A much more comprehensive dataset was extracted from Worldwide Swedish Vallhunds – Västgötaspets Pedigree
Database once kept by the now-deceased Leone Darling. It is rather a shame due to the death of a predominant breed historian, the domain will one day be taken down once it expires since the information is much more complete with far fewer errors. Using the dataset from Ms. Darling provided a much clearer picture.

When Christopher Landauer revealed one must go back to the founders to get a more reliable calibration of a dog’s COI, a graph of why it is not enough to look at the COI(3) and COI(5) was produced. With Riley, we will take a look at the COI(29).

Distressed by the relatively high COI, more information on the founders and popular sires and brood bitches was needed. To understand why such a high COI was procured, we must first understand what a pedigree collapse is. However the entire tree is relatively compact and there are a few noticeable collapses at a glance. The good news is they are not frequent. The bad news is not all the known founders are included in his complete pedigree. This hints the possibility several lines died out.

Pedigree tree highlighting repeated ancestors generated with PedX.

When inquiring numerous breeders about this issue with Riley, it was learned he is very typical of the breed. In fact, he is a relatively accurate sample of the Swedish Vallhund population.

So what happened? The modern population of Swedish Vallhunds, in which there is approximately 500 registrations world-wide every year, once had a more diverse ancestral base. A great number of potentials were rejected due to poor understanding of recessives and lack of knowledge of concepts essential to population genetics and quantitative genetics such as allele frequency and polygenes when the breeding program first initiated even though the rejects had obvious influences or characteristics. Ontop of the inability to recognize suitors, many of the progeny were sold unregistered and only the ones who were seen as ideal for breeding were registered for many decades after the founding of the Swedish Vallhunds. In addition, there were a few kennels between 1960s and 1970s producing surpluses of puppies which coincided with the extinction of several dam-lines and a a couple of sire-lines in the 1970s and 1980s. The bleeding of the breed slowed down when the Swedish Kennelklubben mandated entire litters must be registered in the 1980s, and a rule was passed in the 1990s stating a sire cannot contribute more than 5% of the existing gene-pool. As the result, conductor was able to slow down the train to hell.

However using pedigree software are quite limiting and they don’t tell us a great deal of information. There are quite a few of them out there. One of the easiest software to utilize, often used in population genetics, ecology and conservation biology for visualization, although the original purpose of the software was for discovering new relations between proteins in biochemstry and genomic laboratories, is an open-source network analysis program such as: Cyptoscope, Gephi, Pajek, BioLayout Express^3D. There are plenty of software floating around on the Internet which regurge useful information.

In the next post, an illustration using a node-mapping software will be provided and explained. We will walk through as we add more information to the dataset and change how it is processed, different interpretations arise. We will also explore why in a competitive world where everyone is more concerned with their self-image, a pedigree record is rather limiting. A pedigree is a tool which only becomes more useful as more hard data is added.

Today, I set out to Grouse Mountain to take on the Baden-Powell Trail with Riley. It was a humbling experience because I learned the limitations of dog-ownership. Originally, I got a Swedish Vallhund because the idea of having a medium-sized dog which can fit underneath the seat of a bus or is allowed on walk-on ferries and water-taxis was rather appealing. However because the Vallhunds are a medium-sized dog afflicted with achondroplasia, they require a different kind of collapsible carrier from the ones used by companion owners: one with metal frames, strong canvas and a wide base to support the weight. It became noticeable trekking up the side of a mountain with a large framed canvas on one’s backpack took a toll throwing me off center with its drag factor and uneven weight distribution. The difference between anchoring the soft-but-framed crate to the pack and doing without is substantial on such steep terrain like a rock to a feather. So while it is feasible to have a medium-size dog which can be taken anywhere in public in a city where dogs are not free without the supplement of car ownership, there are compromises which are not always beneficial.

On the trail, it became glaringly obvious why long-legged dogs who are slow-runners with tremendous endurance was needed for hunting in British Columbia. The terrain is too rugged and too tenacious to be conquered by a normal dog or a sprinter. A dog like a trial-bred Border Collie or a Saluki will not fare well in such situation; nor would a small hunting spitz such a Finkie or a Norrbotten, or most terriers other than the Jagd, Irish or Airedales for that matter. There is only two real styles to hunt in a mountain region, either to run long distance for hours or to pressure the animal intensely to head for the trees as soon as possible. However, since owning a long-legged breed takes away the independent of being free of being bonded to loans, high maintainance and insurances necessary for owning a car, settling for a dog who is satisfied treeing as soon as possible is preferable.

