George Spradling on Dachshund Breeding – 1969
Download this page in PDF formatDachshund Club of California Symposium — from the August 1969 “The American Dachshund”
Submitted by Elaine Hanson, April 20, 2012
George Spradling on Dachshund Breeding
(a large part of this article was taken from an article Mr. Spradling wrote in 1965 for the “American Kennel Gazette”)
Four of the essentials for a sustained and successful breeding program for good Dachshunds are: 1) A clear mental picture of the ideal Dachshund desired to be bred and developed, including a sound knowledge of anatomy and the functional reasons for virtues and faults. 2) Complete objectivity in appraising dogs, uninfluenced by wins or losses. 3) A working knowledge of the genetical principles involved. 4) A sufficient understanding of nutrition and feeding so that the dog’s potential quality may be realized.
Without those bare essentials, no breeding program can be successful over a period of successive generations.
‘The ability to appraise’
Numbers 3 and 4 are comparatively easy. It is possible for a bright high school graduate to learn all of the genetic principles necessary for such a breeding program in a few hours of guided study. Numbers 1 and 2, however, are the stumbling blocks for most breeders. No matter how well you feed or how much you know about genetics, you cannot be successful unless you have the ability to appraise the product.
It is incredible that a person will start a show dog breeding program without any understanding of the essentials involved. A lawyer spends seven years in college learning the bare fundamentals of his profession, well knowing that it will take approximately 15 more years in actual practice before he is a proficient practitioner. That same lawyer may go to a show, fall in love with show dogs, build a kennel, buy expensive stock (“preferably unrelated”), hire a handler, put laudatory ads in magazines for his stock and breeding program, and actually believe he can make the grade as a breeder.
After one generation, downhill
What are his chances? About the same as the lamb has of killing the butcher! He is blinded by love and the naive assumption that breeding is easy. Like begets like, doesn’t it?
He will fool himself for a while by buying winners, and should he be lucky enough to obtain a prepotent bitch, he may keep going as long as she produces. He won’t know how to handle the succeeding generation, so his stock will deteriorate instead of improving. When the wins stop, he quits or comes to his senses and educates himself on what he is trying to do. If you believe this is an exaggeration, then take 10 or 15 years of the back issues of The American Dachshund and check out the advertisements of show dogs.
The truth is, most Americans are dog lovers, not breeders, just as the Europeans say. Most breeders are interested more in wins than in breeding. As long as the dog can win, they are happy, regardless of his true qualities. Winning and showing are as honorable as breeding, but somehow exhibitors don’t think so and feel impelled to breed.
‘… the fingers of one hand’
Actually, it is much cheaper to buy top show dogs than to breed them, unless you have the knowledge, patience and a little bit of luck thrown in. Of the hundreds of Dachshund breeders during the past 30 years, you can count on the fingers of one hand the few who have continuously bred top quality show dogs for more than one generation.
The quicker a breeder can determine the quality of his stock, the faster and cheaper he can develop his line. A knowledge of anatomy and structure will enable a breeder to cull his pups by the time they are nine weeks of age, instead of waiting for maturity, thus determining not only the quality of the puppies but also ascertaining the genotype of the bitch and perhaps the sire.
The moment a puppy is whelped, the important features of his anatomy may be checked out: is he long or short in back, is his upper arm as long as his scapula, is he well ribbed-up or short in his rib cage, are his hocks long or short? None of these things will change in his lifetime and if they are proportionally bad at birth, they will always be that way. Heads, angulation front and rear and feet cannot be determined at birth, except if the bones of the zygomatic arch are very flat, then a broad skull is unlikely to develop.
What you can see at eight weeks
The remainder of the checking out can be done when the puppy is fully up on its feet and moving at eight to nine weeks of age, except for depth of chest and some head development. He will look at this age almost exactly as he will at maturity.
