Article: What is a Bloodline?

By Nicole Rhodes

11/8/15

Sometimes there can be some confusion about the meaning of various words, especially for new people who aren't familiar with a subject, who may hear a word used but not really understand it's correct use. Or they may have seen the word used incorrectly and then carry on using that word incorrectly themselves! The title of this article is "What is a Bloodline?" but I will cover a few related terms as well.

When talking about bloodlines a person may be referring to dogs that trace to a particular sire or dam or a person may be talking about a breeder's line of dogs. A pup or dog being of a particular breeder's bloodline or line means that a breeder, or several breeders working together, selected the breeding pairs for particular traits over multiple generations. When multiple generations are involved, if the breeder has been selecting for specific traits, we often find that the results are more predictable in the subsequent generations. A predictable "type" of dog is set and is often recognizable to others by the dog's appearance or working method.

Buying two dogs from other people and breeding them does not net you a bloodline. The resulting pups areyour breeding but not your bloodline. Some dogs may be comprised of several bloodlines but would not be considered to be of a particular bloodline themselves if they were not part of the selection criteria of the breeder of that line. One cross made differently than the breeder of a line would have made can entirely change the type of dog produced. We would also not look at a dog's pedigree and say he is from someone's bloodline whose name appears several generations back and we most certainly wouldn't if that person's name is on the last line on the papers! Doing so is foolish and uninformed at best or an outright lie to advertise one's dogs at worst.

Lets look at a pedigree and discuss what we see.

READING A PEDIGREE:

Here we have the registration papers of a dog that I own named Bart. American Border Collie Association papers give us quite a bit of information until we get past the grandparents and then only the owner of a dog at the time this certificate was made is shown, rather than their breeder. The information we can glean from this paper is also limited by who we know. For instance, Deborah Meier and Wayne Bamber are two people who work together to select and breed dogs. If I wasn't familiar with them I might think there were two different breeders rather than the same kennel.

This paper tells us that Wayne and Deb owned Jake and Vicki, those two were bred together to produce Ricky. So we would say that Ricky is of Wayne and Deb's breeding. We would not say he is their line, as while they selected Ricky's parents, neither of the crosses that produced Jake and Vicki were of their selection. Then Wayne and Deb crossed Ricky and Tory to produce Bart. Bart is of their breeding but at this point we might also say he is the first generation of their bloodline. There has been several generations of selection for what a particular breeder is looking for to produce him. It may be generations more to set a truly consistent type.

To get an accurate understanding of the dogs behind Bart and of what bloodlines or selection criteria may have been used we need a different source of information. To look farther back I often refer to The International Border Collie Association's online database. The information in it isn't always one hundred percent accurate as it is hand entered by a person using many different sources of information but it can be useful none the less. This database tells us not only the owner but the breeder of each dog (when the information is available) and sometimes his birth date and color.

If we look up Bart's sire, Ricky (click here to view), we very quickly can determine that his sire Jake would be considered to be from Pete Carmichael's bloodline. We can see that he was involved in at least four generations and maybe more if we look back further. Looking at Ricky's dam Vicky's side of the pedigree we see no clear cut bloodline close up. We may say her grandmother Meg appears to be Nyle Sealine's bloodline, and that the Kuykendalls were involved in the grandsire's side (I don't know the different Kuykendalls well enough to say they were working together toward a particular selection as there is more than one Kuykendall on the page) and there is some line breeding that has been done on both sides of her pedigree to various dogs but Vicky herself is not the product of a particular breeder's bloodline.

If we look up Bart's dam, Tory (click here to view), we can see that her sire Pete is Tom Forrester's bloodline. Tory herself, and her dam's side, is a little more complicated. We see the name McCall come up in several different generations but looking at this we might not necessarily call this their bloodline. Tory herself was bred by the McCalls but if we look at her mother Jessie we see that her breeder was someone else. Jessie's sire however was owned by the McCalls. Jessie is possibly a stud fee puppy (a puppy given to the owner of the stud dog in lieu of money) and not of any kind of specific selection of the McCalls. Jessie's sire Katch is possibly also a stud fee puppy as we see his sire was owned by the McCalls but not his dam. It is possible that the McCalls worked with these other breeders to select for these dogs but with the information we have we would conclude that Tory is their breeding but not their line.

ESTABLISHING A LINE:

There are people who have raised many generations of dogs but have never created a recognizable line: they were just breeding dogs, not selecting type! It takes careful consideration and honesty with oneself to recognize the various traits in a dog and bitch and to be able to consistently select for those things out of the resulting puppies. It takes many generations, a lot of pups, some successes, a whole lot of failures, and likely some inbreeding to create a recognizable type. It's made more difficult that when selecting for working traits one must wait until a pup is old enough to see what he is than if one were selecting for physical traits. Few people have the time and resources to dedicate. What winds up happening is that most breeders do not have the goal of producing a true line of dogs. They are just happy to raise some usable dogs.

Some things to think about if you hope to create a line of dogs:

Have a clear picture of what you want to produce. If you can't recognize what you want, you'll never find it.
Examine the individual traits of the dog. Learn to recognize all the bits and pieces that comprise the whole package. Sometimes the same behaviors don't all have the same root cause in every dog! For some help on learning to break things down into the parts of the sum, I recommend this book by Tully Williams called "Working Sheepdogs - A Practical Guide to Breeding, Training, and Handling". Yes, this even applies to those wanting to breed cowdogs, when discussing a dog's working method traits are traits whether he's working sheep or cattle.
Be consistent! Crossing two dogs that "work good" will not net you consistency if those two dogs "work good" with entirely different methods. Crossing similar working methods are more likely to result in the same in the pups. Be careful not to double up on traits you don't want.
Keeping one pup and selling the rest at weaning time will rarely give you a clear picture of the whole of what was produced in a cross. Different environments and abilities of the handler can net very different results. Also beware taking the word of puppy buyers as gospel, I have found different people see and describe things very differently. A dog one person describes as "the best dog ever!" may be described by another person as "the most worthless piece of crap I've ever seen."
Don't give up but don't be afraid to give up either. Contradictory, I know. Sometimes we need to keep trying, make a different cross, try a cross again, go on with a generation even if it didn't quite turn out the way we wanted and hope the next will be closer to our ideal. There comes a point though when we need to recognize something isn't working and change course, back track, or even start over.
Be honest with yourself. Sometimes our favorite dogs aren't always the best examples of what should be bred. If you think a dog can do something, go prove it, don't just make the assumption with no evidence. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and all that. If you're going to cross mediocre dogs don't represent the pups as something they're not. Better yet, keep them all and see if any of them actually turn out how you expect.

What is a Bloodline? & Establishing One