I
have had great fortune in surrounding myself with outstanding Great
Dane breeders. It is their skill and breeding programs that
have given us a wonderful base for our current program. The
best advice I can give anyone is to start with the best instead of
trying to breed up.
Our first champion bitch came from Barb
Kooper. We were introduced to Laura Kiaulenas and to BMW.
We became great friends and through her philosophy and help we
obtained Ch. BMW Arlecchina and BMW Nostalgia (Vicki Li Volsi
co-breeder). Laura's holistic approach led one of my
Foundations to grant funds to Purdue Vet School to study the
relationship between vaccines and autoimmune disease. Advisors
to this study were Drs. Larry Glickman, Jean Dodds, Paul Hardiman
and Neil O'Sullivan. This important study has had a large part
in modifying the Vaccine Protocols today. I believe my
indorsing this study is the most important of my achievements in
Great Danes. It will not only help the health of Danes, but
also other breeds.
Later, Hugo Gamboa and I became
friends and his generous advice and seed stock gave us another
important source of genetics for our breeding program. Then
Amy Thurow joined us as our Kennel Manager and exclusive handler and
she, too, has been a great additional asset to our showing and
breeding program.
After Laura died her mother asked
that I continue the BMW name, but I elected to add LR (BMW LR).
We continue to use her holistic approach to our health program.
Laura did a lot of line breeding, but had the ability (and courage)
to go to outside crosses to bring in traits that she needed.
My feeling is that you need to be careful in line breeding since you
may get wonderful results or disasters. If you have the
perfect dog free of genetic problems, you will get wonderful
results. If not, you will be doubling up on your genetic
problems.
We use our own organic beef raised
here and our kibble is always a super premium food that eliminates
all chemical additives and is as close to organic as possible.
I have now started my own
foundation (BMW LR Foundation). The goal and mission is to
breed Great Danes free of genetic diseases, but also using
parameters that will be useful to human genetics and minimize
environmental insults. We will be using software to help this
endeavor, but until more DNA markers are available, we will be using
longevity (in addition to conformation) in our breeding selections.
Our goal for longevity is the hope that we will increase life
expectancy of our Great Danes by choosing long-lived parentage in
our future breeding. As I have learned in my cattle-breeding
program, if you select only one or two traits you will lose overall
reproduction and performance. Therefore, until we get better
genetic markers, a most useful selection tool is longevity which
brings all genetic problems under one umbrella. Therefore, I
urge my fellow breeders to pay more attention to longevity.
Longevity, while we await the ongoing research that will give us the
necessary lab tests to eradicate genetic disease and thus lead to a
healthy, long-lived companion. When perusing pedigrees,
pictures, show champions, let us start asking, "how long did the
parents, great grandparents, etc. live?" This is a simple,
ready tool we can all use now, and let us not forget temperament is
also heritable.