Quote: My sole purpose in crossing Brabanters and Spitz was simply to get a little more genetic diversity. Both breeds have small gene pools, and my Spitz all came from a single hatching. The same with my Brabanters. My Spitz particularly are quite good. I was lucky enough to get eggs from a good breeder. I originally planned to breed the crosses back to the pure bred Spitz.
But then the possibility of breeding Cream (or Citron as they call it in Europe) Spitz arose. We, the members of the American Spitz club, would like to have all the colors the Europeans have. Some others are working on black, blue, white, and chamois Spitz. Since I have the genetic material for cream Spitz, they would like me to make it my project. I just don't know how to go about it.
It is your choice if you would like to make the cream your project. Perhaps if you go along with this that same group can advise you on how to do it. I still suggest reading about rotational breeding as in theory you have 2 groups of the rotation. If you raise10 chicks and keep only 3, then breed those and keep only 3, you are painting yourself into a corner potentially. THe ugly recessive genes show up with intense inbreeding. Do you have the stock number to throw out a whole line if a recessive should show up?
I had this happen in my sheep. I closed the flock and kept the best rams and bred them back to mothers, aunts, nieces. After about 10 years, I started having lambs with leg problems. After 3 lambs with hip dysplasia the light bulb went on! Duh. Recessive gene. THe quick fix was to bring in new blood to dilute the gene in my case as I was not breeding pure breds rather I was developing a line that was useful to me. Many lines of domestic animals do have defects, and it is only a problem when an offspring is a double recessive. My point is: you run the risk of creating more double recessives with heavy inbreeding. THe other way to look at this is that this is a testing method to see if there is a recessive hiding.
You said you were limited on space right? Can you breed the numbers of offspring it takes to bring back this color? Maybe just longer? Also, Is is as important to create a new color as it is to maintain a healthy population until the numbers are up? Again, I can only ask questions. I do think having a healthy popultaion to work from is important but you already know that!
