Chapter 11 - The Pedigree

The word "pedigree" is derived from the French pied de gris, which translated means "crane's foot." Its use is due to the fancied resemblance to the long, spreading toes of the crane of the manner in which the lines of names diverge to record the ancestry of an animal.

The term "family tree" expresses the implied idea even better than does "crane's foot," for the generations of ancestry branch out from the individual as do the branches of a tree from a trunk. The trunk throws off two main limbs, analogous to the parents, each of which divides into two smaller limbs, the grandparents, and each of those limbs divide to form two even smaller limbs, the great grandparents, and those limbs may divide and subdivide ad infinitum to show the more and more remote generations of ancestry.

The pedigree of the dog is its family tree, the record of the names of its ancestors and of their relations to one another and to it. The pedigree often includes the name of the breeder of the dog, the date of the dog's birth, its own and its parents' numbers in whatever stud book they may be registered, and other data about the animal. These added data, however informative, are not properly a part of the pedigree.

Pedigrees are now usually published simply as columns of names, which in each successive column from right to left are more widely spaced. This arrangement places the names of the parents in the first left hand column, the names of the parents' parents (the grandparents) in the second column, and so spaced that the name of the progeny appears midway vertically between the names of its parents. The pedigree may include as many generations of ancestors as its maker chooses to record or of which there are available data.

We include on pages 158-159 of this book a seven generation pedigree of an extremely notable litter of Golden Retrievers. Its notability is in the fact that nine of its thirteen members became champions of record. The other four, it is alleged, were all good enough to win their championships, but their owners were not "show-minded" and did not choose to exhibit them. They were bred by Mr. and Mrs. Millard C. Zwang, of Minneapolis, and handled in the shows by Mr. Hollis Wilson, the expert professional handler, through whose courtesy this information about the litter and its pedigree are provided. This litter was whelped March 16, 1954. The names of the members which achieved championships are as follows:

Ch. Sprucewood's Chocki, who in three months of showing was four times best dog of any breed in all-breed shows and won nine Sporting Groups;

Ch. Sprucewood's Chore Boy, who has had two Best in Show wins, including the National Golden Retriever Specialty Show for 1955;

Ch. Sprucewood's Color Girl;
Ch. Sprucewood's Chee King;
Ch. Sprucewood's Coquette;
Canadian and American Ch. Sprucewood's Chinki;
Ch. Sprucewood's Chuck O'Luck;
Ch. Sprucewood's Ching; and
Ch. Sprucewood's Chee Whiz.

There will be less amazement at the winning record of this marvelous litter when it is considered that the immediate parents, much alike, are among the very foremost of their breed, Golden Retrievers. The sire, as shown in the pedigree, is the American and Canadian Champion Golden Knoll's King Alphonzo, who has been twenty-seven times Best in Show in all breed shows, best in one national specialty show and best in three regional specialty shows, three times winner of the Speedwell Pluto Challenge Cup (1953, 1954, and 1955) for the top winning Golden Retriever of the respective years, the Alexander Spur Trophy for 1954 for the winner of the national specialty show. The dam of this litter is Champion Chee Chee of Spruce-wood and is of equal excellence to the sire. She has been five times best of all breeds in all-breed shows, and has won the national specialty show twice (1952 and 1953), with which wins was included the Alexander Spur Trophy; and she won the Speedwell Pluto Trophy for 1952.

The seven generation pedigree shows us that the line breeding of this litter is not intensive. Yet, if one will pursue the pedigree into its further reaches, one will note that time after time and time again the names of the same dogs appear in it on both sides of the house, notably the name of Speedwell Pluto and his major offspring, the same Speedwell Pluto in whose memory the trophy was established.

Another litter notable for the excellence of its many members is the one of which the pedigree is shown on pages 162-163. It is the Doberman Pinscher litter, bred by Dorothy M. Harding of San Gabriel, California, whelped September 8, 1951, which Miss Harding designates as the "Opera Litter." In it were eight champions, one more that has points toward championship but retired from the shows to be bred, and two never exhibited, eleven in all. The names of the champions are:

Ch. Harding's Faust, with seven Bests in Show, including two specialty shows, forty firsts in Working Group, 87 times Best of Breed;

Ch. Harding's Oberon;
Ch. Harding's Rigoletto;
Ch. Harding's Mignon;
Ch. Harding's La Traviata;
Ch. Harding's Thais;
Ch. Harding's Tosca; and
Ch. Harding's La Boheme.

