Artikkelit

How’s it going with the longhaired Dutch Shepherd?

This new year marks the 10-year anniversary of my first longer form article, “The Genetic State of the Longhaired Dutch Shepherd And What Can Be Done About It”. Even if I have to admit that by now I consider that work to be beneath my current standards, I’m still linking it here in case anybody wants to have a look at how things were back then. If you are feeling too lazy to look, do not worry, I can tell you what has changed in the last 10 years: A lot. Inbreeding has been on a decline, and has more than halved since the most critical times of the variety in the late 90’s. In fact, the 2024 average (19 %) was last seen in the 70’s! More than half of all the sources of new blood (variety crosses, look-a-like registration & longhairs out of shorthairs) in the variety’s history were introduced from 2015 and onwards. Seriously, this is big; in the last 10 years the variety has been introduced with more new blood than it ever was prior to that. In 2024, 80 % of all litters had some of this new blood somewhere within their 3-generation pedigree. Every new year more new individuals have been introduced; in 2024 there were already 7 dogs with non-longhair ancestry used for breeding for the first time.

Originally, I was going to share these numbers in a similar post to “HH Dashboard: 2023 Year In Review“, but instead I am going to write about something else, something I find more urgent. I am going to write about how the delight I felt from seeing the first shaky steps of progress has slowly turned into a sinking feeling in my stomach. Frankly, I think things are a little out of hand right now. And before you become outraged and argue that this is exactly what I have wanted – haven’t I been advocating for introduction of new blood, and throwing all kinds of doomsday scenarios about cancers and dead puppies and inbreeding depression for years – and can I just not be satisfied for once, I want to ask you to hold it until I have told you the full story from my point of view. It is a little long, so buckle in and get a cup of hot cocoa, we are going to have to start from the beginning!

Developments of the early years

Out of its three varieties, the longhaired Dutch Shepherd has always been known as the one most suitable to be “just” a companion dog. This was surely not the case in a time before breed clubs and dog shows and pedigrees, but the modern longhair, re-created in the 40’s and the 50’s has never been of much interest for people involved in dog sports. The preservation efforts of the early years focused on setting the desired appearance, which meant that there was no room for improvement, or even maintenance of working qualities. Some later shorthair crosses – employed whenever the variety would have died off without – probably had a moderate effect, and we do have some individuals from the 80’s and even the 90’s with working and sport titles. However, for the longest time the longhaired variety has just been struggling to exist. Even if there had been room to consistently choose breeding animals with working criteria, the breed was so homozygous that no visible improvements to these qualities could have been made. Figuratively speaking, if you mix red with more red, you are never going to get purple no matter how carefully you measure each application, right?

While the longhair was relatively comfortably boxed into its companion dog role, things were not so simple for the shorthair. The tumultuous early years of European purebred dogs in the turn of the 20th century were full of discord among breeders and owners. Breed clubs and their newly introduced breed standards took a firm stance on what was and wasn’t correct, and FCI was seen as promoting only show dogs. It is said that many good dogs had to be left out of breeding for something as simple as having a little bit too much white on them. Rules and limitation like this led many Dutch working dog lovers to divert into the KNPV program, established in 1907 to preserve and develop the working qualities of Dutch dogs. Naturally, some people staying with the FCI stock still loved sports, and did their best to breed working dogs despite the ever-diminishing options. By the end of the 80’s the divide was probably at its most extreme, and the “traditional type” shorthair was similar to what it is today – not reliably suitable for police work or high level protection sports, but usually perfectly capable of filling the dreams of anybody interested in their national sports, obedience, agility etc.

