642 – Espen Engh Offers a Master Class on Dog Breeding
Espen Engh Offers a Master Class on Dog Breeding
Famed Norwegian Greyhound breeder and judge, Espen Engh, is back with host Laura Reeves offering a Master Class on dog breeding.
“When we started out, there was a combination of two very different British strains that had proven that it worked really worked,” Engh said. “Those two breeders were at the end of their career and they hadn’t mixed their dogs a lot while they were still active. But some very clever breeder very quickly found out that combining those two lines worked extremely well and produced dogs that had been almost unheard of before truly high quality.
“So we collected different crosses between those two lines to combine our own strain to start out with. And I do think it helped a lot that my mother had been active in the breed for 20 years before breeding the first litter. She had been judging for many years as well. We didn’t have to do a lot of the beginner’s mistakes. So from day one, we were able to start at a high note.
“When the breeder repeated (that successful breeding of two disparate lines) by luck or persistence, we were able to buy what we considered to be the best bitch in that repeat litter. And she turned out to be just as good as or probably better than those puppies from that first combination. So we were able to start with a really phenomenal bitch.
“We had a phenomenal male at the time too. He was runner up top dog all breeds in Norway. And maybe if we were amateurs, or if my mother was an amateur, we would have bred those two together, but they didn’t really fit. We would double up on faults. The male turned out not to be a good stud dog at all. And we had lots and lots of litters for other breeders. We never used him. So rather than using that top winning really beautiful dog, which didn’t fit the bitch, we didn’t do that from the start.
“So our first combination was quite successful and we got an outstanding bitch in that first combination. And then we quite quickly realized that in order to progress, you know, now we have like two generations of phenomenal bitches, we would never be able to be big breeders number wise. We didn’t have a big kennel, we didn’t have the style, the facilities to breed dogs on a large scale. So we had to make a system where you can actually breed successfully from a limited number of dogs.
“And I thought, why not just base it on breeding from the very best bitch of each generation? And that’s what we did. When we were at the most active, we would have three or preferably four litters from the very best bitch of each generation.
“As Greyhounds are very fertile, you’ll get an average of like 10 puppies or nine, 10, 11, 12 puppies. Each of those top bitches would then have 20 daughters to choose from. I mean, in every litter, we would keep all the bitches that were thought were good enough. Most of them never just one, two or three. And we’d run them on until they were fully grown so we would know for sure who was the best. And selected the best bitch of each generation and repeated that.
“Now, if the mother is great, the grandmother is great and the great -grandmother is great, you’re very likely to get the really good one out of 20 bitch puppies, aren’t you? But We also need some males to breed them to.
“We also chose the second-best bitch in the generation. Remember the mother had four litters, she would be bred to four different males. We selected the second-best bitch from each generation, preferably a half-sister to the main bitch, which I call the alpha bitch. So the second best bitch, the beta bitch, we would try outcrosses on her.”
641 – Espen Engh on Greyhounds and Judging
Espen Engh on Greyhounds and Judging
Host Laura Reeves is joined from Norway by famed breeder and judge Espen Engh of Jet’s Greyhounds for a two part conversation about Greyhounds, judging, breeding and why the Scandinavian dogs are so consistent in quality.
Int. Ch. Jet’s Elegant Negress, Engh’s first Best in Show winner from his first litter.
“I kind of inherited the interest for dogs in general and Greyhounds in particular because my mother started up with a Greyhound in 1955 so she was the source of everything,” Engh said. “She got her own mother hooked on the Greyhounds as well. So I’m a third generation Greyhound fancier and lover.
“My mother was only a teenager when she started out. She was very quickly bitten by the bug and started showing her first Greyhound all over Scandinavia. She didn’t breed, however, she didn’t have the possibility to do that. So my mother and I started breeding Greyhounds, 20 years after she got her first one, in 1975. And although my mother is no more with us, I keep reading from the same strain, actually from the same bitch line that was started in the early ‘70s.
“There are many things that make the Greyhounds unique. And one of them is their long, long, long history and the amount of generations that have gone into breeding greyhounds. I’m quite sure that the Greyhound is the only breed where you can actually trace the pedigrees back to the 1700s.
“(The first description of the Greyhound as having the “head of a snake, the neck of a drake”) is from a poem that was attributed to a woman called Juliana Burners more than 500 years ago.
Ad for one of Engh’s multiple BIS winning Greyhounds.
Actually, she didn’t exist. So it’s somebody else wrote it. But that you could say is kind of the first Greyhound standard, because it describes the Greyhound, the head, the neck, the feet in a poem. Greyhounds are a very sophisticated breed. They are very close to their owners. They are about a combination of substance with elegance.”
Engh has been invited to judge at the highest levels worldwide.
“It certainly is a privilege. It’s certainly something very enjoyable to be able to travel around, somebody else picking up your bill, to enjoy looking at dogs, feasting your eye on dogs, getting that little tear in your eye every now and then, maybe a goose bumps every now and then too, which is really one of the reasons for doing it.
“But it does also present some challenges and some difficulties. Some breeds do have very different breed standards and that can certainly pose some difficulties. Other breeds, actually the breed standards themselves are not that different, but the development of the breeds are. So they have developed in quite different directions.
“Obviously, and I think we need to state that from the beginning, if you are willing and able and do undertake judging a breed in a foreign country, you have to respect the breed standard in that country. I mean, that should go without saying, but it doesn’t always.”