After a great disappointment waiting for a litter to arrive,there ended up being only 2 pups so my search continued and im interested in a litter but i have found several dogs on the mothers side that are also on the sires  and not distance relatives either,the sires mother grandparent and great grandparentsplus many more are all on the mums pedigree too,it seems a little too much for my liking but im not an expert,any opinions on this appreciated.Thanks

Grandparents and great grandparents shouldn't be a problem, that's line breeding not inbreeding, which is a good thing if a good breeder does it, to fix wanted characteristics. It's more important to make sure the breeder has done all the relevant health tests for your breed.

It can also depend on the breed. Some breeds actually have quite small populations. Perhaps they've never been very popular. If that's the case then it is difficult for breeders to find unrelated dogs, even if they want to. So talk to people who've been in your breed for a long time. Secretaries of the relevant breed clubs can be a good source of information.

Close breeding can be a good thing, it just depends on your breed and any issues to do with it.

Its not a rare breed and both parents have had all the health tests done ie eyes hips etc si im perfectly happy with that.

I'd first of all ASK the breeder why they chose to do that mating. A good breeder will have a good reason, eg. wanting to double up on GOOD qualities in these lines, be it looks or health or temperament.  I'm planning an uncle to niece mating and have lots of reasons for why I am doing it. Without those reasons (i.e. deliberately wanting to get certain characteristics brought out), I wouldn't do it.

As canine relationships can be very complex, why not go onto the Kennel Club site and use the Mate Select tool here, which is the 'Mating Inbreeding Coefficient Prediction' page: http://www.the-kennel-club.org.uk/services/public/mateselect/kinship/Default.aspx .

Choose the breed, then you can input the parents names and it will give the level of inbreeding for the mating(puppies).

To put the numbers into perspective, the mating of parent to offspring and full siblings with each other, which matings are no longer acceptable for registration by the kennel club, would give a COI of 25%.

Now the combination of full first cousins (which is allowed in humans) would give a COI of 6.25%.

Then look at the average COI in the breed.

This may well help you decide if the level of kinship is acceptable to you in this combination.

As with everything the relationship of the individuals is only part of the story.

If the related individuals were really good examples of the breed, and just as importantly were free of health issues and produced the same in their offspring, then there will be little or no issues.

Inbreeding cannot produce faults that are not latent in the individuals, what it does is make it more likely that good and bad genes shared by the mated individuals mated can express themselves for good or ill.

On the other hand mate two faulty individuals (breed/physical traits, health or temperament), even if unrelated, means you have a high chance of getting the same.

Using other tools you can check the parents health results, those of their parents, siblings and offspring, all things that should help you decide if the mating seems a sensible one.

I would ask the breeder for their reasoning behind the mating.

You will see quite a few 'close' pedigrees ...mainly belonging to two types of breeder...

Those who have made a study of the quality of key dogs...in terms of working ability, beauty and health... And are maximising those traits.
And there are those who do it  for convenience...ie the dogs are there, their daughters, sons and misc relatives are on tap...why spend out.

Your scenario seems like the former.

I used the kennel club mate select and it says 28% surely thats too high to kc reg the puppies?

There is no set CoI limit because of the incompleteness of a lot of the data. As long as the sire and dam aren't siblings or parent/offspring then the pups can be registered.

I've known an aunt/nephew litter be registered with a higher CoI than a banned mother/son litter would have been.

28 % is very high indeed so again I'd want to know WHY the mating was done. It's vital for the breeder to really know a lot about the dogs in the pedigree when it is so close -they can't be just names on paper.

28% is the accumulation of inbreeding (it will tell you on the  side panel how many generations have been taken into account and how many are complete.

25% COI is the equivalent of mating offspring to parent or litter-mates to each other, which is now banned, but that is assuming no relationships in the past.

For example first cousins can marry and produce children with a COI of 6.25%, but this generally only happens occasionally.  In some cultures it happens generation after generation, so the inbreeding levels increase, and in human population there is no selection criteria based on health in these cultures, so negative genes can accumulate without being weeded out as would be the case with selective animal breeding.