The pedigree shows the names of the greatest members of the Doberman Pinscher breed.

The two litters of which the pedigrees are shown here are very unusual in that the members of them showed such excellence throughout, which is an earnest that the parent stock had been almost wholly purged of its undesirable genes. Up until some two decades ago a litter of any breed in which more than a single champion developed was rare indeed. Lightning had struck twice in the same place. It has now come to be well-nigh commonplace for a thoroughly well bred litter to embrace two or three dogs worthy of their championships, and sometimes four or five. Of course, the number of possible champions is limited by the number of puppies in the litter; it is impossible to make more champions than there are dogs. And to make a champion one must exhibit a dog, frequently with a long and arduous campaign. Many bitches, especially of the smaller breeds, produce only a limited number of puppies at a single pregnancy, and a record number of champions in one litter from such bitches is out of the question.

Moreover, championship is not the final test of excellence in a dog. Although the word "Champion" before the name of a dog implies that it is one of considerable merit, there are champions and champions, some of such magnificence in their conformation and usually their style and showmanship as to make their names famous forever, and some only good enough to get by in the limited competition in which they have won.

Many fine dogs, even great ones, fail to make championships, either because of their owner's failure to exhibit them or for some other reason such as their being prematurely crippled or their early death. So it is impossible to estimate a litter entirely by the number of champions it contains. But that number of champions is at least an indication of the merits of the litter as a whole. A multiplicity of fine dogs in a single litter is a mark of the excellence of the genes in the parental germ plasma and the consistency of that excellence. A single good dog implies that the correct genes were present in both parents, but two or more good dogs from the same parents are evidence that the parents carry the right genes and transmit them more than as a mere accident. Such parents were formerly (and are yet sometimes) said to "nick." Such a nick was in the past considered merely fortuitous, but we now know why dogs produce fine progeny with such consistency.

The significance of a dog's pedigree is seldom evaluated at its true worth. For many persons, a pedigree means at once too little and too much. How often do we hear an owner vaunt the length of his dog's pedigree, which is declared to be "as long as his arm!" He frequently has never read the document and does not know anything about the data it sets forth. It is, to him, merely his dog's "papers." It contains cryptic lists of meaningless names arranged in more or less widely spaced columns. He knows, vaguely, that it is a catalogue of his dog's ancestors, a sort of warranty of the purity of his dog's lineage. He takes a pride in that purity, much as he may take pride in tracing his own lineage to a Mayflower Puritan or to a Norman invader of England. He values the pedigree for its length, although upon examination it is usually found that only three or four generations of ancestors are recorded in it. He is unaware that if the dog (or both his parents) be registered, the pedigree could in all likelihood be extended to ten or even twenty generations.
Often he counts the names of champions of record in the pedigree, usually without consideration of the nearness or remoteness in the ancestry of those championships, and that by adding one more generation to the record the number of championships could perhaps be doubled. These championships are sometimes rubricated, or at least underlined, to imply a significance which they do not, in fact, possess.

When Earl Haig gave a Sealyham Terrier to Will Rogers he told him that if the tyke knew how great his ancestors were he would not speak to "any of us." An excellent pedigree, however, does not always mean an excellent dog, and the gene theory has deflated pride of ancestry, especially of remote ancestry. It proved that an organism may derive exactly nothing at all from some remote progenitor. Among dogs as among men, there are unworthy sons of worthy sires. Two litter brothers, identical in their pedigrees, may be much alike in their physical type and genetic constitution, one or both; or they may be so different in both respects that one may be a great individual and become a "pillar of the stud book," while the other is a waster both for exhibition and for breeding.

There is a proverbial story of a judge of dogs who, when an exhibitor expostulated with him about the low position of his dog in the prize list of a show and boasted of the animal's fashionable pedigree, replied, "Next time, bring the pedigree and leave the dog at home."

The pedigree does not make the dog. The dog, if he be good enough individually and genetically, does make the pedigree.

The pedigree may be in essence only a statement that all of the dog's progenitors for a certain number of generations are all of a stated variety. In fact, a large part of the pedigrees are little more than that, mazes of names of obscure dogs, here and there perhaps illuminated by the name of some more or less obscure champion. To the uninitiated, a pedigree is a pedigree. But such a pedigree has, in fact, little significance and no value.

