By Carol Beuchat PhD
You've probably seen pictures of these amazing statues, the so-called Terracotta Army. These terracotta figures, which were discovered by Chinese farmers that were digging a well in 1974, date to roughly 200 BCE, and were thought to afford protection to the emperor in his afterlife.
They are impressive for a number of reasons. They depict life-sized Chinese warriors, including infantry, cavalrymen, chariot drivers, crossbowmen, generals, and lower ranking officers, as well as muscians, acrobats, and other non-military figures. In addition to roughly 8,000 soldiers, each with unique facial features and wearing the garb appropriate to his rank and duties, there are 150 cavalry horses, and 130 chariots with 520 horses. It is a truly impressive clay army.
Needless to say, the magnitude of the task of creating these sculptures is difficult to imagine. It involved thousands of workers and painstaking work that probably took 30-40 years. The statues were buried in pits 23 feet (7 m) deep, and at least one of these pits was 750 feet (230 m) long and 203 feet (62 m) wide, the length of about about 2.5 soccer fields. Just moving the statues to these pits would have been a massive task.
The point here is that with enough time, determination, and humans to do the work, we can accomplish some truly remarkable things.
But what does this have to do with purebrd dog breeding? Bear with me.
But what does this have to do with purebrd dog breeding? Bear with me.
The world of purebred dog breeders is increasingly aware of the need to know more about the genetics of the dogs we breed. Indeed, breeders have been keeping breeding records since even before the first kennel club was established in the late 1800s. These pedigrees recorded the history of a breed, allowing breeders to follow the passage of genes from one generation to the next, and they provided the only information about the potential genetic makeup of a dog. The kennel clubs were formed to create these records and and their mission has been to preserve them in perpetuity.
The registration records of most kennel clubs around the world have survived more or less intact for decades if not a century or more. They represent a priceless compilation of the origins and evolultion of hundreds of extant dog breeds. For those interested in the genetics of a breed, these records can reveal the size of the original gene pool, how diversity was lost, the size and timing of bottlenecks, crossing in of other breeds, and much more about the history and genetics of a breed. (See The Amazing Secrets Hiding in Your Pedigree Database) But for most breeds, complete pedigrees back to the founding dogs are unavailable. Kennel clubs do not make these records available online or as a downloadable file. Breeders might be able to purchase a 5 generation pedigree of a dog, but if you want deeper generations you have to pony up for the connecting pedigrees in the fifth generation of dogs or run down that information yourself. It doesn't make much sense to record and preserve pedigrees if they are not accessible to the people that need to use them. If we believe in genetics (and we do, don't we?), it seems essential that we have the information we need to use genetics to inform breeding strategy.
The registration records of most kennel clubs around the world have survived more or less intact for decades if not a century or more. They represent a priceless compilation of the origins and evolultion of hundreds of extant dog breeds. For those interested in the genetics of a breed, these records can reveal the size of the original gene pool, how diversity was lost, the size and timing of bottlenecks, crossing in of other breeds, and much more about the history and genetics of a breed. (See The Amazing Secrets Hiding in Your Pedigree Database) But for most breeds, complete pedigrees back to the founding dogs are unavailable. Kennel clubs do not make these records available online or as a downloadable file. Breeders might be able to purchase a 5 generation pedigree of a dog, but if you want deeper generations you have to pony up for the connecting pedigrees in the fifth generation of dogs or run down that information yourself. It doesn't make much sense to record and preserve pedigrees if they are not accessible to the people that need to use them. If we believe in genetics (and we do, don't we?), it seems essential that we have the information we need to use genetics to inform breeding strategy.
So, what's the problem here? Kennel clubs could certainly make the more recent digital pedigree records from the last few decades available in a convenient and useful fomat, but alas most don't. The reasons given for not providing easy access to pedigree are usually something about maintaining "control" of the information (a topic for another time). Never mind that the data are mostly out there in bits and pieces put together by breeders, some is incorrect, and most are inconvenient to access.
For the "analog" records compiled in rregistration books before the advent of digital files, the problem with access usually given as the "enormous" amount of work it would take to create digital files for dozens of years of stud books.