Even so it is not a good idea to inbreed too heavily as it limits genetic diversity in closed populations, and if a problem arises there is nowhere to go (as all the other available animals probably have too many of the same copies of genes, good and bad).

Personally I would not want a puppy that was that highly inbred, as a breeder it would seriously limit my choices in future generations.

On the other hand if there has been careful selection in the pedigree, especially the individuals inbred to and their relatives, the breed is a robustly healthy one with few if any breed related health issues, then if this puppy is a dead end, destined purely as a non breeding companion, then I might consider it, as at least you know what went into the recipe.  The recipe for me would be too rich.

If this level of inbreeding is common within the breed I would expect the breed as a whole to show signs of inbreeding depression where there are fertility problems, low litter size, lack of vitality etc.

It says it goes back 15 generations and 7 are complete??

Then that is still very high.  The reason I ask the number of generations as generally the further back you go the higher the COI will be as of course most breeds have relatively few founders so will be related further back.

For example in my breed because if is not a British breed, and we are small numerically in this country, we import dogs frequently, so the kennel club may only have say three or four generations for that dog in it's database (though often any dogs in the pedigree who have been in previous imports will give a fuller picture), so the COI may appear quite low (it's 4%).

There is a dog I am interested in in Norway who is a Finnish import with a COI under 2% based on 4 generations, (The Scandinavians in my breed try to avoid inbreeding) but by 8 generations it is close to 6-7% (still acceptable to me based on a 5 generation full pedigree).

The Kennel Clubs way of calculating COI's does not compare like to like unfortunately as it takes data from further back but incomplete, rather than a set number of generations enabling you for example to compare the same number of generations for any given dog, but then it at least tries not to make it seem artificially low by limiting the number of genera ions used.

A half brother sister mating (assuming no other relations) is 12.5%, ditto for a full Uncle to nice, Aunt to Nephew, and is generally as close as I would go, but then outcross in the next generation.

I much prefer half Uncle to nice, or cousins, with half that COI.

My youngest champion is such a mating, of half brother and sister, but the common parent is my own now 13 1/2 year old healthy bitch (who was from my 3rd generation of home breeding), who at the time her children were mated was a healthy 8 1/2 year old with three litters under her  belt, health tested offspring and grand offspring.  The dog and bitches sires were both imports from different countries.

When I mated her for her first litter I went abroad and the litter had a COI of 0.5%.  In future breeding I know I may well have set some less desirable points as well as those I wanted, so will have to be very selective in her mates, and future breeding not to use dogs that also have those failings.

>25% COI is the equivalent of mating offspring to parent or litter-mates to each other, which is now banned, but that is assuming no relationships in the past

That would be the result of the hypothetical parent/offspring mating I referred to, whereas the aunt/nephew mating, where the litter was registered, had a CoI of 29% (average CoI for the breed is 6%).

This is why I said that canine relationships are more complex, ditto those in cultures where cousin marriage is common.

What is the average COi for the breed ?  This can be found  on Mate Select. All breeders have been requested by the KC to keep COis below this average.

  I wonder about this idea that close breeding is fine as long as the health of the line is known...now I can see that a breeder would know the health status of the ones they have kept, and hopefully but not a given...have an idea of the health of their own puppies sold as pets BUT can they really honestly say they KNOW the health status and age of death of all those dogs and their siblings in the pedigree they have inbred on. How ?

I dont mean they just havnt been told any different so ASSUME there hasnt been any problems....thats a whole different ball game to actually KNOWING  after all that relies on every single pet owner telling the breeder if they have a health problem and then every breeder of all those dogs along the way being open and honest

Being a Health Officer for a breed club and taking many phone calls from pet owners I am absolutely sure of two things
Most pet owners dont think to inform the breeder of any problems....especially when the dogs is older, all they want is to have a solution to their dogs illness
Most breeders do not deliberately hide the problems in the line....they simply dont know they are there

So taking this into account ...close breeding is a risky and avoidable exercise

I know of breeders openly advocating close breeding when in fact I know they are completely unaware of health issues in relatives of these dogs.....not their fault but non the less the risks are there.

