Strategies for breeding in small populations

What does the future look like in terms of breeding strategies to preserve our working arctic dog breeds? How should we practically proceed when it comes to choosing breeding animals? With the background that the current way of breeding does not fully take advantage of the genetic variation in our breeds, we have thought a lot about what to do in the future. In the search for which method is best to use, both when it comes to preserving new founder populations and existing ones, we have found the Mean Kinship method, which you can read more about below. Here we will share with you the various methods we find to preserve a small closed population of dogs, with the hope that you will find new paths to think in.

How should one think when one has a limited range of genetic variation in a closed population? The picture above shows how you can combine the genetic material of different individuals to go from low variation in each individual to the offspring having the greatest possible genetic variation, with contributions from all the founder individuals. The image above is taken from the film Safeguarding genetic diversity in the Leonberger breed, with Pieter Oliehoek.

Click on the image above to get to the website where you can read about the four-step guide for how to plan work with breeds in small closed populations.