Even then, though, things were happening beneath the surface. One only has to know a little bit about our cousin, the Malinois, to know how strongly that breed was shaped by the illegitimate use of KNPV/NVBK dogs in the development of their FCI stock. Almost every dog had a “paper pedigree”, and a “true pedigree”, versions of their genetic history that might not share even one name. Surely something like this happens in many other breeds as well, but it was especially tempting for the breeders of the shorthaired Dutch Shepherds to follow suit, since they had been desperately trying to keep the working abilities of their breed intact for so long. In addition to KNPV dogs, registered Malinois were also used for the Dutch Shepherd. Despite how unethical it was, many breeders felt that the end justified the means, and as we entered the 80’s and the 90’s this kind of breeding only got more popular both in the Malinois and the shorthaired Dutch Shepherd.

These two breeds have one massive difference, however, and that is population size. At this time the Dutch Shepherd was barely known outside of the Netherlands, whereas the Malinois had been a popular working breed in several European countries for decades at this point. When in Malinois 10 breeders introduced new blood, in Dutch Shepherd only 1 did. These numbers aren’t real, but represent the order of magnitude in opportunities. No matter how dishonest the steps taken were, through them the Malinois increased steadily in quality, and amassed the reputation they have today as one of THE working dog breeds in the world. With the Dutch Shepherd, the same did not happen. Many of the titled, or much used stud dogs we know today to have had false pedigrees were clearly a little lacking in this or that, or at least nowhere near as well performing as their ever-improving and impressing cousins. Trainability itself was not usually a problem, but many of the litters coming from these attempts at working type Dutch Shepherds were a little unstable with poor nerves and had problems with social behaviour. We know this in Finland, too – the reputation of the Dutch Shepherd here was influenced for the longest time by the outright dangerous dogs that kept appearing from these bloodlines, or from them mixed with traditional ones. Surely there were poor individuals in the Malinois as well, but because of the larger population, the low-quality dogs were more likely to be left out of breeding. In the Dutch Shepherd, breeders had to continue with the already introduced new blood lest they narrow the gene pool even further, even if it meant using a dog that wasn’t as stable as it should have been. It was also difficult to find handlers for a type of dog that had no large audience already, so many of these more challenging individuals ended up in the hands of people who did not need or want a high-drive dog and would have been more suitable owners for the traditional type of shorthair. 📌

This is how things stayed until working dog enthusiasts in France, and then a little later in Sweden picked up on the Dutch Shepherd as a possible alternative to Malinois. They went into work with enthusiasm, and almost immediately there were a lot more threads to follow, allowing breeders around Europe to consolidate their efforts. Coming into early 2000’s there was already a solid base for the current working line shorthair created, but in my mind it was still another 10 years before this subpopulation was actually beginning to thrive. These days pedigree forging is somewhat less common than it used to be, due to mandatory DNA-testing in many countries, and the possibility to enter look-a-likes into studbooks of certain countries through exterior evaluation. Due to the existence of a “land-breed” population in the KNPV stock, there is still practically an endless source of new blood to tap into for the shorthair enthusiasts.

Circling back into longhair business

While all this excitement happened in such close relative populations, the longhair kept becoming more and more inbred every year, a situation that was instigated by some awfully popular sires. There had been no longhaired dogs born out of shorthaired Dutch Shepherds since the early years of the breed, so this way of getting new blood had always been closed to the longhair. But then, in the early 90’s in France, maybe a little “oops” had happened somewhere between a longhair and a shorthair, allowing the offspring to go on to spread the longhair allele, or for some other reason two carriers suddenly met up several times. The result was, that we were suddenly greeted by the first long-coated puppies in shorthair litters in the history of the modern longhair. Because the newer changes for the shorthair described previously were not really wide-spread yet, these dogs were descendants of the more traditional type shorthairs. Despite the controversy of the origin of their long coat, three dogs from two combinations were selected and used to give the variety a nice boost both in genetic diversity and willingness to work. The Dutch Shepherd had never gone to France as a companion dog only, but as a potential sports dog, which meant that the offspring of these dogs was welcomed warmly and their limits were tested in every field imaginable. This is also when my own personal journey with these dogs started, and I was privileged enough to start my breeding with a direct offspring.

