Inheritance in dogs : with special reference to hunting breeds / by Öjvind Winge ... translated from the Danish by Catherine Roberts.

  • Øjvind Winge
Date:
1950
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Inheritance in dogs : with special reference to hunting breeds / by Öjvind Winge ... translated from the Danish by Catherine Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/182 page VII
    Foreword could expect. That so large a work, in spite of its general de¬ pendability, should contain some errors is not surprising, espe¬ cially since the editors of the work cannot prevent the occur¬ rence now and then of incorrect statements concerning the color or ancestry of the dogs listed. Also, among dog breeders there are less scrupulous persons who succumb to the tempta¬ tion of listing as the father a dog other than the one that, to be consistent with their knowledge or supposition, should be so named. The breeder does not wish to give unfavorable in¬ formation about his beloved dogs. Concerning this point, Rudolf Lons, in his book. Der deutsche Hundesporf, sein Wesen ' und seine Ziele (1913), writes: The Statements of the breeders, when they cannot be accurately checked, must never be considered as material unopen to criticism. Should one believe these statements, then their dogs will inherit, al¬ most without exception, just what the rules of the society dictate that they ought to inherit. The tailless dogs are all born without tails, they have upright ears or long-hanging ears, if such are prescribed as the characters of the breed. Faults in build actually never occur; all their dogs ideally inherit the established characters of the breed. A breeder who will admit the contrary is exceedingly rare; he does not wish to place his breeding animals in a bad light. For this reason, in spite of the thirty years' work of special clubs, there does not exist as yet any reliable material from the breeders which is suitable for sci¬ entific treatment. But quite apart from the manner of inheritance of breed characters, many dog breeders need, as it seems to me from my experience, an elementary knowledge of the basic laws of heredity. How much more interesting is breeding work when it is undertaken with a knowledge of the laws of inheritance. A breeder with such knowledge looks at his animals with other eyes and greater understanding ,and learns to distinguish between what is inherited and what is not, a question which, in itself, is of extreme practical importance. One hears much too often statements that clearly indicate that the breeder lacks all under- vii
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