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| Bournehouse Golden Days © The Kennel Club |
Here's the orange belton English Setter that went Best of Breed yesterday.
She is clearly highly-rated - but she is also eye-wateringly inbred with a co-efficient of inbreeding of 34.9 per cent (8 gens) against a breed mean of 12.7 per cent.
Just to put that in perspective, a mother/son or full brother/sister mating would produce a dog with a COI of 25 per cent. So this girl really is keeping it in the family.
In fact, this dog's parents were half-siblings (which in itself would have produced a dog with a COI of 12.5 per cent). But there is a lot of background inbreeding which has pushed her COI up even further. One of her ancestors, Sh Ch Latest Dance at Bournehouse, is her great-great-great grandfather 10 times over. There is a huge cost to this in terms of the breed's genetic diversity - and that's on top of the fact that show-ring has, in the main, reduced this breed to a sweet but dimwitted simulcrum of its former, proudly-working self.