I know of breeders responsibly testing their dogs when a new DNA test becomes available and being absolutely gobsmacked when it shows half their kennel are carrying the gene for a disease they didnt have a clue was there....as far as they knew they had never had an affected dog.

Just take a look at how many individuals are represented in a 10 gen pedigree ....then think how many siblings of each dog......how can any breeder possibly know they have all been healthy and lived to a ripe old age ?  Its easy to ASSUME they are, if the ones you have personally are all fine ...but that isnt the same as knowing the status of the rest, which is the basis for close breeding is fine as long as you know the lines !

No but your average unregistered mongrel litters breeder knows even less about the ancestry of the dogs, or the relatives and offspring. 

For all they know they may be mating close relatives as such litters are usually from local dogs.

Generally the issues associated with inbreeding (inbreeding depression) start to show up with inbreeding levels above 20%.

As you have pointed out a breeder may well unknowingly have half their dogs carrying a deleterious gene yet never produced an affected dog.

The most deleterious and common ailments are found in many/most breeds, (Hip Dysplasia, PRA, Epilepsy) so mating unrelated, or random dogs with no knowledge of ancestry will not prevent them occurring.  Especially as these are the ones least likely to have parents health tested for what we can test for.

Keeping inbreeding levels low and avoiding breeing practices that narrow the gene pools further are to be avoided (repeat matings over use of sires) more transparency and co-operation between breeders in numerically small breeds so that people avoid doign too many similar combinations etc.  Lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Many breeds enjoy robust health as a whole living to respectable ages.

I don't know if this has been picked up or not but Mate Select can't work fully when there is an import ok the pedigree. If you have one the results won't be true, so worth looking through to see.

If no import on either side then it would be asking the breeder why they feel this mating is worth doing, what do they hope to achieve that by using no other dog will.
Again it's only a tool and we should be looking at the bigger picture, health tests, temperament, breed type.
Some of the best dogs produced have been closely mated, not inbreeding but line breeding.
There is that old saying twice in and once out, so line breed for 2 generations and then breed out for 1... I know many who adopt this process..

Has this sire produced some lovely dogs, can you look through the pedigrees of those to if they have been line bred. If the dog is a 'popular' sire then I would ask why that dog, why close another breed line down by using him.
I'm not a fan of the popular sire as I don't think it does any breed any good

What does the team think about K9data? I know it's only for Labs and GRs, but you can look at COIs and progeny as well as syblings etc. Again it's reliant on breeders/owners entering data and being truthful. A lot of information on there and interesting for a lay reader such as me searching for the right dog this time (if that's at all possible)

So true suejaw -Mate Select does NOT give a true picture at all. In my numerically small breed, where there have been a lot of imports in the last few years, it has given a totally false result. It says that for the breed the COI is 1 %! Most dogs I know of range from 10 % to 20 %, other than those sired by the recent imports which is in the last 3 years or so. And we can't all use only imports all the time, but when we don't, we suddenly look really bad!

Mate select does work for imports, but the number of generations will not be complete for more than four or so generations, which is the number most people work to anyway.

In my breed we have imports probably every other generation due to low numbers, so I do think we need to keep our COI's based on KC records quite low as they are bound to be higher if they went back further.

That's strange as Jeff Sampson said a a seminar it won't work at this time for any pedigree with an import on it, so has it been updated and changed since then? I can't see that the KC are quite that forward thinking?!

When you do your COI check on a dog or mating look on the right hand side, and it will say something like what it does for my overseas sired Safi:

About this calculation
The pedigree data used to calculate this result extended back as far as 17 generations with the first 4 generations being fully complete.

Or the same for my youngster Peni who is import sired, by a son of the others sire (so they will have more generations on his sires than his Dam's side)

My oldest Jozi who has imports further back, (2nd and third generations) and is half uncle to niece mating as was her dam has a COI of 7%:

About this calculation
The pedigree data used to calculate this result extended back as far as 14 generations with the first 5 generations being fully complete.

