As I reached out to perspective advertisers for this issue, I heard a common complaint, “Why waste my money? No one is going to breed to my dog. They (bitch owners) are just going to breed to the same two or three dogs.” There were days when I could have sworn that these potential stud dog owners talked to each other and pre-planned their response as they were worded so similarly.

This response perplexed me and made me sad. Of course, it is true that there are ‘popular sires,’ there always has been. I too have bred to my share of popular sires over the years, some in their hay day while others were in the infancy of their stud careers with nothing yet to show their worth. I’m sure that I will continue to do so from time to time when I feel that such a dog has something to offer a particular bitch of mine.

But I’ve also bred to dogs whose contribution to the breed gene pool was minimal, if any. Breeding to such dogs is risky for the bitch owner. But I did it because I saw potential there. Sometimes it has paid off, other times I’ve regretted the decision. The regrets have come in the form of simply bad ‘clicks’, diseases manifesting that I had no prior experience with and unstable temperaments.

One would have had to have their head in the sand the last couple of decades not to have noticed the increasing occurrence of DCM in the breed. At first, we wrote off such claims as just “more dogs being made available for testing” or “increased spread of information via social media” as an excusal of such ‘perceived’ increases.

But the numbers are numbing. Both here and in Europe the percentage I hear again and again is over 60% of the breed has DCM. Extrapolating from data over the last few decades it is estimated that some 70% will be affected by 2020, and that by 2040 that number will be essentially 100%.

As dog breeders, we tend to breed to fix flaws as defined by our breed standard; choosing a mate subjectively based on who we think can make up for those flaws while keeping those attributes of our breeding program that we prize. By comparison, captive breeding managers do heavy math using data bases for the known entirety of all captive breeding populations. I’m talking seriously heavy Einsteinian eye-blinking, my-brainjust- checked-out kind of calculations.

According to Perdue University, the goal of captive breeding is to retain at least 90% of the initial diversity for 200 years by reducing the loss of alleles due to inbreeding and genetic drift. The whole purpose of the above equations is to pare down through all the possible worldwide candidates in captivity to find the one individual likely to hold rare alleles that are distinctly different than those of the purposed mate. These calculations are done for every proposed breeding. Through this method the loss of alleles is decreased, resulting in retention of genetic diversity in the captive population.

I wonder if one day the only Dobermans we see will be in zoo-like settings. At least there they might stand a better chance to avoid extinction through objective captive breeding.

I’m certainly not pointing any fingers; I have had more than my share of dogs die from DCM and I am slow myself to jump on the diversity breeding train. Old habits are, after all, hard to break. Thus, I too am part of the problem. I am Pandora, expressly forbidden to open the box which I have been given as a present but doing so anyway, bringing woe upon the world. We are Pandora, warned over and over about the crisis in our breed, only to continue to place our desires over discipline, perpetuating the crisis into the next generation. This includes not only breeders, but stud dog owners and even those potential advertisers who said, “No one is going to breed to my dog.” If no one knows your dog exists, if people forget that you have that lovely champion at home on the couch because you stopped showing him, then they certainly won’t breed to him. In that case he becomes lost to the gene pool, and the genetic diversity of the breed shrinks a little more, and we inch closer to that DCM prevalence of 100%.

Thanks for inviting us into your home,
Elizabeth