What I quickly noticed, and what breeders in France noticed, was that there were a lot of people who would like to “do stuff” with a longhaired Dutch Shepherd. Had I not been one of them as well, people who loved the less high-strung nature of the longhair, as well as the looks, but would have liked to see them have better trainability? So it is no wonder that when more longhairs began to appear, and this time from the now-emerging working lines, their offspring was promptly snatched up by breeders wanting to spread these qualities. With this, even more people noticed the same thing; there really is a market for a longhair that wants to work! These few new bloodlines spread quickly across Europe, just fueling the hunger for more.

And like so, we arrive to 10 years ago from now, to 2015. Inter-variety crosses were technically still a possibility, and had been all this time, but they were very strictly controlled and out of reach of most people outside of Netherlands. These projects were also always very integrated into the traditional bloodlines, where selection was not favoring a more sporty type. They did offer a temporary relief from the rising levels inbreeding, but as described in my 10-year-old article, their benefit was quickly swallowed by the tight backcrossing into the same traditional bloodlines. As an exception, in 2012 I was allowed to make a variety cross involving a working line shorthair, but unfortunately full use of this combination was not able to be reached due to a several years long ban that was placed upon Finland in variety cross matters. It was clear the home country of the breed was not ready to relinquish control over their traditional bloodlines. And it was not just them! Even if there were, and are many people who would like to work with their longhair, there are also many people around the world who do not want to change their variety. These people are generally speaking not against better genetic health either, nor are they against better trainability. They just do not want to see the dogs they love change, especially not with any means necessary. Some of these people have been with the breed longer than some newer breeders have been alive, and I do think they have as much right to speak on its matters as anybody else. And even if I myself prefer more of a working type dog, I have much understanding for these people; the only way to effectively improve a trait is to leave most others drifting. Unless those other traits were fixed (no new alleles were introduced), after a few generations much more than just the trait under improvement has changed – and usually not for the better.

Because this growing divide is an essential part of the breed experience, and even has an influence on which way the variety is developing, I will go ahead and talk about a little more. The differences of opinion on what is correct seem fierce considering the miniscule size of the breeding population. Since 2015, the number of litters per year has been about 27, and in the ten years before that, 23. So even if breeding practices are changing rapidly, the variety itself has not become that much more popular at all. We have a very strongly opinionated, action-taking minority at both ends of the spectrum, and everyone in the middle just works with what is available. These latter mentioned are people who are not looking to make waves, just want to produce some nice dogs, and usually don’t take part in the discussion on what is “right”. It is the extremes that need to learn to listen to each other, and eventually work together to provide good breeding options for all. Right now, the more one side promotes or even accepts a certain extreme, the more the other extreme becomes a sign of correctness for the other. Things that did not even need to be under question, suddenly are. For example, introducing new blood into the variety had nothing to do with working qualities for the longest time. As soon as people began to speak of their less inbred, more trainable dogs as the better option to the standard type, the seeds of conflict were sown. When being a “mutt” was criticized, it made people only want more foreign blood. When the desire to see more working dogs in the variety was criticized, it meant the next goal was to go for even stronger features. What better way to show the haters, than to do exactly the one thing that makes them seethe? The sad truth is that by allowing this type of divide to flourish, we are making both of our situations more difficult and promoting selection that is not focused on what truly matters. However, as years go by, there will be more and more people breeding who have never owned a “pure” longhair, as they are called by some. These people will see what they own, and what they were introduced to when they entered the breed as what it should be like, and will only want to build more into that direction. If we want to find common ground, the time is now.

