What is the future of the golden retriever?
I often think about this subject, and let’s just say I don’t see the glass as half full. It seems emptier every time I look at it.
Fewer and fewer goldens have retrieving instinct and possess the nose and biddability of a good working retriever, and those that do come from somewhat inbred lines. The only solution to some of the inbreeding is to do outcrosses.
The problem with outcrosses is that we don’t have the absolute best dogs to outcross with. Show goldens don’t really have the body type that makes for an efficient retriever, and in the US lines, they have too much coat. In the UK and FCI lines, they are the wrong color. Trust me, dark color is functional conformation! The dark color is easier to see in a cut corn or grain field if shooting pheasants, but it is also good camouflage in the reeds if waterfowling. And even fewer of them have retrieving instinct.
Our solution is that we wish to breed a good thoroughbred or warmblood, but all we have for outcrosses are Belgian draft horses to increase genetic diversity.
Now, we can breed dogs with poor working characteristics into those lines and then breed back to working characteristics. However, that means that we must sacrifice the working ability of a generation or two just to increase genetic diversity.
I find this a very imperfect solution, because while you are increasing diversity, you are also increasing your chances of getting that particular conformation in your working stock.
It would be better if we had, as we call them in West Virginia, a “come to Jesus meeting” with the show people, and actually showed them what functional conformation looked like, even running dogs of different conformation in order for them to get a feel for what is functional and what is an encumbers efficient movement.
That’s the only solution I have to this problem. When the golden retriever was began to become noticed by retriever fanciers in the early twentieth century, it was in a terrible shape in terms of conformation. They were all short-legged and heavy-boned, and the normal flat and way-coated retrievers could run circles around them. But it wasn’t long before selective breeding reduced the bone and lengthened the legs of the goldens and made them more competitive with their black and liver brethren.
I certainly don’t see why this cannot be accomplished again through careful selective breeding. But we actually have to do it. Only then will the glass fill up again.
I don’t want our dogs to become like the Sussex spaniels, a rare breed and very much a novelty as a working dog. (They do exist, but it’s one breed of spaniel that suffered from the fad of breeding them for very short legs. The field spaniel also suffered from this, but today, they aren’t bred with short legs.)
Sweet Jeebus – that photo belongs on FU Penguin.
Okay, I’m just gonna throw this out there… don’t even know if I believe it myself…
There aren’t a whole lot of performance litters of the type you (and, interestingly, I) really think of as working goldens.
But how many people are there that know what these dogs are, admire them for what they are, and will use them as they’re meant? Not many. There are maybe 40,000-50,000 goldens registered annually with the AKC, and of those, maybe… I don’t know… 1 in 50 will ever see a bird? Just a guess. Let’s say 1000 dogs annually need to be bred to retrieve. That’s about 125 litters.
Is the working dog gene pool, if intelligently managed for health and COI as well as working traits, and with the occasional “outcross” to a nice agility, obedience, or (gasp) moderate show golden, too shallow to meet this need for many, many more years?
Just playing Devil’s advocate.
I’d be happier if I could use a nice field Lab or a flattie as an outcross.
But the problem is moderate show dogs are becoming hard to come by
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think I recall that years ago in England (25 years ago?) there was some outcrossing of pointers with dalmations (I think). The offspring were then bred for a few generations until they bred true and then granted registration as pointers in England. I don’t remember what problem existed that they wanted to solve. Forgive me if this is really wrong–I hope my memory serves me well. Anyway this may suggest a model for possible outcrosses.
It was to prevent bladder stones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalmatian_(dog)#Bladder_stones
And the Dals with pointer ancestry never got registered as Dalmatians.
As for genetic diversity in goldens, check to see if the following dog exists in your dog’s pedigree: Holway Barty. I’ve found that most field line goldens in this country have him in their pedigree (mine sure did.)
Thanks for refreshing my memory with the Dalmation info.
As for Holway Barty you are right. He is in my puppy’s pedigree. He was also in the pedigree of the outstanding field golden that I owned and hunted with until I retired him 12 years ago.
He lived almost 13 years, and I’ve noticed that a lot of field line dogs live 12-13 years. Every golden I’ve owned has him in there somewhere. My current dog is a cross between field and English show lines. She’s very light gold, and she’s a heck of a flushing dog. Retrieve? Well, that’s not her thing.
In field goldens, he’s the most significant import and probably the most import sire of the past half century.
And if you look at European field lines, the Holway line is very prominent.
But that can be a curse, because you wind up with lots of related dogs.
We line bred our first dog to her second cousin. The puppies were awesome.
However, if you keep that up generation after generation, you’ll see lots of bad things starting to pop up.
Juvenile cataracts and various cancers are really a problem in these lines. Hip dysplasia is less of a factor, but it’s still there. (I think it’s less of a factor because we don’t breed for so much bone. Flat-coats don’t have the hip dysplasia to the extent of goldens. They have it, but it’s not the big problem. They have a worse cancer problem, though. )