# Weighing a high COI against other breeding factors?



## afewgoodshepherds (14 d ago)

What are the first thoughts that come to mind when you hear these data points:

I met a breeder with beautiful dogs who marketed her puppies ts granddaughters of a 2x world champion.
I bought a female from this breeder at 8w old in Nov. 2022.
I learned after sale parents are half siblings. Breeder didn't disclose this! Ugh.
Did genetic testing immediately through Embark. They found no evidence of carrier traits for the 223 conditions they test.
The puppy's COI is 43%.
Puppy's lineage has no evidence of poor hip scores, to my knowledge.

*Immediate questions:*
1. How much does this high COI complicate my aspirations to be a GSD breeder? (She's delightful in every way except this COI).

Secondary questions:
1. If I keep her for breeding, how can I mitigate a high COI outside of finding unrelated lines? (She'd be my first female and the start of my line).
2. How would you mitigate a higher COI while still maintaining the traits we know and love of GSDs?


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## selzer (May 7, 2005)

Sigh, you have a beautiful puppy that you know absolutely nothing about yet. If she was 8 weeks old in November of 2022, then she is 3months old. Of course she is delightful in every way. She is a puppy. Use her for your breeding program: research her lines, research other lines; train, train, train, train her; title her, get involved with canine sports, find what she excels at and go down that line; name your breeding program/kennel after her. 

Should you breed her with a high COI? No. Probably not. You will have some uncomfortable conversations about this choice down the line. That isn't the end of the world, but it is hard to explain why you chose to breed to a pup that is so closely inbred. As a buyer, you can claim ignorance of how tightly inbred the puppy is. As a breeder, you don't have that excuse. 

Breeding is not something you should consider after you acquire a puppy. If you want to be a breeder, than you need to buy a puppy with that in mind. That means you need to know what her lines are, you need to familiarize yourself with her pedigree _before_ you purchase the puppy. 

Most folks do not want to go into breeding to sell puppies to the least knowledgeable folks. You go into it wanting to sell your pups to knowledgeable people in the breed. So go out there and get yourself known. Spend a couple of years getting involved with people in person, trainers, club members, show-people, competitors. It's not easy to break into the world of dog-people. Everyone with a new puppy wants to breed it, and that turns people off right quick. Get involved in canine performance events and forget about breeding until you are ready to make your next purchase, when this puppy is several years old and where you want her to be. Then go about getting your foundation bitch with all of what you have learned in the mean time.


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