So, during the last ten years, the variety has slowly been set on a specific course. Improving it is now universally starting to mean improving its status as a working dog. Looking back at shorthair history, where improvement of the variety was severely hindered by the limited size of the population, can we expect it to be any easier for the longhair? What we are effectively doing is trying to create another subpopulation under a subpopulation of an already small breed. If the longhair could not sustain itself without new blood before, it definitely cannot do it now – that and the attempts to achieve higher levels of “working blood” is why every year more new individuals are introduced into the population. But it is not some of the working champions and other high-quality individuals from proven bloodlines that are introduced, along the lines of what Malinois and shorthair breeders were secretly able to do back in the day; it is mainly those few long-coated dogs that are sometimes born into shorthair litters, but occasionally also individuals from projects made in secret from breed clubs that would not have approved of them. Knowing how much unethical breeding there is in the world, there is no guarantee in the quality of any of these products, and even coming from good breeders there is no guarantee they are good individuals, or individuals well fitting for our current breeding animals. Going this route, we are not carefully evaluating a bloodline, the traits it commonly carriers, and then making the best fitting choice for the needs of the individual partner, of our breed and our personal breeding program – we are quite literally taking in the first new bloodline we can find and nearly indiscriminately using it with what we have. When we breed like this, we are letting randomness take over a significant number of things that would have been able to be taken into account otherwise. And because of these compromises, we are getting a larger-than-normal portion of pairings that simply do not work. The evidence of this can be subtle, but it is definitely there. Right now, the quality within litters is very uneven. There are problems with poor nerves, and problems with sociability. Often the stability is not there. Just the fact that we already have so many unreliable and even outright dangerous dogs shows us we are not exactly dancing on rainbows riding unicorns; in my personally collected data (~1200 causes of death), being euthanized due to behavioural issues has gone from being 5 times less likely in the longhair than the shorthair, to being equally likely in both varieties when comparing dogs born before 2015 to dogs born ≥2015. In the same timeframe, 75 % of longhairs euthanized due to behavioural issues represent these newly introduced shorthair bloodlines. According to Finnish character tests (LT) and mental descriptions (MH), longhairs with at least 1/4 shorthair blood are showing considerably more aggression and clearly more drive than other longhairs, making them simply too demanding for less experienced owners. And even if the interest for longhairs with more working abilities is on a rise, most new people looking at the variety are still looking for an active family dog, and/or their first sports dog. Unfortunately, most of our “longhaired shorthairs” are maybe a little too much for this audience now. On the other hand, people who live and breathe working dogs, and can better handle this type of dog, do not often go for breeds where the likelihood of a truly good individual is so low. And this completes the circle, where most of the puppies from these new bloodlines go to people who do not need or want a high-drive dog, and might even be more suitable owners for the more traditional type of longhair.

Some clever people might have already guessed it, but the little red pin 📌 I put in the text earlier is where I think the longhair is at now in the great wheel of repeating history. Read that paragraph again. It will probably take another 20 years before the “working longhair” properly exists, and even then only IF we fix the problems we have now. If we do not re-adjust course, we are effectively just going to be breeding inferior working shorthairs with long coats. And I am sorry for those who do not want to hear this, but with the same conditions, I do not think there is a possible future left where the “the traditional type” exists as it does today. It is simply too late for that. If we look at 2024 litters, the whole variety is now a one large cross! More clearly put, while looking at only 3 generations, more than half of the genetics in the pedigrees of last year’s litters come from outside populations. The variety is truly going through a rapid and total restructuring, and the pit in the bottom of my stomach is equal in depth to how poorly I feel like we are currently managing it.

