Looking Beyond the Pedigree: From Genetic Snapshots to the Bigger Picture
Updated: 6 days ago
Key Takeaways
A test score, health clearance, pedigree or genomic result provides valuable information, but each is still a snapshot.
Longitudinal data allows breeders to put those snapshots in sequence and begin seeing the larger genetic picture.
The influence of a popular sire can continue expanding long after his own breeding career ends through successful breeding descendants.
Performance success and respected pedigrees cannot guarantee freedom from inherited risks we do not yet know how to identify.
Health information that lives primarily in private conversations and institutional memory creates an uneven playing field for breeders.
Missing health information is not the same as a documented history of good health.
Better breeding decisions may depend on preserving enough information, for long enough, that future breeders can see the movie rather than a collection of isolated snapshots.
I Thought I Was Seeing the Big Picture
Earlier this year, I wrote about the difference between pedigree-based and genomic coefficients of inbreeding. I do not intend to revisit that discussion here. My earlier article, Coefficient of Inbreeding (COI) in Small Munsterlanders, explains why pedigree and genomic COI measure related but different aspects of genetic similarity.
At the time, I believed I was beginning to see the larger picture. I had pedigree calculations, genomic information, performance testing, health records and years of experience with the dogs behind my breeding program.
I also believed that testing progeny would help close the loop between what we expected from a mating and what the puppies actually inherited.
Since then, enough Cedars Point progeny have received Embark testing that I could finally begin doing exactly that.
What I did not yet understand was that I was still looking at a collection of snapshots.
I started with our G litter, produced by Cedar and Yetta. The SMCA pedigree database calculated a 10-generation pedigree COI of 4.19% for that mating. Embark's Pair Predictor estimated an expected genomic coefficient of inbreeding, or eCOI, of 11%.
Seven G-litter dogs now have Embark genomic COI results. Their results are 10%, 10%, 11%, 11%, 12%, 12% and 13%. The average is 11.43%. I found that fascinating. Embark's mating-level prediction of 11% came remarkably close to the observed average of the seven tested offspring, yet the individual puppies still spread across a range from 10% to 13%.
The prediction described the mating quite well. It did not describe every puppy as though they were genetically interchangeable.
That result made me curious enough to keep looking.
One Litter Was Interesting. Three Litters Made Me Pay Attention.
I next looked at our H and I litters.
Six tested H-litter dogs currently range from 12% to 14% genomic COI, with an average of approximately 12.8%. Five tested I-litter dogs range from 12% to 16%, with an average of 14%. The I-litter results are 12%, 13%, 14%, 15% and 16%.
I understood before doing this work that full siblings do not inherit identical combinations of DNA. Most breeders who spend time studying genetics understand that concept. What changed for me was seeing the variation laid out in dogs I bred, puppies I raised and litters whose pedigrees I knew intimately.
It moved the concept out of a genetics discussion and into my own breeding program.
More importantly, it caused me to wonder what else I understood intellectually but had never really learned to see.
From Snapshots to a Movie
I have been thinking a lot lately about snapshots.
In another article I recently submitted for publication, I described performance testing as a snapshot of a dog at one moment in time. A Natural Ability test, Gun Dog test, Utility test or even a Versatile Champion title tells us something meaningful about a dog. I believe deeply in the value of objective testing and have built much of the Cedars Point breeding program around it.
But a test is still a snapshot.
A photograph works much the same way. I can take a picture of a six-month-old dog and preserve exactly what that dog looked like on that day. The image may be completely accurate. It still does not tell me what the dog looked like three months earlier or what that same dog will look like at three, seven or ten years old.
The more I worked with our longitudinal breeding data, the more I began to wonder whether I had been looking at genetics in much the same way.
A pedigree is a snapshot of ancestry.
A pedigree COI is a calculation based on the relationships recorded in that pedigree.
An Embark result tells me something about the DNA of the individual dog tested.
A health clearance tells me what was evaluated and known at the time it was performed.
A NAVHDA score tells me how a dog performed on a particular day under a particular set of conditions.