I have checked and not one of mine that have more than 5 complete generations in the KC database, though of course I can take most pedigrees back much further using Scandinavian and US data.

You shouldn't be looking at a 15 gen COI. 6 generations is more than enough. 15 generations is nearly 33000 possible ancestors. You would need an extraordinary number of dogs in a breed to get a low COI when looking at a 15 gen pedigree.

I was pointing out though that in my breed due to the number of regular imports and now overseas matings we rarely have more than 5 full generations the calculation is based on so in our breed being numerically very small (sometimes less than 50 registrations in a year) we are best to err on a lowish COI, as it is likely it will be higher than it seems.

I have owned them for 21 years and spanned 7 generations and none have more than five full generations at the Kennel club. 

Of the 9 I have owned and bred 6 have been 0 - 1%, (with only 4 full geenrations in KC database)the rest have been 7-8% except the half brother to sister mating (with the grandfathers imports from different continents) with a 14% COI.

Most Geneticists would advocate using 10 generations....this is where the COi dosnt really change much no matter how much further back you go

From 6 gens to 10 gens there can be a sharp rise.....from 10 gens to 15 or 20 the change in COi will be negligable.

> From 6 gens to 10 gens there can be a sharp rise

Indeed, I was working out the COi for some current litters and the difference in 5 and 10 generations is huge in all but the last litter which has a high COI over 5 generations and it doesn't change much to 10.

Litter 1......2.4 % over 5 gen, 19 over 10 gen
Litter 2......2.8/13.4
Litter 3......8.3/20.2
Litter 4......9.5/20.4
Litter 5......21.3/26.9

Interestingly my 1st borzoi had a COI of 32%, the highest of any dog I've owned since but he was also my best dog. Clever linebreeding ensured he carried the best traits of his ancestors and he was a very successful show dog. He died age 7 of cancer, same as most of my other borzois even the ones with far lower COIs.

But the dogs that appear half a dozen times in the first six generations, contribute a lot more than the dog, for example, that appear 50 times in gen 7,8,9 and 10.

I Just dont really understand why anyone would only use 5 and not 10....unless of course they would like the COi to look lower

Plus has anyone wondered just why the KC has asked breeders to keep the COi of their litters less than the average for the breed.......it certainly isnt a popularity exercise is it ?

Just maybe they have seen the writing on the wall for many breeds unless breeders take some responsibility for the overall genetic health of their breeds as well as their next show prospect

Just maybe if Borzois hadnt been line-bred so heavily they may not all be dying so young .......sorry but I would never describe my best dog as being one that died at 7 no matter how beautiful on the outside

> I Just dont really understand why anyone would only use 5 and not 10

because as I have demonstrated sometimes that is all the full pedigree info available. 

Without a database trying to do a COI beyond 5 genrations is an awful lot of work.

>Plus has anyone wondered just why the KC has asked breeders to keep the COi of their litters less than the average for the breed.......it certainly isnt a popularity exercise is it ?

I don't know where on the Mate Select pages of the KC site you see advice about the desired COI or that they should keep below the breed average.

The page says for individuals and breed and proposed matings:
.
What does this value mean?
*Inbreeding is defined as the mating of related individuals, whether they are closely related or more distantly related. The inbreeding coefficient of an individual is the probability that two copies of the same gene have been inherited from a common founder, that is an ancestor shared by both parents. The lower the inbreeding coefficient, the lower the probability (risk) that this will happen.
An inbreeding coefficient of 12.5% means that there is a 1 in 8 chance that a dog will inherit the same version of gene from the same dog that appears in both the sire's and dam's pedigree. The puppies born to a mother/son, father/daughter or brother/sister mating (which the Kennel Club will no longer accept for registration), would be at least 25%. The inbreeding coefficient of puppies born from a grandfather/granddaughter mating would be at least 12.5%.