Digging into the how and why

If you ask people what traits they think the best working dog has, you will get a plethora of different responses. Naturally, there are probably as many opinions about this as there are ways to work a dog, but no matter what other things come up, the people who really know their stuff will always eventually bring up stability of temperament and strong nerves. They will describe a reliable, clear-headed dog with high drive thresholds, a dog that can handle challenging situations without losing its head, and is both socially and environmentally safe. No matter what else comes in the package, these are traits and features that do not make any dog a difficult or dangerous dog. It is only logical to suggest then, that if everybody in our variety focused on these traits first, the population as a whole would become a better fit for itself, and would produce stable dogs more evenly – regardless of their other differences. Currently, if a person wants to breed drivey longhairs, their cull-quality puppies (not actually killed, but just not considered as breeding prospects) are more likely to lack in nerves or social behaviour than they are in prey drive. And who is likely to welcome these exact puppies home? You know it, the people who did not have enough experience to promise working results for the best puppy… Unfortunately, the qualities I just described are some of the most difficult to consistently breed for as well, which means serious steps would have to be taken to do this. It also means that the new blood coming into the longhaired variety is often the weakest exactly on these fronts. The top quality dogs on the shorthair side have these traits, but as mentioned before, these are generally not the dogs we bring in. As an example: with the longhair, on average 18 % of all births take part in breeding, meaning 8 in 10 dogs are left out of breeding for one reason or another. I don’t have pinpoint accurate numbers for the shorthair, but they should be very similar, if not a little tighter than for the longhair (this is usually the case in larger populations). Looking at “new blood” however, 36 % of all long-coated puppies born in shorthair litters in the 10 years between 2011-2020 were selected for longhair breeding. It might not be immediately obvious why selecting 36 % of a small random group of dogs that were born with one specific trait is so much worse than selecting just 18 % of the best, and I even spent one sleepless night trying to decide on the best way to visualize it.

Let’s look at it like this: if we have to select 18 % from the full shorthair population for breeding, it is a pretty easy task. First we just pretend the following conditions are true: a) All breeders are of the same mind on what “the best” is, and b) It is possible to quantify “the best”. Then we simply sort all the dogs in the breed by quality, and select the best 18 %. To take genetic diversity into account, this could be the top puppy in every top 18 % litter. In any case, we are never at risk of having to pick from the sub-average side of the breed, and we will never have to consider the poorest quality puppy in a litter. But for a longhair born into a shorthair litter? It is pure game of chance which dogs will be assigned long coat and which will not. The genotype frequency for long coat in the shorthair is something around 0,5 %, if even that, so the probability for any dog to be born in a litter that is in the top 18 % of the breed, as one of the better-than average puppies, with long coat is no higher than 0,045 % — at most 1 birth in every 2220 dogs or so.

To better visualize the difference this type of selection makes in the quality of breeding animals, we can start a lottery for the dogs that we know were already assigned long coat at birth. Let’s assume we have a pool of 10 available longhairs born into shorthair litters (on average, it would take several years to find this many), and we are now selecting the earlier stated 36 % of them for breeding. I’m asking a random number generator to generate us 10 numbers between 1-100 to work as a measure of their quality in the breed. Number 1 means this dog belongs in the top 1 % in quality, number 10 signifies top 10 % and so on. The numbers we were assigned are: 14, 20, 30, 86, 76, 54, 11, 53, 83, 93. What we can first look at from this string of numbers is that our 10 longhairs are slightly below the shorthair average (shorthair average in quality would naturally be 50 %, our longhairs sit at 52 %). For the next step, I’m asking Excel to highlight the top 36 % of these individuals (4 dogs, since halves aren’t allowed!), our breeding picks. We get 11, 14, 20, 30. So with this set of dogs, half of the individuals we took in for longhair breeding were worse in quality than what was equal to the minimum in shorthairs (18), and none of them were actual top individuals in the variety.

We can do the same roll 4 times more to see how things could happen differently with different sets. Here is a table of all the rolls and selected dogs:

Random sample AverageSelectedEqual to SH criteria
14 20 30 86 76 54 11 53 83 935211 14 20 302/4
86 83 04 73 70 95 86 60 56 906704 30 56 701/4
73 17 33 19 05 05 31 31 13 212505 05 13 173/4
35 48 24 22 63 35 36 03 16 123003 12 16 223/4
47 96 25 28 77 16 41 49 11 614511 16 25 282/4