At this age the back line, angulation both front and rear, arch of neck, arch of toes, length of neck, front and rear stance, can be finally determined by lying on the floor and watching the puppy move.
He can be appraised better at this age than at any other time before full maturity. Any fault now evidenced will grow and become more pronounced, thus if there is even the slightest tendency to toe out or in, or have a crooked front, then those faults as well as others will get worse, not better.
Heads are difficult at this age. Clean chiseling under the eyes will remain, as will snipyness of muzzle or wide skull, but a somewhat wide muzzle often will grow out in proportion with the length of the head.
A shallow chest may be ignored at this age because chests deepen with age, but no other bones change in proportion, except skulls, which often widen. If the head appears slightly large in proportion, it is so much the better, but if it is small in proportion to the body, it will always be so.
Bones in the leg should also be somewhat large proportionately or the dog will be fine boned at maturity. It must be remembered that except for deepening of the chest and widening of the skull, no bones grow after the permanent teeth are fully developed. Thus, the head and leg bones appear large in proportion during puppyhood if they are to be in proper proportion at maturity.
We have never missed a dog of high quality in culling in this fashion. Unfortunately, there are not ever very many top show quality dogs to pick, but no amount of wishful thinking can make a dog any better than when it was born.
Questions and answers and comments from the audience punctuate these excerpts from the remainder of Mr. Spradling’s talk.
There are prominent breeders who have bred for years and years and years who are unable to appraise their own stock.
A breeder gets more thrill out of correcting the faults in his dogs than in getting wins. That is not true of anyone when they start. It was not true of me. I bitched louder than anyone else you’ve ever heard over [defeats of] dogs that I know now were horrible really, but I didn’t know any better.
There is no magic formula for breeding. It relies on your eye.
Take a man like Joe Mehrer (Marienlust Kennels), who was against inbreeding, by the way. His eye was such that he could ignore genetics. Joe knew structure.
He insisted on having an oval chest, smooth withers, backline generally good. He was a little careless on fronts. When dogs didn’t turn out well he killed them.
What is the meaning of a purebred dog? It means you can breed, at random, any purebred Dachshund to any purebred Dachshund and get a dog that is recognizable as a Dachshund.
‘You lose nothing by inbreeding’
Inbreeding means that you are mating together couples more related than the average in the breed. You lose nothing by inbreeding. You lose everything by outcross.
Do you know how I test my males? I would not think of breeding a known producing bitch that I own to one of my own dogs, no matter how beautiful he is until he is bred to a bunch of klunks. I give services away. . . Some people advertise stud service to approved bitches only. I interpret that as meaning anyone who’s got the stud fee.
If I could look at a dog and tell how it would produce, I could make millions of dollars. So could anybody.
If a dog produces one or two good ones, that is no proof. See the good and the bad bitches he has been bred to, the inbred ones and all the others, and see if there is any pattern coming through on the puppies.
Mutants: Cid, Leutnant, Favorite
When I started breeding again in 1946, I went to California because I had heard that they had good dogs, and darn if they didn’t. I went to a puppy match and there was a great bunch of puppies shown. I turned to my wife and said, “Someone here has a great producing bitch.” Then I looked at the ages of the pups and realized that couldn’t be it. Then I found that Mr. and Mrs. Heying’s Ch. Favorite v Marienlust sired them all. That dog, from a breeding standpoint could have been more closely inbred. The more inbred they are, the more likely they are to produce well. He wasn’t inbred until you’ve gone back in about the fourth generation. He was just favored by nature, is all. He was a mutant. And you get about three or four in all the time I have bred Dachshunds. Only three or four.
Then I saw dozens, upon dozens, upon dozens of Favorite litters. He was popular as stud, and I saw them all over the United States. You could almost tell them the minute you’d see them.
The bitch is more important in breeding, with the exception of a mutant male. A Cid vom Werderhavelstrand, a Ch. Leutnant v Marienlust, a [Ch.] Favorite v. Marienlust will produce beautiful dogs out of a lousy bitch. Favorite did it repeatedly. All of my inbreeding was on Favorite children.
