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A Bit About Breeding
Caucasian Shepherds are a very difficult breed to get involved with. Very difficult decisions will have to be made in regards to a breeding program when your ultimate goal and primary focus is on working ability. It is a very unfortunate fact that this is NOT a breed known for consistently producing either great health or great
working abilities.
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Working Qualities-
Something to keep in mind when searching for a working Caucasian Shepherd is to look at as many dogs in the pedigree as possible. Half siblings to the dogs in question, or to the sire and dam, other relatives as well. There are dogs that show up out of seemingly nowhere that do really well in experienced hands, but more often than not these dogs turn out to be flukes and do not reproduce themselves or only produce a very small number of dogs that are capable of working. There are some high profile bloodlines in this breed that produce one phenomenal dog PER GENERATION, and no more! With the rest being sub-par.
Don't let titles or the lack thereof fool you. We will discuss more about titles on another page, but for now I will simply say that a title does not make a dog, and a lack of titles does not mean a lack of quality or ability. When judging working ability and the quality of the dog, always look at the dog and the traits it has, not simply whether it has numbers and letters next to its name.
Genetics are a funny thing and quite often breeding is more of a science experiment than people will admit to. There are never any guarantees in breeding. No dog or bloodline is perfect. There are faults and flaws all around us. We as breeders must be able to recognize these faults and admit to them in order to make the best breeding decisions and to move a breeding program forward.
Even if you only breed the strongest dogs from the strongest bloodlines, undesirable traits will show up eventually. This is why not all puppies from every litter are considered breeding picks, and not every working pick puppy will mature to be a breeding quality dog. The quality of a bloodline and breeding program is seen in the consistency in which it produces dogs that closely meet the ideal of the breeder. If a litter produces one dog that is as close to the image of perfection as can be achieved, but all of the other dogs show obvious faults, can it really be said that the litter was a success? It is our opinion that the one great dog from a litter does not make up for the rest of the dogs being sub-par.
Breeding is always a balancing act of strengths and weaknesses. Because no dog is perfect, we must try to recognize the areas where each dog is strong and where it may lack compared to our "ideal." When choosing to do a breeding, each dog must show very compatible strengths and any weakness or lack in one dog should be an area where the other dog is very strong.
When we say faults, flaws, or weaknesses when describing dogs that are being bred, we don't mean serious health, structure, or temperament problems. No dog is perfect, but we try our best to come as close to our image of perfection as possible. So calling a dog "weak" or saying it "lacks" in one area simply means that the dog has less than our image of perfection calls for. These weaknesses are merely observations of things we wish to improve upon in order to produce dogs closer to our ideal. We do not breed dogs with serious faults or flaws of temperament.
Nerve issues are a perfect example of something that is not considered a "weakness" or "lacking" - it is plain and simple a huge fault that automatically eliminates a dog from our program. We do not keep and most definitely do not breed dogs that show fear of objects, sounds, new environments, strange people or have other sensitivities/fears. There is no excuse for breeding a dog that exhibits obvious weakness of temperament even if you are breeding to a dog that has a very strong and stable character. We do not breed dogs that exhibit sub-par levels of drive, energy or have health issues such as allergies, digestive problems, entropian, wry jaw etc.
MANY breeders attempt to "breed up" when they are putting two dogs together to produce a litter. An obviously sub-par or weak tempered animal is bred to a strong animal in the hopes that the strength of one will make up for the weakness of the other. What ultimately happens is that you may produce dogs that are better than the weak parent, but are not as good as the strong parent. When you breed sub-par dogs to strong, quality dogs you are not only introducing the good traits of the strong parent into the offspring, you are also introducing the weaknesses of the faulty parent into the pups and the bloodline. It can take generations to elliminate or reduce the negative impact of breeding a weak animal into a bloodline.
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