CATTLE have them. Sheep have them. Pigs and chickens have them, so why not estimated breeding values (EBVs) for working dogs too?
The intriguing prospect of Kelpie EBVs for qualities like “eye” or “cast” could be one of the outcomes of a three-year-project by a team at the University of Sydney.
Supported by Meat and Livestock Australia, the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation and the Working Kelpie Council of Australia, the world-first project is assessing how one of Australia’s home-grown assets, the Kelpie, can fulfil more of its considerable potential.
“We’ll be trying to give people better tools and information about working dogs, including a better understanding of how a good dog, properly handled, can improve a farm’s bottom line,” said project leader Paul McGreevy, a researcher and veterinarian.
“The other aspect we’ll look at is the opportunity costs of using an inappropriate dog, or badly handling a good dog.”
The project is focusing on Kelpies, but Professor McGreevy said the findings are likely to be applicable to other livestock working dogs, like the Australian Koolie or New Zealand Huntaway.
The researchers – Professor McGreevy, Professor Claire Wade and two veterinarians doing their doctoral studies – will work using the emerging science of behavioural genetics.
In the case of Kelpies, that will start with a survey of sheep and beef producers to establish what people regard as the chief value of their working dogs, and the behaviour that best demonstrates that value.
Survey participants will be asked what manoeuvres are the most difficult to train into a dog.
“A lot of the merit in our working dogs is that many of the behavioural responses we value in them are innately rewarding,” Professor McGreevy said.
“We’re also very interested in the responses that are valued, but which we need to encourage through rewards and conditioning.”
Having found what is valuable in a dog, the researchers plan to devise scientific tests to capture a dog’s performance of certain behaviours.
As any frustrated dog owner knows, performance can vary day to day, hour to hour.
The tests will reflect this variability, Professor McGreevy said,
ranking consistency in behaviour over several runs rather than trying to attempt a snapshot.
After compiling a database of dogs expressing different behaviour, the researchers will establish how heritable they are and then dive into the kelpie genome to look for evidence that certain key behaviours are encoded in DNA.
This sort of investigation is greatly helped by genetic variability – a reason the sheep and beef research communities have assembled “nucleus” flocks and herds with the widest-possible range of genetic variability.
In the case of the Kelpie, genetic variability is right to hand in the form of the “bench Kelpie”, the smaller, less athletic show animals that are bred to prescriptions far removed from the “working ability” that drives the evolution of working dogs.
But comparing the chromosomes of the bench Kelpie with the working Kelpie, the researchers might be able to pinpoint DNA that encodes valuable working traits.
If that’s possible, then Kelpie EBVs are possible.
Whether EBVs and other genetic tools like SNP (single-nucleotide polymorphism) genetic selection chips will become available to breeders of working dogs is a commercial decision beyond the scope of the project.
But there are advantages in starting late, Professor McGreevy said: one of them is that the database and genetic testing technologies needed to take working dog breeding to another level are already mature, and becoming steadily cheaper.
Click on this image to see our photos from the NSW Sheepdog Championships.