I recall a quite prominent breeder who had a good bitch. I had put up a lot of his dogs. Then he went out and bought champion bitches from nearly every kennel he had ever heard of. I prophesied then that he wouldn’t last more than two or three years, because he would never produce anything more. If he had properly bred his producing bitch, he could have had a kennel of 200 dogs, all related to her. He could have gone on through the years.
The way to test quickly
If you want to test quickly, breed a full brother and sister. Breed a father to a daughter, a son to a mother. Practically all of my breedings for many years came through old Zaranthaetta.
I took [Hainheim’s] Zaranthaetta off the show circuit when she lacked two points of finishing. Her mother had died, and I wanted something to work with. I bred her to Lance of Heying-Teckel and got eight puppies, all of which died but two, Hainheim’s Lance and his brother, a very lovely dog. Then I bred her to a little of an outcross to see what she contributed. It was very satisfactory. Then I bred her to Lance, her son. And produced – and this is very odd – you could inbreed on the mother and gain in size, which is not normally true in inbreeding. You couldn’t do that with Lance. His puppies would get smaller and smaller.
If you are interested only in wins, don’t breed at all. It’s too expensive. But know what they are before you buy them. The best thing to do if you don’t know is to hire a handler that does know what dog can win. Lots of poor dogs make big wins.
If you would dip the majority of Longhaired dogs in buckets of water and then take them in the ring, the judges that put them up would throw up.
‘If the judge is fooled, fine’
This is supposed to be a sport. And if it’s a sport, play it like it lays. If the judge is fooled, fine. That’s part of the sport.
The best exhibitor that I ever knew of bought dogs. She would follow judges, watch them, and see what they liked . . . . You never saw but one of her dogs shown with any consistency, it was that one she wanted to win. That’s fine. It’s honorable, there’s nothing wrong about it. It is just as honorable as breeding a good dog.
A championship doesn’t mean much. I have put up dogs repeatedly that I thought were miserable, because they were the best dogs there.
‘… the little dog in the alley…’
If you breed to the little dog down the alley from you, if it’s well-bred, you are just as likely to get a good dog as you would to send it off to the leading champion who isn’t proven as to genotype. One or two good winners doesn’t prove the genotype factor.
A good chest is just like the sled runners fore and aft. If they have good length of chest you can see that at birth. If it is the proper length, the end of the chest will be not more than my finger width from the navel.
You cannot tell too much about heads at birth. If they are somewhat flat, they likely will not be thick in skull, and if the muzzle is fairly wide it will probably lengthen , but even at six weeks you will have trouble on heads. From then on they don’t grow evenly, and you may have some that just look like faulty things. But at maturity they will be back just like they were as babies.
Have you heard of anybody ever buying a top winning dog from me that I mistook and sold for $50? A pet, and it turned out to be a topper? It never happened.
When I was breeding a lot, dozens of people came to the kennel to buy dogs. I’d tell them if they were after a show dog, a three-months-old puppy would cost them a minimum of $350. And if it wasn’t a good one at maturity, they were to get their money back. They would pick out one that they thought was much better than the one I pointed out, buy it, and then scream their heads off because it wouldn’t win.
I start my still-nursing puppies at three weeks old eating with their mother the same food. I keep them nursing just as long as they will nurse, and if mamma gets nasty at about eight weeks I hold her down. The longer the pups get the milk, the better it is for them, and it doesn’t hurt the bitch a bit. Then you don’t have to use pablum and all sorts of weird things. Put a little Esbilac in the food as they grow.
At six months, grown
In 99.99% of puppies, when they are six months old they are as big as they will ever be. There will be no growth in bone beyond the time the teeth – the permanent teeth – are in. The head at that age should look too big for the body, otherwise it is going to be too small. Now there is an exception: the chest will drop. It will go down. The rib cage will grow, the head will grow in width.
