-Diversity-
What does it mean & why
does it matter?
First I want to begin that this is my very first attempt at a blog: I am not a professional writer by any means so please bare with me through my errors and jumbled paragraphs.
.
If you’ve gone over my website or followed me on facebook: you may have seen “Diversity” mentioned: this is a (likely unorganized) breakdown of what diversity means, and what my goal with diversity entails.
In 2016 I started researching UCDavis’ VGL Diversity Testing. I had pressure from some of my peers to look into it: to be 100% honest, I originally blew the testing off. My initial reaction was “I’m already doing so much testing, what difference is THIS test going to make.” I’m sure I wasn’t the only breeder who felt this way; but I’m glad one day it clicked to me how important this “one extra test” was.
The VGL diversity test is not like your average health test. It is not a pass/fail test; the best way to describe it is a tool to make wiser pairings when selecting a mate for your dog or bitch. The test comes back as a panel with all kinds of helpful information; which honestly most pet owners and even many breeders struggle to comprehend what the results mean. There is a database, known as Betterbred.com that helps explain the different areas of this test, and they also help calculate numbers for us.
One aspect of the Diversity test is the “internal relation” otherwise abbreviated as “IR”. If you are at all familiar with COI (Coefficient of inbreeding) IR replaces COI. We have discovered through testing that COI is not accurate: and there is actually a genetic range of inbreeding even within a litter. Some people have a hard time grasping this: but think of it being no different than one puppy in a litter being born brown and another born black. Genes are inherited differently in every puppy; some take more after one parent than the other. Inbreeding ranges can be drastic, however most of the time puppies are within a similar range.
For an example, I had four siblings tested from my very first litter out of Athena.
Their IR scores are the following:
-0.00 | 0.00 | -0.15 | 0.03
(Nike, Cheza, Ember & Dublin.)
*Note that three of the other siblings from this litter have not been tested.
As you can see, for the most part the puppies had similar scores, but we found one in the litter that was drastically less inbred than her siblings. When it comes to the IR number, the preference is to have a score of 0.00 or below. The more negative the number, the less inbred the dog is. The higher the number, the more inbred a dog is.
The average IR for our breed as a whole is 0.03. Studies have shown that INBRED poodles are more likely to develop SA (sebaceous adenitis; an autoimmune disease that affects the hair and skin.) than OUTBRED poodles.
One of the other important aspects of the diversity testing is finding the “Outlier Index” otherwise abbreviated as “OI”. The OI number determines if a dog is diverse, or genetically different from the mass population for their breed. According to the studies done by UCDavis; we believe that diverse dogs are healthier and less likely to suffer from autoimmune diseases. Two of the main diseases that they are focusing on are SA and AD (Sebaceous Adenitis and Addisons Disease) and there is current research going on to see if they can find a genetic connection to Bloat.
The breed average OI number in standard poodles is .24
To be considered an outlier, the dog needs to have an OI score of .30 or above.
At Crystal Creek, we are blessed to have a few dogs who fall into this category; but we also have dogs that fall below our breed average. Our goal is to slowly reach the .30 range. It sounds like an easy task: but it’s MUCH harder than it sounds. Not every stud dog owner is willing to VGL test their dog: and many wonderful stud dogs are simply not diverse. The other complication is not every diverse dog you do manage to find, will be compatible with your female. When breeding for diversity you must also try to balance proper structure, not compromise temperament and keep the right amount of drive in your line. It is incredibly difficult to find a dog that is a perfect match.
Sometimes we will have litters where every puppy is diverse; other times we don’t have diverse litters. There are a lot of standard poodles who’s OI number is in the teens; our goal is to keep our litter average above .25 and to slowly work towards the .30 range while not compromising the other goals in our personal breeding program.
Our active dog’s OI ranges are the following:
.29 | .23 | .21 | .23 | .27 | .22 | .15 | .40 | .44
(Ember, Nike, Remmy, Valo, Keisha, Cinder, Ezra, Novena, Kylo)
How Can we Tell How Related Two Dogs are?
