Hall of Fame English Setters and the Coefficient of Inbreeding

Hall Of Fame English Setters and Coefficient of Inbreeding

Do the Hall of Fame dogs in her pedigree give Sugar more chance of being a great one? Is she better off with more of them or with fewer ones repeated more often? Is a lower COI better for performance and a higher COI better for production?

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The Breeding of bird dogs has been part art and part science for hundreds of years. Unfortunately a lot of the “science” doesn’t always produce results that are as distinct or repeatable. And the art part seems no more definite.

The Coefficient of Inbreeding (COI) is one of the more scientific tools that a lot of people are starting to look to in order to help predict what they will get from a given litter. The COI is essentially a statistic that has been devised to describe or identify the amount of “inbreeding” present. Out of curiosity I wanted to take a look at COI in some way to determine if it was a good predictor of quality breedings so I could use it to assist in my breeding plan.

I wanted to focus specifically on English Setters as that is my breed. I decided to look at English Setters that have been elected to the Bird Dog Hall Of Fame (HOF). First, this kept the sample size small and easy to work with. In truth it may have been statistically too small to provide meaningful results.

Second, using HOF dogs allowed Setters from multiple venues to be represented. To select winners of one major trial or another would have geared the results toward that particular venue, in my mind.
My intent here is to provide a table I created to give you a look at the COI numbers on most of the English Setters in the HOF. I must give huge credit to the Willie Walker Pedigree database for the information on the COIs (8 generation) that I found on these dogs. If you are a Setter breeder you need to be looking at their database; it is amazingly helpful.

I also included the COI of the sire and dam to see if maybe those would be telling, and whether the sire or dam were a HOF dog or a field trial champion.

Personally, I don’t see that the HOF Setters support COI as an indicator of greatness. However, I honestly feel that it is too small of a sample size to be statistically meaningful. While I had intended to work out a mean and standard deviation, I think the sample size is so small as to make this pointless. With the lowest COI being 1.695 (Flaming Star) and the highest 29.312 (Count Noble) and only 27 dogs in between with COIs spread evenly throughout, there appears to be no telling point.

On a couple of side notes, I did find two interesting (at least to me) points. Only one Setter I found has sired two HOF dogs: CH Grouse Ridge John. He sired Tomoka and Grouse Ridge Will. If you look at their production and for what what he is ultimately responsible, it makes you wonder why Grouse Ridge John isn’t in the HOF.

A second point I found interesting is that Destinare and Hick’s Rising Sun were whelped by dams of the same breeding, Sandhill Sheba and Sandhill Becky. From a breeder’s standpoint, they were on to something with that litter.

So from here, where could we go to find more definitive information on COI and field trial Setters? If we brought in another bird dog breed, we would get more numbers, but then we’re not looking at Setters, and could that change things? I think maybe we could get more numbers if we included winners of the various English Setter Awards, which may be a good place to go next. We would still have a variety of venues represented. I also think more females would then be represented as the HOF process seems to work against females.

But for now, it’s up to those breeding to determine how much COI means to them and to what degree to rely upon it.

Statistics on COI garnered with the help of the Willie Walker Pedigree Program among other sources.