If you have a fine-boned dog at birth, you will have a fine-boned dog at death.
Q.You speak of inbreeding brother and sister. Don’t you run into mental problems?
A.If you inbreed and it is unsatisfactory, you outcross immediately and you’ve got back to where you were.
I have had people write me and say that they don’t want to breed to a dog that has any monorchidism in his line. Well, they had better get into some other breed. I know of no line that doesn’t have it.
You don’t need to worry too much about what is more than three generations back in a pedigree. The influence of the ancestors is going to be so minor and there are so many of them.
The best fronted dogs in the world will occasionally produce fiddle fronts. That is inherent in the breed. There is nothing worse, both to look at and for movement or anything else, than a fiddle front.
Many of the Marienlust dogs increased in size on inbreeding. Lance bred back to his mother produced all right. When I would inbreed on her I would get bigger size. But, unfortunately, Lance didn’t inherit that from his mother. You don’t know how the little genes are going to jump through the hoop.
Q. In your inbreeding, have you ever been so unfortunate as to come up with absolute monstrosities? What I mean is dogs that – as you so horribly put it – have to be killed?
A. I have probably inbred my dogs more than anyone I know, and I have never had a monstrosity.
Q. By this I mean a head and a half, or a tail and a half, or whatever.
A. Never. I have had some poor specimens. Some of them were quite beautiful, but they were faulty. In my line, Lance himself had a beautiful head, but he had a tendency to throw rather common heads. Many of them are still coming through. But that’s the easiest thing to put on. As Ed Hirschman always said, “You can put that on in one generation.”
Her husband was her brother
The only time that human beings have been highly inbred was in the royal family of Egypt, and it lasted about 3000 years. That was mother marrying son. Cleopatra was the product of – well, she was quite a girl. And her husband was her brother. Boy! They had good recessives. And in the royal families of Europe you can almost tell when the outcross brought in bleeding, insanity and all sorts of things. Well, it may be that people are the lousiest producers in the world. Because their breeding is utterly haphazard, based upon love, and love is ridiculous. Some guy might love a pig.
Q. You speak of your inbreeding as reducing the size.
A. That is generally one of the things that follows.
Q. Then in your outbreeding, this would be one of your considerations – to keep your size.
A. Not necessarily. Probably, yes. Hybrid breeding generally does make size and stamina. In inbreeding, there are further things that you have to watch for. I mean really intense inbreeding. Stamina is one, loss of size and, perhaps also, loss of intelligence.
With a mutant, like Favorite, most any bitch either closely related or unrelated. He is the exception to the rule.
A prepotent bitch is largely the same. The tendency is for breeders to give the male the credit for everything. If you send a good bitch to a big winner and you get a good puppy, you’re inclined to say, oh look what he produced, and forget the dam. How do you know? She might have produced a better litter with the dog next door.
Try to remember if you breed by the way they look, you are inviting disaster. Because they don’t produce the way they look. If they did, breeding would be so ridiculously easy that not a one of us would be interested.
If you have a short chest or a tendency toward shortness, and if you are smart, you cover it up with fat. Most judges will never catch it. A lot don’t know what it is.
Falcon structurally the best
Ch. Falcon of Heying-Teckel was structurally the best Dachshund I ever saw. However, he was not photogenic. He always showed well under me, but if he had stood up for his pictures it would have been much easier to explain what he really was. You should have seen him playing ball, or running around in the living room.
Rose Heying: I was with him for Best in Show one time and there was a Boston in, and this lady was playing ball with the Boston. Falcon looked absolutely beautiful. He got the Best in Show, as he was all alert. He was a ball player.
Q. What do you consider the most severe fault in your 35 years of breeding?
A. The cardinal fault of the breed is the bad front. It is a terrific fault in all breeds. But particularly true in Dachshunds, because of their lowness.