Thanks to the software of Betterbred, if both dogs have had their VGL testing completed and submitted to the database, we can compare the genetics of the dogs. Betterbred rates their genetic relatedness in Categories of 10. 10 Being the most unrelated, category 1 being the most related. (A category 1 breeding would be like breeding Mother to Son, or breeding full siblings together)
We try to always shoot for a category 10 breeding to make sure we avoid inbreeding and hopefully lower the risk for producing SA. We will not do a breeding where the parents are past a category 6 pairing as we believe the risk does not outweigh the benefit. Therefore you will not see line breeding (inbreeding) preformed by us.
Is Diversity “bullet proof”? Having a dog that is genetically diverse will not GUARANTEE that the dog will be free of disease, or prevent them from producing offspring with health issues: but it does reduce the risk. We always have to remember, at the end of the day no one can control mother nature. As breeders we try our absolute best to avoid producing any health issue, but sometimes tragedy strikes. As breeders, we don’t have the answers to everything. Cancer can crop up, autominnue diseases arise. Sometimes the best thing we can do is pull the dog who becomes affected with a health issue; sometimes we can attempt to breed the health issue out of the line: and sometimes we have no choice but to start from scratch and completely end a line.
Although we know there isn’t a way to completely eliminate all health issues, our hope is that by slowly adding more diversity to our lines (and to the poodle population as a whole) we can work towards a future where health issues are far and few between.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
For additional information on the USDavis VGL Test I recommend visiting these two websites.
www.betterbred.com
https://www.vgl.ucdavis.edu/services/dog/GeneticDiversityInStandardPoodles.php
Bonnie M. Winings
Crystal Creek Standard Poodles
Published 11.14.2018
"Colours Are The Smiles of Nature."
“Colours are the smiles of nature.” –James Hunt
Lately we have been asked by families if we are going to move to breeding only solid-colored poodles and I wanted to cover this topic in a blog. Many of my friends and followers know Crystal Creek as a respected name for producing quality parti-colored poodles however if you take a close look around, most of our dogs are now solid in color and there is a good reason for this.
Multiple ethical parti-colored breeders I looked up to have decided to end their parti-colored program and now only breed solids. As a pet owner looking in, you might be curious as to why this is and there are quite a few reasons.
Breeders who are serious about improving their dogs hold a high standard in producing proper structure. (Dogs who adhere to our breed standard as closely as possible.) This is a true challenge when running a breeding program with multi-colored poodles. Sadly our reality is that the vast majority of multi-colored poodles (Parti, phantoms, sables and brindles) have been heavily bred in primarily pet-quality breeding programs or even worse, mass produced by puppy mill operations. For those who are not familiar with why this may be bad, breeders who mass produce or produce *only* for the pet market often breed dogs with little or no genetic testing, no titles/accomplishments and are pairing dogs together with the soul purpose of producing flashy colors to market to the uneducated public. This has taken quite a toll on the overall quality on poodles of color; Some of these poodles have minor faults, whereas some have faults so serious they hardly resemble our breed.
Besides dealing with the struggles of less ideal structure, there is still a stigma in the poodle community for breeders who have poodles of color. There are a lot of “strictly solid” breeders who still view multi-colored poodles as the worst representations of our breed no matter how much improvement a breeder has put into their line. This makes it very difficult to breed better parti-colored poodles when a fraction of your fellow breeders refuse to work with you simply because your dog “is the wrong color”. Thankfully, more solid breeders are embracing poodles of color but it is still a very real challenge we face when trying to bring new lines into our program.