None of those snapshots is false. Each has value. The problem comes when I mistake one snapshot, or even several disconnected snapshots, for the entire story. What I really wanted to see was the movie. That meant taking the information we had accumulated over time and putting it in sequence. The mating prediction. The puppies produced. Their individual genomic results. Their health histories. Their performance. Which dogs eventually entered the breeding population. What they produced. Which of their offspring were bred again.
Once I started doing that, I realized I had been asking pedigrees to answer a question they were not really designed to answer.
I knew how to look backward and ask where a dog came from.
Now, I wanted to know where those genetics went.
We Usually Read Pedigrees in One Direction
Most of us read a pedigree backward. We start with the dog in front of us. We look at the sire and dam, then the grandparents, great-grandparents and dogs farther back.
The farther we move into a traditional pedigree, the more the ancestry becomes a web of names and connecting lines. Ancestors reappear. Branches cross. Kennel names change. The information may be present, but recognizing reproductive influence requires us to ask a different question. Instead of asking only, “Who are this dog's ancestors?” I began asking, “What happened after an influential dog entered the breeding population?” How many offspring did that dog produce? Which of those offspring were later bred? Which descendants became influential themselves? How many apparently separate kennel lines ultimately trace through different branches of the same relatively recent ancestry?
That forward-looking approach changes the picture.
A sire's influence is not limited to the number of litters he personally produces. His influence can expand through successful sons and daughters, then again through grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The number of direct offspring is only the beginning. When I followed a pedigree backward, I saw ancestry.
When I began following the genetics forward, I started to see movement.
Following Cody Forward
One of the dogs I followed was Cody vom Apfelbaumbach.
Cody was a German import who became influential in the North American Small Munsterlander population. One of his sons was VC Hunting Hills' Hemlock, better known as Hemi. From Hemi, I followed two particularly productive sons documented in the SMCA pedigree database. One had 45 documented direct offspring. The other had 44. That second branch continued through at least seven direct offspring with continued breeding activity in the pedigree records I reviewed. Among those branches were dogs with 15, 11, 27 and 16 documented direct offspring. The 27-offspring branch continued through additional breeding descendants and eventually reached a sire I used in my own breeding program.
When I followed Cody backward, I saw a pedigree.
When I followed him forward, I began to see a movie.
The point is not to add every offspring number together and pretend each represents a unique genetic contribution. Pedigree networks overlap, and doing that would overstate what the data show.
The point is much simpler.
Cody's influence did not end with Cody.
Hemi's influence did not end with Hemi.
The influence continued through successful progeny that became breeding dogs, then through their successful progeny. It moved into different kennels and through multiple generations. At some point, the original influential sire moves far enough back in a pedigree that we stop thinking of a proposed mating as breeding back on that dog.
The kennel names are different. The immediate parents are different. Several generations have passed.
The ancestry did not disappear simply because the names changed.
It moved.
The Popular-Sire Effect Is a Generational Problem
The popular-sire effect is not a new concept in canine population genetics.
Researchers have warned for years that disproportionate use of individual sires can reduce genetic diversity and rapidly disseminate inherited disorders. In a modeling study examining mating practices and genetic disease, researchers found that a realistic popular-sire scenario produced a 4.4-fold greater risk of disseminating a genetic disorder than random mating.
The reason is not difficult to understand.
A successful sire produces many offspring. If several of those offspring are also successful, breeders use them. Their offspring spread into additional breeding programs. Some of those descendants become influential themselves. The original dog does not need to remain alive or actively breeding for his influence to continue expanding.
What I had not fully appreciated is that the popular-sire problem may become harder to see as generations pass.
When the original dog is actively breeding, everyone recognizes the connection.
Ten or fifteen years later, breeders may be selecting dogs from different kennels and looking at different immediate families while repeatedly drawing from branches of the same ancestral network.
This is not necessarily intentional linebreeding. It does not require someone to sit down and deliberately decide to concentrate one dog throughout the breed. Population-level concentration can develop from many individually reasonable breeding decisions made over time. That may be what makes it so difficult to recognize. No one breeder has to make an obviously reckless decision for the movie to end somewhere nobody intended.