No pedigree is of any worth if the dog whose lineage it records is sterile or is not to be bred from. The record of a dog's ancestry is only of service as an earnest of the kind of progeny he is likely (or liable) to beget. One is presumed to evaluate the prospective generations ahead of the dog from the recorded generations behind him.

That this is possible is true only in part. A good pedigree confirms what a dog's type and his proved ability to produce good stock has already proclaimed. The proof of the stud dog is in his puppies. The roll of his ancestors is but an obligato to the tune of his genes.

It is not to be denied that the son or daughter of two parents who are themselves of eminent ancestry and recognized producers of stock of consistent excellence is likely himself, when mated adequately, to produce well.

Even in this twentieth century we have yet found no way to gather figs from thistles, nor Kadota figs from Mission fig trees. Dogs yet bring forth, each according to his kind. Blood (sic!) will tell. The pedigree is far from being a scrap of paper.

The knowledge of inheritance as transmitted by means of the genes renders absurd our former attitude toward the pedigree and our former methods of analyzing it.

Francis Galton's was one of the great minds of the nineteenth century and he was among the first of the workers who sought to bring the laws of heredity into some semblance of systematized arrangement. We still accept, although with crossed fingers, his so-called "Law of Filial Regression," which declares, in effect, the tendency of races to revert to mediocrity. It is what dog breeders mean when they use the term "the drag of the race."

Galton reached his conclusions from statistical studies. He found that the adult children of very tall parents tended to be, while taller than the average of the population, not so tall as the mean height of the parents; the children of short parents, shorter than the average but of greater height than the mean height of the parents. His statistics reveal the tendency of exaggerations of type in the parents to grow smaller or to disappear in the progeny.

While Galton, in gathering his statistics and arriving at his conclusions, failed to separate the environmental influence from the influences of heredity, we recognize that those conclusions, as stated in the "Law of Filial Regression," are, on the whole, correct. We recognize, however, in the light of genetics, how much more a mongrelized race, such as our own, is prone to such "filial regression" than is an intensely inbred race like our purebred races of dogs. Genetics reveals how out crossing and mongrelism, which latter is but the extreme result of the former, bring about the burial of exaggerations of type in hybrid-dominant mediocrity. Galton did not know that these exaggerations of type might well have inscribed upon their tombstones, "they are not dead but sleeping."

This "filial regression," as Galton learnedly called it, this "drag of the race," in a dog breeder's vernacular, impresses upon us the imperative need of eternal vigilance and unremitting selection through the generations. The pedigree, intelligently read, indicates whether or not that selection has been exercised among the dog's progenitors.

Parental         Grandparental   Great Grandparental     All More Remote
Generation     Generation        Generation                    Generations Combined
«•%               25%                 12%%                          12%%

Galton's Law of Ancestral Inheritance (Now Discredited)

However, it is Galton's other so-called law, "The Law of Ancestral Inheritance," which has for so long corrupted our interpretation of pedigrees and rendered futile much of our breeding procedure which was predicated upon our application of that "law" to the pedigrees of our dogs.

"The Law of Ancestral Inheritance" declares that the organism derives from its immediate parents fifty percent of its total heritage (twenty-five percent from each parent); from its four grandparents, twenty-five percent of its heritage (six and a quarter percent from each grandparent); and from each succeeding generation in the pedigree, it derives one-half of such fraction as has been left over from the contributions of later generations, and that part is derived equally from the members of that generation.

The part of the heritage derived from each ancestor is thus stated definitely, and the amount diminishes as the ancestor's position in the pedigree grows more remote. It is all so pat and logical. It appeals to our common sense. The ease of its application prompts its employment.

It is in the light of this "Law of Ancestral Inheritance" that we have read and studied our pedigrees, and even yet few of us have learned not to accept it. All that is wrong with the so-called law is that it is not true. Researches in genetics have knocked Galton's "Law of Ancestral Inheritance" into a cocked hat.

While we know that the organism derives fifty percent of its heritage from, or rather through, each parent, we also know, and know why, the contributions from the various members of each of the earlier generations are likely to be very different from each other in their amount and kind. The inheritance from the grandparents is usually unequal and, as we delve further back in the pedigree, we find ancestors who have made no contribution at all to the inheritance. A dog may have descended from certain ancestors without being biologically related to them or without receiving any of their attributes. If one or more of his genes or gene complexes have come from a given ancestor, he is related to it, otherwise he is not.

