Best to Best vs Pretty Ped?

[TFX]

THIS....THIS RIGHT HERE - THIS IS WHAT I"M TALKIN BOUT!

TFX, I've like a ton of your posts in the past, but this one is straight to the point and good stuff. Said a whole lot of stuff I wanted to say.....but better.

Thanks NQK, you're a real gentleman, and there aren't many of those left in the fancy.

[Officially Retired]

On all of this "best" business, I'll tell you my thoughts. You could offer me to breed to the latest 5 time winner who has shown a lot of heart, and I really don't want any of it, even if he is the "best" dog around. You see, for me he is not the best. We have just worked way too hard for much too long to go willy-nilly breeding to any old great dog, even as rare as great dogs are.
I am a seed stock breeder, and I would breed to the very good dog of my line over the great outcross every time. If someone with my stock wants to make a cross and turns up with something extraordinary, then I would consider breeding that back and tolerating the outcrossed 1/4 as a means of improvement, but that would be about it for me. I still take the risk of what is behind that outcrossed quarter haunting me for generations. I have seen way too many "best" dogs; including CH, GR CH, and ROMS, throw garbage because nobody took the decades required to stabilize the gene pool behind them. Now that I have a gene pool I trust and believe in, nothing else is really appealing. It's not that I don't appreciate the great dog for what he is, but he doesn't appeal to me as a brood dog as a means to improve my personal breeding efforts.

Great post. That was my experience, time-and again, all throughout my breeding dogs: every time I made a cross, even though many of my "cross dog" efforts yielded great dogs, I always had highly-inbred(linebred) dogs on the yard that would whip them. And when I bred my core dogs back into the crosses, the 3/4-1/4 results were always better still than the original crosses.

Further, when I ran my core dogs into other people's crosses in school, those other people almost always picked up. When I sent my core dogs to all 4 corners of the earth, they would routinely (8-9x out of 10) whip just about every "badass cross" they ever faced in the pit, by out-smarting, out-gutting, and out-lasting them.

So I pretty much stopped bothering to make crosses.

Jack