Why Were We So Confident?
As I followed these lines, another question kept bothering me. Some of the dogs that helped shape the North American Small Munsterlander population came from Germany. The dogs themselves did not necessarily arrive in North America with extensive personal testing records. Their initial credibility was rooted, at least in part, in their pedigrees, their parents and the reputation of the German performance-breeding system behind them. Then those imported dogs were tested here.
They performed exceptionally well. They earned titles. They demonstrated natural ability and versatile performance. Breeders used them, and many of their offspring performed well too.
Think about the confidence loop that can create.
A dog comes from a respected European breeding system with accomplished dogs behind it. The dog arrives in North America and proves itself in our testing system. The dog's offspring perform. Several of those offspring become breeding dogs. Their offspring perform. At every stage, the snapshots we can see appear to reinforce the original decision.
We found good dogs. We bred good dogs. They produced more good dogs. Why wouldn't we continue?
The international Kleine Münsterländer breeding system is built around performance, character, health, pedigree analysis and calculated breeding values. It also recognizes something that is easy to forget: breeding values and mating calculations deal in probabilities. They cannot guarantee the outcome of an individual puppy or eliminate risks science cannot yet identify.
That distinction matters.
A rigorous breeding system can reduce known risks. It can create structure around breeding decisions and improve the information available to breeders. It cannot guarantee that a dog is free of every inherited risk that has not yet been identified, cannot be reliably measured, develops later in life or follows a complex mode of inheritance.
I began wondering whether, here in North America, we had sometimes blurred that distinction. Did confidence in the breeding system behind an import become confidence in the genetic safety of the dog? Did exceptional North American performance reinforce that confidence? Did successful progeny reinforce it again? At some point, did a respected pedigree and a series of outstanding snapshots become a proxy for something neither could actually prove?
I don't know.
There is no smoking gun sitting in front of me that answers those questions.
But after watching the movie move forward through generations, I think they are questions worth asking.
Genetics Carries What We Want and What We Don't Know Is There
The problem with genetic inheritance is that it does not care why we selected a dog.
We may be breeding for search, point, cooperation, water work, temperament or structure. When we select a successful dog and expand his influence through a population, we do not transmit only the traits that caught our attention.
We transmit genetic material. Some of it we understand. Some of it we can test. Some of it we cannot yet see.
This is where inherited health becomes uncomfortable. Idiopathic epilepsy is one example, and I use it carefully because even the word makes breeders uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable.
The International Veterinary Epilepsy Task Force recognizes a proven or suspected genetic basis for idiopathic epilepsy in a number of dog breeds while also making clear that inheritance patterns differ among breeds and that many genetic causes remain unresolved. In some studied populations, pedigree analysis has supported complex or polygenic recessive inheritance rather than a simple single-gene explanation. That matters to breeders because there may be no straightforward carrier test to run before a mating. A dog can appear healthy and perform at an exceptional level. A dog can reproduce before a health problem becomes apparent elsewhere in the family.
Several generations can pass while breeders are still trying to determine whether cases they are hearing about are isolated, familial or part of a larger inherited pattern.
Now place that uncertainty inside a small breeding population shaped by influential sires and successful breeding descendants.
That is where I become uncomfortable. Not because I can point to one dog and say, “There is the problem.” I can't.
The discomfort comes from realizing how quickly a risk we do not yet understand could move through the same reproductive network that so efficiently preserved the traits we valued.
The movie does not carry only the scenes we want to remember.
What If the Important Part of the Pedigree Isn't Written Down?
During this research, I revisited the pedigree record of another highly accomplished and influential imported dog. I knew the history associated with that dog. I knew why the breeding history mattered to me when I evaluated pedigrees containing him.
The official pedigree database lists the dog as “Retired.”
That is all the breeder reading the record learns about the retirement. A person who has spent years in this breed may know more. Someone may remember a conversation. Someone may know which longtime breeder or breed official to call. Someone may already know enough to ask a very specific question.
A newer breeder does not have that advantage. That breeder sees “Retired.”
The database is the same, but the information available to the two breeders is not.
That is a problem.
