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Lonkkaindeksijakaumia | Hip breeding value distributions

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Azuricoyotes Hollandse Herders FI

1 day ago

WHO IS THE BEST BREEDER?Story time.When I was a 14–15 year-old teenager and first encountered Dutch Shepherds, I quickly embarked on a very important quest: I was going to determine the BEST BREEDER out there, and then acquire my first dog from them. The logic seemed flawless. Why wouldn't you want a puppy from the best breeder? More than 20 years later, I still see essentially the same question asked on social media all the time: "Can anyone recommend a good breeder?" Almost inevitably, somebody replies with "XYZ is THE BEST".But what does "the best" actually mean when it comes to dog breeders? And more importantly: how would we know which kennel that is?For one person, the best could be "the one that I instantly clicked with on a personal level" or "the one that has an amazing social media presence", or simply "the one that sold me my favorite dog". These are perfectly understandable reasons to like or choose a breeder, but they don't necessarily tell us much about the quality of the puppies they produce.Maybe we could use something more concrete instead: "the one that competes at the highest level in a breed-specific sport", "the one that comes with the most recommendations", or even "the one geographically closest to me". Great, now we have things we can actually quantify and compare. But objectively, even these don't answer the question we're actually interested in. The best breeder is simply, "the one that produces the best puppies".One could argue that "the best puppy" is just as vague as "the best breeder". And to some extent, it is. Just look at all the breeds that have diverged into show and working lines: different breeding goals can produce very different ideas of what makes one dog better than another. But whatever traits we decide are important, successful selective breeding still requires us to identify which animals are better than average for those traits, and over generations, raise the bar of what "average" looks like. To do either, we somehow HAVE to be able to tell where an individual stands in relation to the population.And that requires measurement — not necessarily a number in a spreadsheet, but some systematic way of observing, assessing and comparing a trait. A trait that cannot be measured, cannot be improved through selection.Back to the past: teenager me was a weirdo, and like adult me, never much cared for the social aspects of dog breeding. I never asked anybody who the best breeder was. Instead, I created a little notebook with a list of Finnish kennels. For every breeder, I collected information about their dogs in various categories — health, character test and working results, cosmetic faults etc. Anything I could find, really. Surely, after everything was tallied up, one would emerge victorious.But back then there were no public databases or similar resources, so my comparisons depended almost entirely on information provided by the breeders themselves. We all know this mainly means the highlights and successes. I quickly realized I would not be able to find the best breeder this way. My datasets were simply not comparable!These days my little notebooks have graduated to spreadsheets and databases, and the sources of data are much more numerous. Unfortunately, the fundamental problem never completely went away. We still don't have the same amount or quality of information from every breeder, or even every dog. Some dogs are extensively tested, described and documented; others are forever just a name and a pedigree number in a database. Some breeders make sure important data reaches their colleagues; others make sure it doesn't. More data does not automatically lead to better comparisons.Despite these challenges, I am still chasing that best breeder. I want to be the breeder who would have scored high in teenager-me's old notebook. To know whether I am succeeding, I obviously need to collect as much information as possible about the dogs I produce. But knowing my own dogs isn't enough. If 10% of my puppies develop a specific health problem, what does that tell me? Am I doing terribly? Exceptionally well? Without knowing how common the same problem is in the wider population, I have no idea what doing a good job looks like. That means evaluating my own breeding requires data on everybody else's dogs, too. We need some idea of what the population looks like before "better than average" can mean anything at all. I have known small breeders who became discouraged from breeding after a health issue appeared in their puppies. If only they knew how common those same issues actually were, in a world where every other breeder claims they have never heard of them…There is another problem I have learned about since those notebook days: it isn't enough to simply have more data. The data we do have can also become dangerous if we mistake the measurement for the trait itself. Take "good character". We can all agree that good character is preferable to bad character, but "good character" isn't a single trait we can select for. If we compress everything that makes up "good character" into one measure, we lose much of the information that would actually make selection effective. The same is true of a test result, score or title. It tells us something about a dog, but we need to understand exactly what it tells us, and what it doesn't. The more closely we can measure the actual traits we want to select for, the more useful that information becomes. And even a good measurement creates another problem when we stop treating it as a measurement and start treating it as the goal."When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This principle is known as Goodhart's Law. Goodhart was an economist, but I see the same principle in action everywhere in the dog world. Look at dog shows. Their original purpose was to give breeders feedback on how well their dogs fit the breed standard. However, once success in the show ring becomes a breeding goal in itself, selection begins to favor whatever wins shows instead of the moderate dog the breed standard was originally supposed to describe. The same can happen with dog sports: a working or sport result can give us valuable information about a dog's working qualities, but selecting specifically for the traits rewarded by a particular sport is not necessarily the same as selecting for the qualities essential to a balanced or breed-typical dog.This is why we should select for the qualities that make a good working or sport dog, rather than selecting for success in work or sport itself. Every examination, event and trial provides a new datapoint, but one datapoint alone means very little. For population-level comparisons, measurements are especially useful when they are well standardized and available to as many owners as possible. I believe important traits should always be measured more than once, and preferably from several different perspectives. When we repeatedly see the same picture, we can be much more confident that the picture is real.Earlier I mentioned how "the best puppy" can be difficult to define because different breeders have different goals, but not everything is equally subjective. People can reasonably disagree about how much drive or aggression an ideal Dutch Shepherd should have, but I think it is much harder to argue that we should deliberately aim for more fear, social insecurity, environmental sensitivity or disease. I think the most important traits in a dog are the ones that do not leave much argument for taste. If we want to keep moving those traits in the right direction, we need ways to tell whether we actually are. Figuring out better and more accurate ways to measure them is one of the things that makes this world of dogs so interesting — and so endlessly gripping! — to me.For me, good breeding is therefore not about trusting statistics over experience, or experience over statistics. It is about collecting useful pieces of evidence from as many angles as possible, understanding what each of them can actually tell me, and looking for the patterns to emerge.To close this post, let's return to teenager-me once more. If I couldn't figure out which breeder produced the best puppies, how did I eventually choose one? I chose the breeder who gave me the most data. The good and the bad. The one who listed every wonky bite and failed health result on their website, instead of showing me only the dogs that made them look good. So in the absence of better answers, "the best" became synonymous with "the most open". The one who shared my love for measuring.A trait that cannot be measured, cannot be improved.📐Photo:Siblings AC BLACKSWEET ZIP "Haades" & AC BLACKSWEET RUE "Rune" (2025 Léon x Mina) meeting up for the first time since they were puppies. 🐒🐒 ... See MoreSee Less

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Azuricoyotes Hollandse Herders FI

5 days ago

AC CLASH OF FANG AND FLAME "Midoriya" (2023 Ruuti x Mina)Passed his BH test 🫡Congratulations to owner, great work. <3 ... See MoreSee Less

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Azuricoyotes Hollandse Herders FI

1 week ago

Half sister and brother!AC BLACKSWEET NIM "Nimbus" (2025 Léon x Mina)AC A WOLF AMONG THE PINES "Link" (2023 Ruuti x Mina)💞 ... See MoreSee Less

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