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Oh, the COI of Borzois is only 4% the same as for my own breed who live on average to 13 1/2 years, so longevity is a bit more complex than COI.

I decided not to go with that litter,something just wasnt right so i decided to follow my gut instinct.however i have another question,another litter i am keen on are related too( this one is complicated!!) it seems the sires dad is the son of the dams mothers sister,is this ok?

Sounds fine, but check it through the mate select tool to see the level of inbreeding. 

I can't really visualise it, but is sounds like the grandfather on sires side is the dams first cousin, so the sire is her second cousin. 

Certainly a a lesser relationship between the parents than first cousins who can marry.

Assuming this is the only common relationship, it doesn't sound too close.

> Oh, the COI of Borzois is only 4% the same as for my own breed who live on average to 13 1/2 years, so longevity is a bit more complex than COI.

I suspect the difference in life expectancy is more to do with size here, a giant breed versus a medium breed.

However I think you're right in saying that COI and longevity can not be directly linked. I've compared the COI and age of death of the 15 borzois I've owned. There doesn't seem to be any link with some with low COI dying before those with much higher COI.

Off topic I know but I was reading an article the other day about dogs and it made quite a point, its only dogs that seen to have the phenomenon where the smaller animal live longer than the larger. In other mammalian species such as elephants they live until ripe old ages where say a dear or mice live comparably shorter lives.

I wonder what the COI would be in a tiger or panda.

The CoI of the cheetah must be massive, because they're so close genetically that the entire world population could descended from a mother and two cubs at the end of the last Ice Age. Even the pet Syrian hamster is reputed to be descended from a single brother/sister mating in 1930.

but those are species which have developed to that size - you'd have to look at sizes within say elephant populations and say that one variance was bigger/smaller and lived shorter/longer, you can't really compare to another species... interestingly it often goes on heartrate... the elephant has a slow heart rate and the mouse a very fast one so they may be seen as having similar numbers of heart beats....

with dogs who 'evolved' to a certain size, larger is perhaps not going to live as long as that optimum and very small the same...

It's definitely not only dogs where the smaller breeds live longer than the large ones -rabbits are the same, The British or Continental Giants tend to live just 4-5 years at most, the smallest breeds like Netherland Dwarfs and Polish can live well over 10. Surely horses are the same as well, the small ones often living into their 30s.

Then rather than size is it only different if man has had a hand in the breeding I.e. domesticated horses and rabbits.

I really dont think anyone is "getting" the whole COi thing.  Its not about an individual litter its about the health of the breed as a whole.

Cheetahs are a doomed species   as a whole they are so genetically similar one disease could wipe out the whole species....they havnt the diverse genes needed to fight a variation in disease challenge.

Simply looking at immune system genes, they are inherited as a group....they need to be as diverse as possible, look at them as an army needed to fight every single bacteria, virus, cancer, as well as keep the ability to recognise the bodies "self"  and leave these proteins alone.  When the whole breed becomes homozygous for these groups of genes , the breed has in effect lost half its army, it becomes more prone to auto-immune diseases, cancers , etc. Average life expectancy shortens, litter sizes and fertility decreases over time and the whole breed becomes less fit.

Thats where breeders need to focus not just on their next Champion but also on the whole breed ...does their chosen mating help or hinder, could they choose a similar dog in phenotype that will help the breed as a whole.

The KC is in the process of producing breed plans for each breed that will take into account their gene pool, health issues , population size etc as all breeds are different in this respect and hopefully advising the best way forward

> Then rather than size is it only different if man has had a hand in the breeding I.e. domesticated horses and rabbits.

Yes, and no.
Horses, rabbits and dogs are unique among domesticated species, as they are the only ones to have mutations for gigantism and dwarfism, leading to over-large size and over-small size. Chickens may also fall into this category as well, as you have a range from the pigeon-sized Serama Bantam, to the enormous Jersey Giant.

You can selectively breed for a bigger size (Syrian hamsters, from show lines, are far larger than their original wild counterpart) but only where size mutations have occurred, do you get true giants, miniatures, dwarfs and all else in-between.