Breed health information should not depend on who you know, who you call or whether you already know enough to ask the right question. I understand why this information is difficult to record. I really do. No breeder wants an uncomfortable health concern attached to a dog they bred or owned. I don't want it attached to mine. I have openly provided health information about Cedars Point dogs and have experienced the discomfort of seeing negative information become part of a permanent record.
It can feel especially unfair when your dogs have detailed health histories and another dog's record appears spotless.
But I have come to believe we have to get above that. The answer cannot be for me to report less. The answer has to be for all of us to preserve more meaningful information, more consistently and with appropriate context. Otherwise, we create a system that can unintentionally reward silence. A dog with three documented health concerns may appear less healthy than a dog with none. Yet one may simply have a transparent breeder behind it while the other has an incomplete record.
Missing information is not a clean bill of health. A blank space is still a snapshot. We should be careful about imagining the movie that came before it.
Institutional Knowledge Cannot Be Our Health Database
There are people in every breed who carry decades of knowledge. They remember which dogs produced what. They remember health concerns that surfaced years later. They remember why a dog quietly stopped breeding. They know the connections that are not obvious in a five-generation pedigree.
Those people are invaluable.
The problem is when the information exists primarily inside those people. People retire. Leadership changes. Relationships change. Memories fade. Emails disappear. Eventually, every one of us leaves the breed. If the health history goes with us, we have not preserved institutional knowledge. We have temporarily borrowed it. This becomes even more concerning when a breeder must rely on a private conversation to understand a pedigree. The person providing the information may be entirely sincere, but the system still depends on that individual deciding what is relevant, remembering it accurately and communicating it completely.
No one person should have to carry that responsibility.
More importantly, future breeders should not have to depend on it.
If information is important enough to influence whether a dog is bred, restricted or retired, we should find a professional and fair way to preserve why. Not rumor. Not accusation. Not an unverified health label carelessly attached to a dog.
We need documented information, source context and appropriate qualification.
The uncomfortable truth is still more useful than a comfortable blank.
Then I Looked Again at My I Litter
This is where the research became personal.
Our 2025 I litter was produced from Yetta and Cooper. I did not make that mating blindly. I studied their pedigrees. I knew the historical health concerns associated with one influential dog in Cooper's ancestry. I was also familiar with the Cody and Hemi line and understood its importance within the North American population.
I knew both histories.
What I did not appreciate when I planned the mating was how those histories came together in Cooper's deeper pedigree.
It was only after I stopped reading pedigrees exclusively backward and began tracing influential dogs forward through their breeding descendants that I saw the network differently. Cody produced Hemi. Hemi produced influential sons. One of those branches continued through a son with 44 documented offspring and then through multiple reproducing descendants. The branch moved through additional kennels and generations before reaching Cooper.
Separately, Cooper's pedigree also contains the influential retired dog whose health history I already knew. I knew the history of that dog. I knew the history of Cody and Hemi. However, I had not fully appreciated that I was looking at those histories together in one pedigree. That was my “wow” moment. I had studied Cooper's pedigree. The pedigree was accurate. I had looked at performance records, health testing and the information available to me.
None of those snapshots was false.
What changed was that I finally put enough of them together to see the movie.
Cody and Hemi were no longer names appearing somewhere in a pedigree. I could follow their influence moving through successful breeding descendants, through changing kennel names and across generations until one branch reached Cooper.
The other influential dog was no longer simply a name whose historical health context I happened to know.
The histories were sitting together in the same pedigree. I had not fully seen the population history behind it.
What unsettled me most was that the information had not necessarily been hidden from me. I knew where Timber Trail's Cedar came from. I knew the histories I was trying to avoid. Yet two dogs I had consciously tried not to bring into my breeding program were sitting just beyond the edge of the three-generation pedigree I had been looking at. The information did not have to be secret to be functionally invisible. It was simply outside the frame.
And that realization raised another uncomfortable question for me. Within our breed, I have heard the belief that enough generations between a current dog and an ancestor associated with a serious inherited health concern eventually makes the risk go away or less likely.
I am no longer comfortable with that assumption.
