The kennel club say they will no longer register very close relation breeding/ inbreeding, looking at the KC website thats something like no higher than a COI of 25%. Well...

In my breed there is a kennel who breed quite regularly but iv never seen them use an outside line.. Ever... so out of curiosity I COI their dogs. The average for all their stock was between 30-45% COI. The kennel club are still regularly registering their litters and with their most recent litter (this year) having a COI of 39.6%, being sold through champdogs.

I wonder at what point does the inbreeding COI become so high that it becomes comparable to a endangered species such as the giant panda?  

The kennel club say they will no longer register very close relation breeding/ inbreeding, looking at the KC website thats something like no higher than a COI of 25%. Well...

The kc won't register pups from a mother/son, farther/daughter or brother/sister. They don't ban them based on the litters coi just the relation of the parents. so it's possible to breed a litter with a higher coi than one of those breeding would produce with out using those pairings.

I tend to like to keep below the COI to around the cousin percentage so not much over 6.25%, but so have a half brother sister combination at 13%where the other parents were imported from different continents.

But generally I try and keep below 10%.

>The kc won't register pups from a mother/son, farther/daughter or brother/sister.

the KC only stopped registering these litters due to pressure from the PDE programme not for any valid genetic reason. And PDE objected to it because they likened it to human incest. Used sensibly these pairings can help fix specific traits and have been done in all domestic animals over the centuries. I have no doubt they still are done in other species. 

Indeed the only reason for this obsession with, let's face it, nothing but numbers is due to PDE and nothing else. You can have a fit and healthy dog with a high COI and a sickly one with a COI of 0. Yet these days you are told to go low, low, low. It isn't as easy as that! Just outcrossing doesn't solve all problems. I personally would not be comfortable with a COI of 30 or above but I also do not like how the KC now state my breed should be around only 1 %. My recent last litter was 14 %, and my best ever dog was 19.5 %.  The pup I kept from my last litter will eventually go to a new import and so I will have a total outcross, but I see no problems at all with a careful mating of around 15 % when you KNOW all the dogs in the pedigree, know how long they lived, their health, their looks and temperament etc. The one thing I worried about with this litter was not being able to sell them as if the buyers listened to the KC, they should not touch the pups with a bargepole, but in fact, they all sold extremely easily BECAUSE of the mating done, every buyer wanted the pup for the breeding, knowing the lines. I am surprised anyone can manage to sell pups of 40 % and even above, but I suppose it must be similar -people know the lines, known them to be good etc.

I have found a KC registered bitch from a mother son mating born in 2010 that has a COI as calculated by the KC of 30.3 %, it's not a "rare" breed & quite a decent population in the UK & bigger one worldwide. However this breeder has always done very close breedings & in a breed where there is Hip & Elbow dysplasia & HUU only the mother has been hip/elbow scored, both parents eye tested & no HUU DNA test done :-( The average COI for the breed is under 6% !!

There is an awful lot of misunderstanding regarding COI, which is not in fact helped by the Kennel Club's guidelines. The overall percentage of inbreeding is pretty meaningless without looking at the individual ancestors' contributions to percentage. If a pedigree doubles up on several animals on sire & dam's side of pedigree, the individual inbreedings to each animal are totalled to give the overall COI.

The following sentence is copied from the KC website...

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

This is only true if there is only one animal that appears on both sides of the pedigree. With many pedigrees in my own breed, the overall COI can be somewhere between 10% & 20%, but the inbreeding to any one particular dog or bitch may only be 1% or 3%, as there will be several others who appear more than once.

I agree that to some extent a slightly higher COI can be beneficial for a experienced well versed breeder as your right there is more to breeding than just the COI, as one has to take in to account the overall health hips, elbows, eyes, heart etc but when you get to 30/40% or even more it just can't be right no matter how good the pedigree may look on paper.

Edited to say... None of the dogs are health tested, nor are they shown or worked.

The worst dog we ever had had a COI of something stupid like 39% 
He had many many horrible issues.
We also had half brothers and the inbred one had terrible skin problems , urine infections , birth defects.  Lived to seven and the  brother with the lower coi lived to 14 .  he wasn't perfectly healthy having an inherited condition, but I think some get confused about COI , they can still inherit problems like HD when outcrossed , its the general overall health that suffers with a high coi , they just don't do as well, temperament is not as sound etc

COI is a tool to help inform breeding it is not the holly grail :) I have owned closely bred dogs and done close breedings - my dog from half sibling breeding was 18.6 %, my girl from grandfather granddaughter is  16.5%, I  and my current pup is 0% as I took his mum out to Germany.  All my dogs have been very healthy and lived active lives as working gundogs.

COI is a consideration but only alongside considerations for health, type, temperament, and ability. The art of breeding is to have a clear direction in what you aim to produce and make breeding choices that will enable you to travel the chosen road and maintain / improve on type and quality without compromise on health and genetic diversity.

its the general overall health that suffers with a high coi , they just don't do as well, temperament is not as sound etc

That's totally incorrect. Inbreeding cannot create what does not already exist, it just strengthens what there is -good OR bad. It cannot cause poor temperament for instance.

I have no doubt they still are done in other species.

After the KC's decision following PDE, the GCCF decided it was better to jump before they were pushed too, so to speak, so they made changes to the registration rules for cats. You still CAN register offspring from mother to son, father to daughter and between full siblings, but ONLY as non active. That means you can do the mating, show the offspring -but cannot breed from them. Which to me seems nuts -as if anyone had done such a mating (I would not myself) they are then prevented from outcrossing in the next generation! So why allow it at all? They have also stated that you should not have a higher COI than 25 % but I believe that is a recommendation rather than a rule.

Of course in smaller animals it is common to do close inbreeding for generations, without any problems. Such as mating brother to sister, then mating the offspring together, then mating THEIR offspring together in turn etc. Mice and hamsters for instance. I've done it myself in the past. The one problem you are likely to see is reduction in litter size.

Actually it is the population as a whole which suffers when COIs become too high...not the individuals necessarily.....hence the many anecdotal records of healthy high COI dogs.
But ...as breeders.... we know that the breed population as a whole is affected ..and looking for an unrelated mate can prove very difficult and can involve expensive imports.

We never know, if considering a high COI, if we are concentrating recessive problems
and if lines are repeatedly crossed and recrossed within a kennel,  this does not necessarily prove anything about the safetly of High COIs...rather a demonstration that the breeder has purged the most deleterious genes....either by accident or design.