What is the best way for a breeder to reproduce a beagle he really likes?
By Ralph Gillum, BraceBeagling Columnist
August 01, 2004

A serious breeder would take a real good look at all the physical and behavior traits, as well as the running characteristics of both the beagle he desires to duplicate and its close relatives. Only then would a decision be made to try to replicate it. Some type of inbreeding must be used, so any limiting or negative traits are going to be intensified. This is of great concern for genetically controlled reproductive traits such as low sperm count, low thyroid, irregular or long heat cycles, small litters, giant or water pups, difficulty whelping, poor mothers, etc. Intensifying any of these could well result in a reproductive dead end.

The most obvious method to replicate an outstanding beagle is simply to take the best offspring of the opposite sex and breed it back to the outstanding parent. Some breeders feel that if you then select the best pup from the resulting litter and repeat this process twice more, the third mating will result in pups that closely resemble the desired parent.

Another less well-known method was proposed by the late Al Steinke of Argo fame. Max Scott, a popular Michigan beagler and licensed trial judge, told me Al believed the best way to duplicate a dog was to select a bitch that is as much like the desired dog as possible and mate them. From the resulting litter, select the bitch pup that is the most like the sire and breed her back to him. This may not be the best pup, just the one most like her sire. From that litter, again select the bitch pup most like her sire and breed back to him. From this second litter, select the male and female pup most like their sire and mate them to each other. Al felt that the resulting brother/sister bred litter should contain a pup that closely resembles the original sire. You could use this method with a female; however, you would have to breed her three times before making the brother/sister cross. Therefore, you would need to start off with a young bitch in order to follow this through.

Max told me that years ago he had followed this procedure and ended up with a litter of one male pup which had a physical defect. I believe Al would have told Max that he probably was not as thorough as he should have been in evaluating the physical traits of the dog he selected to duplicate.

Probably the most often used method to produce a similar dog is simply to line breed to the desired individual, getting as many crosses to that dog as possible. With this method, breeders are doing a trade off. They are lowering their chances of getting any pup that is really close to being a copy of the desired parent, but increasing their chances that they will not run into that reproductive dead end.

Since breeding is somewhat of a numbers game, with either of the “breed back” methods you could select two or more pups to breed back, not just the best one or the most similar one. This would increase the odds that you would have some healthy, good running dogs with which to work, even though many of them will probably not closely resemble the desired parent.

After reviewing the above methods, I feel any of the three could result in offspring that resemble the desired parent. However, simply line breeding to the desired individual is the least likely method of the three to result in a near duplicate. In all three methods, the two most important things is the selection of the original parents, and selection of the pups produced that are bred back to the desired parent.