It is then necessary for us to lay aside any mathematical tables of inheritance when examining a pedigree.

We must recognize that our dog has received his heritage in a more or less lopsided fashion. Some of his ancestors have given him much, some little, some nothing at all. Galton was simply wrong, which, if he were yet alive, he would be the first and readiest to confirm.

This would seem to deprive the pedigree of much of its significance. It does not, in fact, do so, however. It only reveals the true significance. The pedigree is to be accepted as a confirmation even more than as a guide. The pedigree should not wag the dog.

It is not a list of meaningless names. Every name represents a specific dog with known or unknown faults and virtues, which he may or may not have contributed to the makeup of his descendant whose pedigree is under consideration. Each of these dogs in the pedigree has produced progeny, some few and some many, and of various degrees of excellence. To analyze a pedigree, one should know what the various dogs in the pedigree looked like and how well or how ill, how consistently or how sporadically, each has stamped his progeny with the attributes of the breed.

No breeder of dogs, however well informed, can know all about every dog whose name he sees in a pedigree, but a familiarity with the history of the breed will enable him to recognize a large part of the names in the pedigrees he reads. He says that one dog had and produced good coats but that his hindquarters were faulty, another dog was noted for his head and put good heads on his progeny, a third dog was exceedingly good except for a bad mouth.

The pedigree is of significance only in relation to the dog it represents and to the progeny he produces. One cannot read the pedigree and visualize the dog, although one may from the dog make a logical guess at the approximate pedigree.

One may examine the dog and consider what of his attributes he may have derived from what ancestors. One may examine his progeny with a purpose to discover what of his attributes he transmits to them, and what attributes of which of his progenitors.
If the pedigree reveals the repetition of the name of some ancestor, showing that the germ plasma of that ancestor was linebred or inbred to produce the animal whose pedigree it is, it may be assumed that such doubling and possibly redoubling of lineage has resulted in establishing in the germ plasma of the dog under consideration the traits, attributes, and type of the ancestor whose germ plasma is inbred into him. This assumption may be incorrect, but it may reasonably be made, especially if the dog himself exhibits a strong resemblance to the doubled ancestor.

Some breeders, in arranging their mating, consider only the pedigrees of the mates and disregard the individuals entirely. To do so is to assume that the progeny will bear no resemblance to the immediate parents but only to grandparents and more remote progenitors.

Such a procedure is as ill advised as to consider only the individual mates and to disregard the breeding that produced them. Both mates count—the individual mates and their pedigrees. The mates are to be the parents in the pedigree of their progeny; their parents, as shown in their pedigrees, will be the grandparents of the ensuing generation.

Quite as important as the individuals or as their pedigree is the kind of progeny that they may have previously produced. In evaluating that earlier progeny in the consideration of what a dog is likely to produce at any proposed mating, the collaboration he has had from his mate or mates, their excellence, breeding, and suitability for him must be taken into account. That a dog has failed to produce superior progeny from an inferior or unsuitable mate does not condemn him as a breeding animal so much as similar failures when he has been adequately mated.

However, a careful observation of several litters of progeny from a dog or bitch, will usually reveal a consistency in the production of good, bad, or mediocre progeny which is greater than is usually believed. The mates, undeniably, make great difference in the quality of the progeny, but a dog proponent for good or for evil will exhibit that prepotency, no matter to what purebred consort of his own breed he may be mated.

A numerically large litter which has been adequately reared and which does not exhibit a high average excellence and an approximate uniformity of type has been unfortunately bred. The parents, one or both, have been wrong or the mating of them has been wrong. Either or both might produce better progeny with other mates—or they might not. In consideration of a litter's merits for the purposes of determining the value of one of the parents as a breeding animal, one should not lose sight of the litter's pedigree and should give due weight to whether it shows a confluence of the germ plasma or some great exponent of the breed not many generations removed. If the parents are closely related through their common descent from a great producing ancestor, there is more reason to expect uniformity and excellence in the litter than if the parents are only remotely related or if the common ancestor is a mediocre dog.