These are the mechanics behind taking small samples from a large population, and ending up with sets that do not reflect the quality of the original population. If we either took larger samples, or combined several smaller samples, the quality would slowly begin to even out. In fact, if we repeat the same roll enough times, the average of all the sets would become the same as it is for the full shorthair population, 50. The difficulty comes from the teeny tiny samples of randomly selected dogs, and the fact that dogs like this are in very high demand right now. We are selecting a larger percentage of them than we are of either longhair or shorthair births, and because of this, for every set at least one dog was selected that would not have been breeding quality at all did it not have a long coat. The probability to get four or more numbers of ≥18 in a set like this is less than 9 %, meaning it is actually very likely that a portion of the “new blood” coming into the longhair variety is always a little lower in quality than what would go for shorthairs typically. The two things that could help the situation are 1) more rigorous selection – a lower percentage and higher quality dogs from these origins should be selected for longhair breeding, 2) the increase of genotype frequency for long coats – if longhairs from shorthaired parents were to be born much more frequently, it would be more likely that exceptionally good individuals were born with long coats as well. This second option comes with a caveat that intentionally selecting longhair carriers and combining them is not the right way to do this, in fact it is only adding another layer of selection that happens within a random-quality subsection of the breed. I.e. first selecting both parents from a small pool of longhair carriers, and then selecting from the small pool of longhair puppies born from those combinations.

The lottery we just finished playing is not perfect, and assumes many things that are not true in real life. Availability, distance as selection pressure, genetic diversity and other things like breeder ethics (not everybody would strive to produce the “best”, even if we all agreed on what that is) always have an effect on which dogs are actually selected. Neither does it account for the fact that even if a selected dog is objectively of good quality, it might still have traits that are not well-fitting to our current breeding stock or the partner it was used with. This is what I mean when I talk about “inferior working shorthairs” as the possible future of longhaired variety. Somebody might say that even an average shorthair is a better option for breeding than any existing longhaired Dutch Shepherd, but I seriously hope nobody will ever think this. And if you are ignorant enough to do so, I hope you find another hobby very soon. Overall, I hope the lottery managed to point out why this current way of choosing our breeding animals, and determining the course of our breed development at the same time has been setting us up for trouble.

I have talked about characters, their quality and their compatibility at length now. I won’t go into health as much in this article, but naturally all rules that apply to characters apply here as well. Overall though, increased genetic diversity is clearly helping with vitality. Currently that is most visible in average litter sizes, which have gone up with 1,4 puppies since 2015. However, within the same timeframe generation length has gone down with half a year, signifying the unfortunate fact that dogs are bred earlier in life than before. Younger animals tend to make larger litters, which means we might not be able to fully credit the increased litter sizes to better genetic diversity either. This development is not ideal. Especially when we are dealing with a lot of new material, we should be careful and evaluate each generation before proceeding; it is possible to somewhat evaluate the character of a 1-year-old animal, but nearly nothing useful can be said about his health at that point. It is likely that the situation is actually even more adrift health-wise than it is in character, we just are not able to tell yet because enough time has not passed, or because we have gotten lucky. In our situation, contributions of single individuals should be kept limited to safeguard existing bloodlines – not because they are “better”, but because we need something to fall back on if a new bloodline introduces traits that are so harmful it should be removed completely. Instead of doing this, we have been breeding so carelessly that a couple of different popular sires representing new blood now each have a presence of over 20 % in all longhair pedigrees, even if the individuals themselves were only born 8-11 years ago. They each already have more 1-3 generation offspring than the number of puppies born in a full year, and their offspring have already showed a significantly higher prevalence of certain diseases than what is standard for the breed. It is like we are intentionally gambling with the health of our variety, as we randomly introduce more and more new blood, all the while breeding younger dogs – almost like trying to make sure the next generations are already out by the time faults are found! I refuse to believe this is intentional, and I think we can do better than this.

What would doing better look like?