Generations create recombination. They can dilute the expected proportion of DNA inherited from a particular ancestor, and a particular descendant may inherit none of a specific ancestral segment. But generations alone do not function as a genetic cleansing mechanism. If a heritable risk remains in a breeding population and moves through reproductive descendants, the passage of time or the number of generations does not, by itself, prove that the risk has disappeared.
That distinction becomes especially important when the mode of inheritance is unresolved. Idiopathic epilepsy in dogs is not one genetically uniform disease across every breed. The scientific literature describes breed-specific differences and, in many populations, suspected complex or polygenic inheritance involving multiple susceptibility genes rather than a single identifiable mutation. Without a known causal variant or validated breed-specific genetic test, I do not know how anyone can look at a pedigree and declare that four generations, five generations or six generations have made a historical concern genetically irrelevant.
Distance in a pedigree is not the same thing as evidence of absence.
And when influential ancestry has moved through multiple breeding descendants, the more important question may not be how many generations separate my dog from one ancestor. The question may be whether those ancestral lines have continued moving through the population and are now meeting again.
Five I-litter puppies currently have Embark genomic COI results. They range from 12% to 16%, with an average of 14%. Those results are part of the longitudinal record I am building. They are not what caused me to reconsider the pedigree.
The larger progeny project did.
The G litter taught me the value of comparing prediction with outcome. The H litter encouraged me to keep collecting data. Following the Cody and Hemi network forward taught me to look at reproductive influence differently.
The I litter forced me to turn that same scrutiny toward my own breeding decision.
I found myself looking at Briar and thinking about breeding decisions made years before she was born.
Different countries. Different kennels. Different breeders. Different generations.
Yet those decisions were still part of the genetic landscape I navigated when I selected her sire.
The snapshots had become a movie, and the movie had reached my kennel.
And if I am being truthful, I did not want to be watching that movie. I have spent my years as a breeder trying to avoid it. I have studied pedigrees, asked uncomfortable questions, tested dogs and tried to understand the health histories behind the names on a page. I knew more of this history than many breeders entering the breed today would have any reasonable way to know.
And still, there it was, looking back at me through my computer screen.
Not a diagnosis. Not proof that something terrible had happened or even will. But a history I thought I understood, moving through generations and converging in a pedigree I had selected myself.
What Do I Actually Know About the Other Side of the Pedigree?
When I reconsider the I litter today, I am relieved that, to the best of my knowledge, the other side of the mating does not carry the same concentration of historical concerns I was examining in Cooper's ancestry.
I need to qualify that statement carefully.
“To the best of my knowledge” is not the same as “free of risk.” There is an imported dog deeper in that broader family whose breeding status and history have also raised questions for me and were noted by the club. That dog was once retired and later returned to breeding. I do not know enough to draw a conclusion from that unclear, vague and undocumented history, and I will not manufacture one. But even that uncertainty reinforces the problem.
What is documented? What is known privately? What is rumor? What was once considered concerning but later reevaluated? Why was a breeding status changed Where does a future breeder go to distinguish among those possibilities?
If our databases preserve only a status and not the context, the next breeder is left to reconstruct the history through private conversations. If the right people are still available. If the breeder knows whom to ask. If the breeder already knows there is a question.
That is too much “if” for a breed-health system.
Looking Beyond
I started this project thinking I was going to compare predicted and realized COI results from my own litters.
I did that.
The G litter gave me a remarkably clean example of a mating-level genomic prediction aligning closely with the observed average of tested progeny.
Then I kept looking.
I followed influential dogs forward instead of only reading pedigrees backward. I watched a successful sire's influence move through successful sons, then through their sons and daughters, across kennel names and generations. I revisited what the scientific literature has warned about for years as the popular-sire effect.
Then I thought about health information I knew only because I had been in the breed long enough to hear it. Finally, the pedigree trail led back to Cooper, Yetta and my own I litter. That is where this stopped being an academic exercise for me.
I can question what breeders twenty or thirty years ago believed about German imports. I can wonder whether respected pedigrees and exceptional North American performance gave us a level of confidence that went beyond what the available science could actually guarantee.