Of course, a dog cannot be judged by his progeny until he has produced. Somebody must assume the hazards of breeding an untested young dog or bitch. The assumption of that hazard is only justifiable if the dog seems promising from his excellence as an individual and from the excellence of the germ plasma from which he sprang, as revealed by his pedigree. It is true that some indifferent dogs with indifferent pedigrees have proved to be great producing forces. Such dogs are flukes and have derived from some remote ancestors a fortunate combination of the genes which they hand on to their progeny. For every one such success, there are a thousand such indifferent dogs that are failures as producers of good stock, and the odds are long ones against the breeder who experiments with mediocre dogs of obscure or indifferent ancestry.

Even when such a dog has been tested as a producer and his progeny exhibits a consistent excellence, it is to be remembered that that progeny is liable in its turn to produce progeny which shows reversion to mediocrity.

In making a mating, the parties to it must be looked at as individuals; their past performance as producers, either with the same mate or with other mates, must be taken into account; and their pedigrees are to be analyzed and scrutinized. The breeder who neglects any of these three considerations risks failure.

The pedigree, taken alone, is negligible. A dog may be well bred and yet be a useless mediocrity, but a good dog is very likely to be found to be a well bred one. The pedigree is a guide. It offers a clue as to what traits may be hidden in his germ plasma ready to blight his progeny. It provides the data which enable one to determine what may be a suitable mate for him. It permits one to choose for him a mate with similar "blood lines" leading to some great common ancestor; or to recognize a degree of out-crossing, if one is bent upon such procedure.

But the pedigree must not be considered as an end in itself. No pedigree is better than the dog it represents. If the dog is unworthy, it is a hazardous gamble to experiment with him just because his pedigree is spectacular.

That is not to say that an excellent dog with a single fault may not have that fault corrected in his progeny and that such a one is to be discarded for breeding. A dog may be an excellent producer and yet have some acquired attribute, or even an inherited one, which may render him useless for exhibition. But it is wise to consider of a dog's faults whether they are of such a kind they may be overcome in the progeny, whether they are faults merely of the individual, of the family strain, or of the race, and whether, even if they can be buried in the immediately ensuing generation, they will not be given to reappearance in later generations. The analysis of the pedigree should show whence the fault may have come and enables one to avoid mating the animal to another whose type or ancestry shows a similar fault, thus avoiding the aggravation or perpetuation of it.

We are reminded of the famous mot of Mrs. Drew, the grandmother of the Barrymores, who, in discussing her sons as box office attractions, declared that "John Drew and Sydney didn't." So with two dogs who may be litter brothers or litter sisters; one may produce well, the other fail. If they are thoroughly well bred and of propontent parents, it is likely that many or all of the litter will be valuable producers: even then, some will excel.

It all depends upon the distribution of the chromosomes and of their particular genes. Dogs with none but desirable genes, purebred for every desirable factor, if such dogs exist, can be depended upon for such prepotence that, given a mate carrying the desirable recessive factors, he is certain to produce well. Such dogs are no problem. Mated to equally reliable consorts, their progeny can be depended upon to have and to transmit their own excellence, which need never be lost. It is to a consummation in such a strain that all of our energies as breeders of dogs must be directed.

But it is with lesser material that most of us must meanwhile work. We seek to eliminate the bad genes from our strain, to hold fast to the good ones. Our pedigrees indicate to us where those good genes and those bad genes are likely to lurk. As a guide, the pedigree is by no means infallible: it shows from what ancestors a dog has descended but does not show which of those ancestors have contributed to his type or to his germ plasma , nor does it show what or how much the so-called "contributors" have given of themselves. These data the dog must himself provide. The pedigree is only the clue, surprisingly dependable but sometimes false. The breeder who disregards it is lost.

It is better to accept the discredited "Law of Ancestral Inheritance" and treat the pedigree as it has so long been treated than to disregard it altogether. But the wise breeder will look at the pedigrees of his dogs in the light of his knowledge of genetics. He will confirm his pedigrees by correlating them with the dogs whose record they are, and he will observe in his dogs the merits and demerits which the pedigree warns him to look for. He will arrange his mating to avoid the faults and to perpetuate the virtues of the individuals and of their forebears.

Something must be said about the trustworthiness of pedigrees, which is frequently brought into question. No pedigree is better than the word of the man who makes it. There has been, and perhaps is, some faking of pedigrees. It is very little. Few, indeed, are the breeders of any repute who would risk the penalty which would come from having such charges proved against them.