The previous night, I only had two hours of sleep and ate lightly. What I did not anticipate was the mountains to be full of difficult bike trails not meant for hikers. Normally, when fatigued, I trust the dog to take the easiest path, however since Riley has learned to pick up scent and tree animals last fall, during bear season, he kept constantly going up and down the mountain bike trails. I did not realize what he was in pursuit until he suddenly ran off, ran up the mountain off the beaten path. In this scenario, recall is completely useless when a dog has a high prey drive. So, I waited for him to tree and followed.

I am still quite unsure what he has treed since getting him back was a priority over observing the tree-tops. Squirrels he will rush, but will not run great distances for such an insignificant creature. Most people have not heard of a bear on Grouse Mountain before, so it could be a marten, a bobcat, a cougar, a raccoon, a mink or a fisher; although bears are not unknown to North Vancouver. It is a rather unusual situation, since he does have an on- and off-switch, because I could always call him off a bear; and he knows if he has his backpack on, he is not expected to assist in a hunt. However the only way to call him off if he is already in pursuit is to catch up with him. He can spend hours barking at something in a tree without responding to a remote recall.

So by the time I recovered the dog, I was dead-beat tired. I had no interest in paying attention to the landmarks in my surrounding and I was lost. So, I checked my smartphone to gain a bearing with Google Maps. However the effort went to waste when he went off again, so I followed again. In the process, I dropped the BlackBerry without being aware of it. With such steep hills and ravines, a leashed dog is a liability. At this point, it was time to cut the trail short halfway through and head home and the quickest way was to navigate down the bike trails.

On the way back to home, I was not a pleasant company. The snacks readily available only spiked glucose and insulin levels, instead of releasing them slowly into the blood-stream. Riley did his best as a young dog to accommodate the intolerance for antics. He is a good sport for dealing with a cranky individual with short-tempers when sapped.

Perhaps someone will find my BlackBerry. Doubtful. However I will need to change the passwords to various accounts, then remind people responses on social-networks and via e-mails will be undergoing unintended delays until a new smartphone is ordered in. Needless to say, if we are walking up a damned mountain, I am leaving Riley’s crate behind and we are taking bloody car or taxi next time.

Brad Anderson sent an interesting footage of “When Bear-Training Goes Wrong”. Caution, it is not for the faint of heart. While there is no explicitly graphic details, people who consider dogs as a family member may find it disturbing.

There are a few interesting things to note here. There are a few Jadgterriers and Laikas. Notice when the bear nabbed the victim, the Russians did nothing except to attempt to persuade the bear to give up the carcass. The men could have done a lot more to save the dog, but a well-trained bear is hard to find; an inexperienced hunting dog are dime a dozen.

However that is not to say it does not happen in real life. The reason why Jadgterriers and Airedales are popular in bear-hunting is because sometimes when the bear stands to fight, most of the time they have no idea what to do with a dog with gameness. While other breeds have strong prey-drive, they do not have the same spirit per-say.

It is commonly said an experienced bear in these types of instinct test usually put on a play. These know the dogs are of no direct threat, so bears treat the ordeal as a game. if the bear is experienced enough, they are allowed to roam free; and when it is time for the trials, the dogs would chase it. Once the trial is over, the bear would come back to the humans on its own accord. It is quite a spectacle to watch.

However the bear in the video seems quite young and has not yet reached sexual maturity. There is still a while bit before the bear has nothing to fear from the dogs or his captors. And for the dog? It is certainly a well-deserved snack.

The Shikokus, a breed native to Japan, are in grave danger. A few Nihon Ken enthusiasts in the know revealed these dogs need hormones and artificial insemination to produce new litters: a sure sign of severe inbreeding depression is underway. To add cherry to the top, bitches have a volalite irregular heat cycle: some come into season every three months, some have split heats, some skip heats and others have silent heats. To add to that, females are self-defensive to the extreme toward males. If a natural breeding is to be performed, the female must be muzzled and multiple people are required to assist the male to rape the bitch in order to conceive. Such hyper-aggression toward closely related individuals of the opposite sex are signs of inbreeding avoidance. If owners of the Shikokus are not careful, they will find that their bitches will eventually full-stop quit breeding and heat cycles become nil. There is only so much a biological entity can take.