Ok, that's a point. There are dozens of volumes of information that would need to be digitized, and in each kennel club in countries around the world. But is getting the information into a digital format "too much work"? Surely the kennel clubs aware that there are already dozens and dozens of breeders around the world typing up pedigree records from old hand written scraps of peper, or from show catalogs, or pedigrees posted on breeder websites. Hours and hours are spent just running down the information. Some breeders have been doing this for years - decades, even - to provide a resource for others in the breed, or (unfortunately, occasionally) to keep the records under control that limits access to others. I know of several large hand-kept pedigree databases that disappeared when the breeder passed away and the computer was tossed out by those tasked with clearing out a lifetime of possessions from Nana's old house.
Go back and look at those Terracotta Soldiers. Making those was a massive task, but there they are, created by armies of workers over many years. Making all those statues was indeed an enormous amount of work. Digitizing 100 years of pedigree records is a sniffle by comparison. And if all those breeders that are already typing could be organized so what they produced was joined with the records kept by the kennel clubs, we would finally have the invaluable records needed by breeders to reveal the mysteries hiding in the pedigree history of their breed.
There really is no excuse now to not get the pedigree records of every registered dog on the planet into a database. Remember, this was the original mission of the kennel clubs. It is no longer necessary to sit at a computer typing away for weeks. I can upload a scan of a page from a registry into software that will do optical character recognition on hundreds of pages in a matter of a minutes. Then I can ask AI to extract the information I need in whatever form I want - Name, date of birth, sex, sire, dam, color, country - and save it to an excel file. The hardest part of this would be creating scans or photocopies of each page. Enlist the help of the hundreds of breeders out there that are already typing everything out by hand, and we could have the files for the purebred dogs of the world available for breeders, researchers, historians, and anybody else with interest.
For the "analog" records compiled in rregistration books before the advent of digital files, the problem with access usually given as the "enormous" amount of work it would take to create digital files for dozens of years of stud books.
Ok, that's a point. There are dozens of volumes of information that would need to be digitized, and in each kennel club in countries around the world. But is getting the information into a digital format "too much work"? Surely the kennel clubs aware that there are already dozens and dozens of breeders around the world typing up pedigree records from old hand written scraps of peper, or from show catalogs, or pedigrees posted on breeder websites. Hours and hours are spent just running down the information. Some breeders have been doing this for years - decades, even - to provide a resource for others in the breed, or (unfortunately, occasionally) to keep the records under control that limits access to others. I know of several large hand-kept pedigree databases that disappeared when the breeder passed away and the computer was tossed out by those tasked with clearing out a lifetime of possessions from Nana's old house.
Go back and look at those Terracotta Soldiers. Making those was a massive task, but there they are, created by armies of workers over many years. Making all those statues was indeed an enormous amount of work. Digitizing 100 years of pedigree records is a sniffle by comparison. And if all those breeders that are already typing could be organized so what they produced was joined with the records kept by the kennel clubs, we would finally have the invaluable records needed by breeders to reveal the mysteries hiding in the pedigree history of their breed.
There really is no excuse now to not get the pedigree records of every registered dog on the planet into a database. Remember, this was the original mission of the kennel clubs. It is no longer necessary to sit at a computer typing away for weeks. I can upload a scan of a page from a registry into software that will do optical character recognition on hundreds of pages in a matter of a minutes. Then I can ask AI to extract the information I need in whatever form I want - Name, date of birth, sex, sire, dam, color, country - and save it to an excel file. The hardest part of this would be creating scans or photocopies of each page. Enlist the help of the hundreds of breeders out there that are already typing everything out by hand, and we could have the files for the purebred dogs of the world available for breeders, researchers, historians, and anybody else with interest.
So, kennel clubs of the world, how about it? We can do this with some readily available software and volunteers that are already typing. We will finally be able to work with deep pedigrees and put the genetics back into the history of dog breeding. And it won't take nearly as long as you think.
There are a number of early volumes of records from the American Kennel Club, the United Kingdom Kennel Club, and US Field Dog Stud books on the ICB website that you can download HERE.
To learn more about the genetics of dogs, check out
ICB's online courses
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ICB Institute of Canine Biology
...the latest canine news and research
ICB Breeding for the Future
...the science of animal breeding
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ICB's online courses
***************************************
Visit our Facebook Groups
ICB Institute of Canine Biology
...the latest canine news and research
ICB Breeding for the Future
...the science of animal breeding
***************************************