The American Kennel Club, The Canadian Kennel Club, and the Kennel Club (British) do all in their power to maintain the integrity of their respective stud books. The registration of dogs is so hedged about with consideration for the accuracy of the data that there is little likelihood that a dog can be entered in the stud book and given a number on false representation. The disqualification of the person who deliberately corrupts the stud book, and the disqualification of his stock, is so certain to follow its detection that the faking of pedigrees is as foolish as it is dishonest. Very few breeders, even those whose scruples would permit, are willing to risk the sanctions. There is seldom much to be gained from the practice: there is always much to be lost. The pedigrees promulgated by reputable breeders are no more likely to be spurious than the currency you withdraw from the bank.

In purchasing a dog, one should always see to the matter that the dog is registered or that the application for registration is in order, duly signed by the breeder and the owner of the sire. And in mating a bitch to a male dog belonging to another person, one should see to it that the dog is registered. This is not only an earnest of the authenticity of the pedigree, but it saves difficulty which may arise later about the registration of the progeny of the mating.

We have said that no pedigree is better than the word of its maker. While that is true, most breeders of dogs are men of some integrity. Dogs are like any other commodity, however, and it behooves the buyer to deal with a breeder of dogs who is known to be reliable.

Dogs are bought for pets because they are cute puppies and because a woman chooses to gush about them. All puppies, good, bad, and mediocre, are cute so long as they remain puppies. The pedigree with a merely cute puppy for a pet is of little consequence. Unless a dog is to be bred from, the pedigree serves no purpose except to stimulate the vanity of an owner who is not sufficiently familiar with good dogs as to see some cryptic virtue in a list of names on a paper. Those names are of use only as a clue to what the dog's progeny may be like.

It is alleged that litters of puppies of similar ages have been reared together and so mixed up that the breeder has been unable to separate the litters with certitude and that such men are prone to assign the pedigree of one litter to a member of another litter. Such a mistake might be possible, but a breeder careless enough to confuse his litters, one with another, a man who has not sufficient acquaintance with his puppies and their type not to know them apart is not likely to be the kind of breeder who consistently produces good dogs. It requires an eye for small nuances of type to be a breeder of good dogs, and a man with such an eye is not likely to confuse puppies, one with another, which he sees daily.

Occasionally a bitch is accidentally mated to two dogs at one heat. In such case, the progeny is usually best disposed of without pedigrees; however, if both sires are of the same breed as the bitch, and if all three are of such excellence that it can be shown that failure to breed from the resultant progeny would hamper the progress of their breed, registration can sometimes be made with alternate sires. This requires a special dispensation from the governing body which maintains the stud book. It is a complication better avoided when possible.

The pedigrees of the stock to be mated must loom large in the programs of any breeder of dogs. They must not, however, be permitted to overshadow the individual dogs to whom they are attached and the proved efficiency of those individual dogs as breeding material. We breed dogs to produce better dogs and not to establish spectacular pedigrees. The pedigrees are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

To serve as that means to that end, the pedigree must be considered intelligently and only as a clue. It is necessary to judge what the various ancestors have contributed respectively to the individual and his germ plasma , and to understand that the name of a dog in a pedigree is no assurance of his contribution nor of the size of any contribution he may have made. The heart must not beat fast at the contemplation of a great name in a dog's pedigree unless the dog exhibits in himself the attributes associated with that great name and the ability to transmit those attributes to his progeny.

Pride in a dog's excellence is justifiable, and in his ability to engender excellence in his successors. That excellence has derived from some ancestor or ancestors: it is not some fairy gift from nowhere. The pedigree, analyzed correctly, shows whence it came. From it may be reckoned how that germ plasma may be united to another to preserve and intensify the good we possess and to eliminate or lessen some of the faults.

The pedigree is meaningless when detached from the dog. It must be correlated with him. A given pedigree as applied to one dog may mean one thing and as applied to the dog's full brother may mean something else. One dog may have inherited the major features of his type from one ancestor, the brother from another. A knowledge of genetics and of the manner in which Mendelian factors are carried by the genes enables us to grasp such a concept. That knowledge places the pedigree in its true perspective in the scheme of breeding.

To disregard or dispense with the pedigree is to sail the seas without a chart. To consider pedigrees to the exclusion of individuals is to be so concerned with navigation as to forget our destination, which is the harbor of perfect dogs.

Ch. Golden Knoll's King Alphonzo

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