A few days ago, it was released there are about 233 dogs registered with NIPPO in Japan in the year 2011. This is a huge drop from 357 two years prior. Overseas, in Europe and United States, where Shikokus are becoming increasingly more popular fetching astounding price-tags stemming from an incredibly small exported gene-pool, it is probably certain we will see the nastiness of auto-immune disorders arise in those bloodlines much sooner. In the irony of it all, while it is true Shikokus have been steadily decline in popularity in Japan heading toward extinction, which is no surprise considering the hassles, the breed is at the point where Japanese owners are literally giving away pups to new homes. Without knowing the effective population size, which its true number can only be found from deep pedigree analyses, and sampling to measure the effective genome, where the zygosity can be overseen, the situation may be far more dire than one realizes.

When one sees comments like this, it is rather scary:

In a situation when the registration number is so low, and people refuses to outcross, every single dog is of breeding quality. Temperament can be restored through careful selective breeding. Recessives can be controlled with a good understanding of genetic drift and allele frequency and keeping disorders at bay may not be possible if the MHC diversity is already lost. The breed has already lost its reproductive fitness and it is a fast-track to hell if the spay-neuter mantra continue to be regurged. Gradually, polygenetic traits such as auto-immune disorders will be fixed, become a feature of the breed and normalized for the most hardcore gaurdians. It will be impossible to breed away from these disorders within such a narrow gene-pool. This is not the time to gripe about puppy-mills or backyard breeders. Gene losses cannot be recovered.

Now is time to stop the bleeding and to perform a triage. It is irresponsible to eliminate potential candidates by desexing them. Although not every dog should be bred, every dog should be treated as a genetic reserve. In an ideal world, every dog would have its genome sequenced and filed in a database to be matched with the best potential breeding partner. However we are still quite a bit away from this being a reality. In the absence of advanced genomic technology, with every castration and tube-tying, the breed takes a tremendous hit.

Some people are literally brain-washed by society. To be fair, they are not exactly brain-washed. The commenter means well, she believes in what she was told. How could they know better? The amount of information out there is paranormal and mind-bogging in which it is intimidating to absorb all the knowledge out there. To be able to synthesize and apply the knowledge is a daunting task in itself.

Over the last year, a new concept was learned: qualzucht [trans. torture-breeding]. It is a concept coined in Germany during the 1990s when animal husbandry started to rear its ugly head. In fact, in some countries, there are now laws for when breeders or an institute knowingly produce defective animals in the presence of better scientifically-documented alternatives.

When it is known that a genetically-bottlenecked breed is struggling, it is a form of qualzucht to not advocate keeping every dog intact. It is torture-breeding to continue a bloodline when the alternatives are effectively eliminated through ideologies. Considering it is unethical to desex a pet in Europe without medical reasons, it is clear North American  believers in the pedigreed world are being spoon-fed what it means to be a responsible breeder or a responsible owner without a clear understanding of population genetics.

Since breeders regard the Shikokus next to primitive and appear to be close to nature, they are believed to be natural and healthy. Due to shrinking population and hyper-selection for type, although people cannot see on the outside, internally, at a genetic molecular level, the dog is just as unnatural as the Bull Terrier, Neopoltian Mastiff, the English Bulldog and other breeds with phenotypical extremes. People interested in the Shikokus owe it to themselves to take agricultural science, quantitative genetics and conservation biology for the welfare of the breed.

There are five options for the Shikokus at this point: let go of the breed; outcross to restore reproductive fitness and open the studbooks to accept any unregistered individuals; treat every individual as sacred; start again from scratch; or bend over and prepare for even further symptoms of inbreeding depression. Time will tell if the dog has chosen a wise ally or not over the few decades or if the contract between the Shikokus and mankind will be revoked. The fallout is coming, and it is rather interesting to watch people patch the leak and to clean up the aftermath. Let this be a lesson for other dog breeds.

This means there is only four more weekends before Riley goes on a vacation in a smaller city than the Vancouver Metro in May. At the best of time, eight days should be available for hiking.

Vancouver is very well-known for its ease of accessibility and its green-space, in comparison to other large cities in Canada. In fact, there is an entire website for tourists and outdoors enthusiasts. According to the website, there are about 65 trails open to dogs. Awhile back, I kept an archive of all the hiking trails and dog parks with a colour-code for the limitations of these areas.

View Hiking Trails in a larger map

For anyone who plans on using the map, always check the rules before going and adhere to them upon arrivals. Rules are bound to change, and only by being responsible and following them, we can defeat highly restrictive impositions while making a case to the authorities these guidelines are counter-productive or impractical. While there are better places to sought out without worrying about cyclists, horses, pedestrians, however when pressured for time, everything goes smoother when hiking on already-blazed trails by other enthusiasts.

