is rated as a 5 and something else is a 15 then I try to improve on the weak trait. I will breed random ocassionaly when going for colour not quality.

Thanks for everyone's input!

I think I've decided to go for rounding out stats and bringing them evenly to a single point. Then, breeding those well-rounded individuals in two ways.

(a) with other well-rounded dogs so I get a pedigree of all-around decent stats to later cross with others

(b) to the highest SOPed dogs, which will probably bring down less important traits to a lower quality, but hopefully retain high scores in important areas.

My goal here is to bring up and stabilize my lines, and, ideally, bring up the minimal trait threshold and work on improving the breed as a whole. It'll take a couple generations for me to actually start seeing results.

If you're in a less popular breed where show wins are pretty unlikely, it's also worth noting that sometimes it's worth sacrificing a little Show Shine in favour of other traits. A dog can sometimes look like it has a low SOP because of having a lower Show Shine, while its other traits are better than other pups in the same litter.

So I definitely recommend using an SOP calculator to 'recalculate' dogs stats to see what their SOP would be if they had 20 SS. In less competitive breeds, a low SS dog can still place over higher SOP/SS dogs because its other traits are better.

As a general rule, I'll attempt showing dogs as low as 18 SS if their traits are as good as or better than other dogs. Anything less than 18 SS struggles to place regardless of traits, but some of my best dogs EVER have been better than their SOP indicated because of that Show Shine.