It is incredible to think that 10 years ago the variety showed itself in such a dire situation that one was forced to consider if introducing something, anything new was better than doing nothing. The dangerously narrow situation then, together with longhairs with better working qualities becoming something that people began enjoying and asking for created the right conditions for change. Despite the limitations on the most obvious ways to improve genetic diversity; variety or even breed crosses done in conjunction with breed clubs and kennel organizations, at that point everybody was already searching for new blood from somewhere else. So it happened, that in addition to the ever-accelerating use of LH out of SH, there were people that did take matters into their own hands. Since 2015 many actions have been taken that have made waves and triggered breed and kennel clubs around Europe. As mentioned before, this is a repetition of what happened with the shorthair, and the only reason it did not happen earlier was the unpopularity of the breed. Unfortunately, these kinds of unconventional actions have been a large part of why inter-variety crosses are still behind lengthy application processes in most countries, and overall under such unnecessarily strong scrutiny. Many of the old-timers were there to see the “red-pinned” times of the shorthaired Dutch Shepherd, and they were rightfully afraid the same would happen in the longhair if working shorthairs were added into them through variety crosses. Little did they know that while they weren’t looking, what they had feared was happening anyway. In practice, every longhair born in a shorthair litter and then used for breeding with the longhairs is a variety cross. Even breed crosses can be made without any approval if you can find somebody to put papers on the brindle offspring. All outside of the organizations that so desired to be in control of these things, but did too little too late.

Please, let us slow down. Now is the time to be critical and to stop and to think. Nothing says we should stop using longhairs born into shorthair litters completely, we should just be much more critical about what we choose to bring in than before. There is absolutely no reason to use sub-par individuals in the name of genetic diversity. Instead of riding the craze that has been going on (it’s not like we needed to replace half of everything in 10 years), we should take inventory on what we have now and what is needed to improve the variety as a whole. For example, I personally believe that the possibility to directly cross with excellent shorthair individuals is one of the only ways to “save” the longhair now. If we were able to bring in something better fitting, some of the questionable options available might begin to look a little less tempting. We also have to stop chasing quick wins and drastic actions, and instead focus on the good that can be done in the long run. We need uniformity – the whole variety needs to rise up, not just one tiny portion of it. In a tiny ink drop of a population like ours, the individuals should never be so extremely different that random mating has a high likelihood to produce dogs suitable for no one. It also isn’t enough to get one or two good individuals in a litter, if the rest are problematic. As breeders we must remember that every single puppy we produce will be somebody’s beloved companion, and if the average owner has a bad experience, something is seriously wrong with our breeding practices.

A recap of all the actions I suggested, or imagined to have suggested in this article:

  • Equipping a much more critical eye when looking at shorthairs with long coats; is it really a good quality individual? Can it give what the longhair needs? Does it fit the dogs we already have? And above all, does its pedigree support all of this?
  • Abolishing private genetic diversity projects, getting out of the grey area, and instead focusing on working with official bodies to promote sanctioned inter-variety and cross-breeding projects.
  • Focusing more heavily on character traits that everybody can stand behind, and that make any type of dog better; stability, sociability, reliability and clear head even under pressure. This would make all kinds of longhairs more compatible with each other and reduce poor matches.
  • Focusing equally heavily on locking down the traits we want, making quality more consistent and improving predictability to enable better matches between puppies and owners. Litters should be evaluated based on their average individuals, not their extremes. However, uniformity and diversity are opposites, so we cannot outcross every generation and boast uniform features at the same time. A balance must be found, but the how is too much to go into in this article.
  • Dogs should not be bred before they are proper adults to help make sure we are not unintentionally spreading diseases that only develop later in life.
  • Individual contribution of animals should be kept as even as possible to prevent popular sires and dams. This does not just mean in first generation, but in second and third as well. My website HH Dashboard is dedicated to helping everyone monitor exactly these kinds of things.