I can question whether we allowed too much health history to live in people's memories instead of permanent records.
I can criticize the tendency of breeders to hold uncomfortable information close because none of us wants our dogs to look bad.
But eventually, I have to look at my own breeding program.
I studied the I-litter pedigree. I knew more historical context than the database showed.
And I still did not fully appreciate how influential ancestral histories converged until I followed the breeding network forward.
So where does that leave me? I don't think it leaves me with a smoking gun.
I think it leaves me with a responsibility.
The genetics we preserve do not include only the traits we intended to keep. A breeding population also carries the things we have not identified, the risks we do not yet know how to test and the histories we may find uncomfortable to discuss. If we continue to rely primarily on pedigrees, performance results and institutional memory, how many patterns will we recognize only after enough dogs are affected for the pattern to become impossible to ignore?
How many breeders will make thoughtful, carefully researched decisions with incomplete information simply because the uncomfortable part of the history never made it into the record?
Years later, if a breeder begins hearing from owners about a serious health problem, will we tell that breeder the history was known?
Will we ask why they did not know enough to call the right person?
Or will we finally acknowledge that they should not have needed an insider to tell them where to look?
I don't know what the North American Small Munsterlander population would look like today if breeders twenty or thirty years ago had possessed the genomic tools, longitudinal health databases and population-mapping capabilities available to us now.
They did not have them.
We do.
The harder question is what we are willing to do with that information.
Perhaps stewardship asks more of us than collecting better snapshots.
Perhaps it asks us to preserve enough information, for long enough, that the breeders who come after us can see the movie.
Because the decisions we make today do not remain frozen in a pedigree.
They move.
Research and References
Leroy, G., Baumung, R., and colleagues. “Mating practices and the dissemination of genetic disorders in domestic animals, based on the example of dog breeding.” Animal Genetics (2011).
A modeling study examining how mating practices affect the dissemination of genetic disorders. The study found substantially greater dissemination risk under a realistic popular-sire scenario than under random mating.
Calboli, F.C.F., Sampson, J., Fretwell, N., and Balding, D.J. “Population Structure and Inbreeding From Pedigree Analysis of Purebred Dogs.” Genetics (2008).
A large pedigree-based examination of purebred dog populations demonstrating substantial loss of genetic diversity and the effect of breeding practices on population structure.
Parker, H.G. and Ostrander, E.A. “Canine Genomics and Genetics: Running with the Pack.” PLoS Genetics (2005).
An overview of canine population structure, breed formation, bottlenecks and the genetic consequences of selective breeding.
Hülsmeyer, V.I., Fischer, A., Mandigers, P.J.J., and colleagues. “International Veterinary Epilepsy Task Force's current understanding of idiopathic epilepsy of genetic or suspected genetic origin in purebred dogs.” BMC Veterinary Research (2015).
A breed-focused review of evidence for genetic involvement in canine idiopathic epilepsy and the differing inheritance patterns observed or suspected among breeds.
Berendt, M., Farquhar, R.G., Mandigers, P.J.J., and colleagues. “International Veterinary Epilepsy Task Force consensus report on epilepsy definition, classification and terminology in companion animals.” BMC Veterinary Research (2015).
The IVETF consensus framework for defining and classifying epilepsy in dogs and cats.
Kleine Münsterländer International. “Breeding.”
An overview of International Kleine Münsterländer breeding coordination, breeding values, health considerations and population management.
About the Author
Jeff Mizenko breeds, trains and hunts Small Munsterlanders at Cedars Point Kennel with his wife, Brenda. He has an unfortunate habit of pulling on loose threads, whether they lead into a pedigree, a research paper, a hunting dog's performance or a question he probably could have left alone. More often than not, the dogs are responsible for starting it.
Jeff approaches breeding as a practitioner rather than a scientist. His interest is in what can be learned by combining research and testing with years of observing the dogs Cedars Point produces, including the things that don't turn out as expected. He believes responsible stewardship requires breeders to be as willing to examine their own decisions as they are the decisions made by others.
The pedigree in reverse. Interesting concept!