An Animal Breeder’s Approach to Producing High-Quality Working Dogs

Abstract

Genetic improvement in a set of traits occurs when dogs selected to become parents of the next generation are superior in performance compared to the population from which they were selected. The amount of genetic change to expect from one generation of selection is governed by both the heritability of the trait(s) being improved and by the degree to which average performance of newly selected parents exceeds the average performance of the population from which they were selected.