For visual thinkers

Before ending the article I want to play another imaginary game. Early on, I used an analogy of colours to describe the impossibility of changing things in a homogeneous population (mixing red with red does not purple make). So let us continue along those same lines, and represent a random “pure” individual from our variety as 10 red balls. Each ball is a visualization of 10 % of the genetics in this individual, and to signify the lack of diversity in our population the balls are all of the same color. Next, consider that a gamete (egg or a sperm) always includes half of the genetics of an individual. In this case we have a female, and a gamete from her would be represented by 5 randomly selected red balls. Finally, when we combine her with a male from the same genetically narrow population, the 5 red gametes of each combine and make a whole 10 again. Here is the same process visually:

Click to reveal

🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴 (female)
🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴 (male)
🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴 + 🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴 = 🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴 (offspring)

Now that we have established our rules, we can look at what started taking place after longhair enthusiasts woke up to their desire to add working quality into the variety. Let’s imagine that working traits are represented by blue, and that we want there to be 5 of them to match how things are in “proper” working breeds. So we outcross to a population that has the desired quality, and overall much more genetic diversity than our small population. It could go something like this:

Click to reveal

🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴 (female)
🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🟤🟢🟡🟠🟣 (male with the working genetics we want + more diverse genes)
🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴 + 🔵🔵🟤🟢🟡 = 🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔵🔵🟤🟢🟡 (1st generation cross)

One cross does not give us enough working traits (blue balls), so we will cross again in the next generation. Remember that a gamete can be formed out of any 50 % of the individual’s genetics, so I am randomly picking half of the balls from each of the parents to represent them.

Click to reveal

🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔵🔵🟤🟢🟡 (1st generation cross female)
🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🟤🟢🟡🟠🟣 (a similar male as before)
🔴🔴🔵🔴🟢 + 🔵🔵🔵🟢🟠 = 🔴🔴🔵🔴🟢🔵🔵🔵🟢🟠 (2nd generation cross)

After the second cross we are still not there, so we will cross again in an attempt to reach the desired quality of our new “working longhair”. Again we take the resulting offspring from our last cross, and combine it with a similar male as before.

Click to reveal

🔴🔴🔵🔴🟢🔵🔵🔵🟢🟠 (2nd generation cross female)
🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🟤🟢🟡🟠🟣 (a similar male as before)
🟠🔵🔵🔵🔴 + 🟣🟡🟤🔵🔵 = 🟠🔵🔵🔵🔴🟣🟡🟤🔵🔵 (3rd generation cross)

And finally, we are at five blue! We saved the breed! Or… Did we just trade out 90 % of what made our whole variety, just to achieve one thing? I think I will leave the reader to think about this and how they feel about it on their own. But if you find this kind of experiment interesting, think about this: was this the only way to achieve five blue balls? What other ways could there be, that still increased genetic diversity as well? And why do you think the method presented here is so tempting for so many people?

Final words

Back in the days when I most loudly advocated for genetic diversity, somebody on social media accused me of disliking the breed. “If it’s all so bad, why don’t you go somewhere else?” This returns to me now, as I’ve just spend several days writing a piece with pretty strong criticism about the quality and breeding practices in the variety. I cannot even say it is everyone else that is at fault, since I myself have been a party to it all. Of course, the true reason for all this negative talk is not dislike, it is love and care. I’ve loved this variety for most of my life. I’ve loved them on every step of their history. I’ve loved them when they were good, and I’ve loved them when they were bad. I’ve loved them when they were not my ideal dog. I’ve loved them all the way from puppyhood to old age and beyond, again and again. I have dedicated my life to these dogs and finding out how to help them, and I really want us to succeed. I really want us to do what is truly best for the variety. What that is should be a matter of vote amongst ALL people who love these dogs.

But in my personal opinion? I think the longhair deserves to be its own type of dog, instead of being a watered down version of another similar breed.

Featured image: Azuricoyotes Shadow of Baar Dau © J. Yliollitervo