Out of these 65 trails in the Greater Vancouver Area, there are about 16 are off-leash within transit reach and 13 reachable via car without taking the ferry to Vancouver Island in the lower mainland. Hopefully, Riley will reach most of these before he boards the plane headed for the Albertan boreal on May 29th.

You would think the little fellow would grow up be:

But instead, he grew up to be this:

Beware of the troll.

While it is easy to find out who aided in the import of some of the dogs found in America, such as West Siberian Laika, Norwegian Grey Elkhound and others, there is one breed which exists outside the major registries, neither the American Kennel Club or the United Kennel Club: the Norwegian Black. These dogs found in the Appalachia are indistinguishable from the FCI-recognized Norwegian Black Elkhounds under the Norsk Kennel Klub, however very little historical records exist. The oral history which does exist is reduced to “my grandfather hunted with these and his father before him did as well”. So these dogs must had come from somewhere since the cultural memory is still intact.

The dogs in question are smaller than their Norwegian Grey cousins, and they are much slender in appearance. The coat is much more dense and shorter. Their intelligence also differs in that they are much more head-strong and wilder, yet they are also more easily trainable than the single-track minded Norwegian Greys; and one can still find these dogs today readily in the classifieds simply as “Norwegian” for the purpose of working squirrels.

There is always a possibility the original Norwegian Black Elkhounds were part of the founding imports of the collective Norwegian Elkhound, which in modern times is now divided into at least  five different breeds or more, arriving in America in the early 20^th century. The possibility should not be a surprise considering Jämthund and Norwegian Grey Elkhound were not formally separated as a breeds until 1946 much with the help of Aksel Lindström, Bjorn von Rosen and others. Also, Elkhounds at the turn of the century were much more variable in colours, and the splits in the breed such as the Swedish White  and others occurred much later when abnormal colours appeared in the litters due to the insistence of the purists all dogs must only be grey. However it would be more preferable to have something concrete and verifiable oppose to speculations and theories.

If anyone can provide a lead on these black dogs found in the backwoods of the Eastern Seaboard, do not hesitate to comment or drop an e-mail through info [at] prickeared [dot] com.

It is quite understandable why someone who recently immigrated to the country has a hard time grasping the American way. After all, the continent is quite vast and Europe and Australia are tiny compared to the seemingly endless land.  However there is a reason to all of this madness.

First off, do not focus on a subset of breeders. Consider the audience as a whole. A great number of pure-bred breeders are living out in the rural area; and with that there are events in life where pure-bred dogs cannot always fill in the niché, especially in the realm of working and performance dogs. Not everyone who is operating outside the registry are breeding “designer dogs”.

There is a reason why there are so many mongrels in North America. Firstly, it is actually quite common for ranchers and hunters to utilize cross-bred dogs. So it is unfair to ask everyone who manages cattle for a living, courses coyotes or pursues feral hogs to give up his or her hobby of showing and breeding pure-bred dogs because they have vested interests in other aspects of their lives. Whether it is mixing Catahoula Cur with Pitbull to improve their ability to physically hold a pig, or crossing in a Greyhound or Saluki with an American Staghound for managing coyotes as pests, or back-crossing a cattle dog derived from a Border Collie to Blue Heeler to work a new strain of cattle, many people have a practical reason for producing performance-bred mongrels. In addition, it is becoming quite common for dog-sports to be the arena of inventive nature with flyball opening way to winning Border-Jacks [Border Collie-Jack Russell Terrier mix] and Border-Staffies [Border Collie-Staffordshire Bull Terrier mix] leading while aceing the Frisbee championships; or Whippet crosses stealing the diving competitions where static breeds lacking innovations within the last 150-years are losing.

If the AKC or the CKC do not allow people to breed crosses outside the registry or even sell unregistered, then anyone who has serious investment in dog sports, agriculture, hunting et cetera will be pressed to forefeit either showing their purebred dogs or working alongside their crosses. The Kennel Clubs know they cannot afford to lose memberships, so the registries do not bother rocking the boat by forcing people into the “either or” position. It is both political and financial suicide for the Clubs to become anything more than being just a registry.

It is actually much wiser to enable people to have their little showing hobby on the side with FCI-recognized breeds, while allowing them to participate in other cruicial life matters which also involve dog-ownership. Otherwise, the registries will just collapse.

Just because someone is operating outside a registry, it does not means they will commit pedigree fraud or engage in other illicit activities; nor does it mean they are being unethical. If cross-breeding is regarded as unethical because of a few bad apples, then in the fairness of tits for tats, one might as well ban dog-breeding altogether since there are just as many horrific examples of pure-bred breeders committing great sins. Bad cases make for bad laws.