U.K. BREED CHAMPIONS & LEADING KENNELS
During our fairly short time in the breed we have developed a real hunger for information and data about these wonderful little dogs. What surprised us early on, was the difficulty we had finding information related to U.K. breed lines, breed champions, leading kennels, top CC winners etc. We felt that for us to create a breed plan to meet our vision, it was critical to understand the background and history of the breed in some detail. This led us to undertake a significant amount of investigative work to establish our own global ETT database. Many hundreds of hours have been spent collating data from the kennel club, breed club, global data sources and other breeders to create the database. Special mention should be made at this point to Roy Wilson, Carole Yeoman, Jane Williams, Andy Leonard & Nick Gourley for their help and support. In addition I must make mention of an excellent book I was recently given by Michelle Wild, entitled English Toy Terrier Book of Champions.
This book was compiled by John Richardson (Reeberrich kennel) first published in 1994 and then updated in 2000, it provides an excellent record of all breed champions from the very first Ch. Dolly in 1884 up to Dobrugh Look Who’s Talkin in 2000. We have thought about creating a new edition of the book to take it on from 2000 to present day, but that might be a project for a rainy day.
Ch. Dolly 1884
1st recorded ETT Champion
Our database contains the records of all 340 UK ETT champions starting from Dolly right up to the very latest in 2019 Ch. Etruria Out Of Words . The database contains pedigree data, lineage data, show win data for each of the champions loaded, and is used to help us make the very best possible decisions in our forward looking breed plan. For each of the 340 champions we have, where possible collated 10 generation sire and dam tail line pedigrees. This has allowed us to better understand the breadth of the available gene pool and to better understand the likelihood of successful breeding with different breed lines. It is clear from this analysis that if you remove the 2 or 3 lines of TMT introduced into the UK in the past 25 years, then all of our UK champions can be traced back to less than 5 breed lines. It is also clear from the analysis that line breeding and in some cases close line breeding has been instrumental in shaping our history as a breed and clearly line breeding is a direction we want to follow at Lasagesse.
Having lots of data in one place allows us to run some very interesting analysis. Below is a chart which shows the number of U.K. ETT championships awarded by decade. The graph makes very interesting reading, the impact of the great wars can clearly be seen in the numbers. If number of champions crowned can be attributed as a measure of breed popularity, then clearly the breed became very popular in the 1960’s before losing a little popularity during the 1970’s. Since then we have seen steady growth decade upon decade in champions crowned and I am sure that will continue through the current decade. Yes we may be a rare breed but maybe popularity of the breed is growing.
Another hot topic at the moment is the influence the introduction of Toy Manchseter Terrier (TMT) bloodlines has had on the health and quality of the ETT breed in the UK. If we dig into the pedigrees of the 52 Champions that have been awarded their titles in the current decade, only 4 dogs do not have any TMT bloodlines in their 5 generation pedigree, so 93% of all Champions this decade are a blend of ETT & TMT , compared with only 22% of Champions having TMT blended bloodlines in the previous decade, which speaks volumes for the influence TMT lines are having here.