Breeders who decided to stop breeding parti-poodles often did so because we are in a very difficult spot to improve the quality of these lines. I myself have been faced with the struggles of trying to improve the structure in my parti-colored lines. This is why we actually have produced more solid-colored puppies than parti-color. We have focused on breeding our parti-color line into solid AKC show lines and we started this process with the second litter we ever produced. (AKC CH Blackjack Beginners Luck X UKC GRCH Crystal Creek’s Heavenly Guardian)
We are not looking to remove parti-color from our program, however as we work to improve our dogs conformation we will continue to breed into solid lines and this means we will see more solid puppies and fewer parti-color puppies. There are some solid lines that carry for parti but we have very limited options. The reason we will not have many litters with parti-colored puppies is there are not many quality parti-color stud options available and we do not want to go backwards on the improvements we have made.
Over the years we have brought in lovely solid females that are unrelated to our original line. We are working on building separate lines that will carry parti-color and we will merge these lines together once we have accomplished the goals we are striving for. This work will take many generations and multiple years of progress but we hope the results will produce exceptional parti-colored poodles with proper structure, generations of health testing and quality pedigrees.
Bonnie Winings
Crystal Creek Standard Poodles
published 1.19.21
“Colours are the smiles of nature.” –James Hunt
Lately we have been asked by families if we are going to move to breeding only solid-colored poodles and I wanted to cover this topic in a blog. Many of my friends and followers know Crystal Creek as a respected name for producing quality parti-colored poodles however if you take a close look around, most of our dogs are now solid in color and there is a good reason for this.
Multiple ethical parti-colored breeders I looked up to have decided to end their parti-colored program and now only breed solids. As a pet owner looking in, you might be curious as to why this is and there are quite a few reasons.
Breeders who are serious about improving their dogs hold a high standard in producing proper structure. (Dogs who adhere to our breed standard as closely as possible.) This is a true challenge when running a breeding program with multi-colored poodles. Sadly our reality is that the vast majority of multi-colored poodles (Parti, phantoms, sables and brindles) have been heavily bred in primarily pet-quality breeding programs or even worse, mass produced by puppy mill operations. For those who are not familiar with why this may be bad, breeders who mass produce or produce *only* for the pet market often breed dogs with little or no genetic testing, no titles/accomplishments and are pairing dogs together with the soul purpose of producing flashy colors to market to the uneducated public. This has taken quite a toll on the overall quality on poodles of color; Some of these poodles have minor faults, whereas some have faults so serious they hardly resemble our breed.
Besides dealing with the struggles of less ideal structure, there is still a stigma in the poodle community for breeders who have poodles of color. There are a lot of “strictly solid” breeders who still view multi-colored poodles as the worst representations of our breed no matter how much improvement a breeder has put into their line. This makes it very difficult to breed better parti-colored poodles when a fraction of your fellow breeders refuse to work with you simply because your dog “is the wrong color”. Thankfully, more solid breeders are embracing poodles of color but it is still a very real challenge we face when trying to bring new lines into our program.
Breeders who decided to stop breeding parti-poodles often did so because we are in a very difficult spot to improve the quality of these lines. I myself have been faced with the struggles of trying to improve the structure in my parti-colored lines. This is why we actually have produced more solid-colored puppies than parti-color. We have focused on breeding our parti-color line into solid AKC show lines and we started this process with the second litter we ever produced. (AKC CH Blackjack Beginners Luck X UKC GRCH Crystal Creek’s Heavenly Guardian)
We are not looking to remove parti-color from our program, however as we work to improve our dogs conformation we will continue to breed into solid lines and this means we will see more solid puppies and fewer parti-color puppies. There are some solid lines that carry for parti but we have very limited options. The reason we will not have many litters with parti-colored puppies is there are not many quality parti-color stud options available and we do not want to go backwards on the improvements we have made.
Over the years we have brought in lovely solid females that are unrelated to our original line. We are working on building separate lines that will carry parti-color and we will merge these lines together once we have accomplished the goals we are striving for. This work will take many generations and multiple years of progress but we hope the results will produce exceptional parti-colored poodles with proper structure, generations of health testing and quality pedigrees.
Bonnie Winings
Crystal Creek Standard Poodles
published 1.19.21
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