It has been said that like begets like. This is very true up to a certain point, but it does not mean when a dog or bitch lias an ancestor with a noticeable fault, that this fault will not crop out somewhere.

  As an instance of this, I have in my kennels a cocker spaniel bitch with a beautiful body, well up on the leg and strong boned, but just a shade weak in head development. I also have two studs, one exceptionally strong headed and also well formed in the body. According to pedigrees and all known facts, this would make an excellent mating. When the puppies arrived they were all strong headed and they had good bodies, but every one of them had an out-thrust lower jaw. This fault did not come from any of the immediate ancestors, but was a characteristic that had skipped several generations and then made a very definite appearance.

  The other stud is a good dog, but he has been beaten by the first in four out of five shows. He is a little too long in the body and his muzzle is just a bit too short. In other words, one of his faults is the same as that of the bitch. However, his blood line was even better suited to the bitch than that of the first stud. So, although their physical characteristics gave the impression that the results would not be so good as in the first case, I decided to risk the experiment. The resulting puppies were the nearest approach to what is considered the ideal cocker spaniel that I have yet been able to produce though there is room for plenty of improvement yet.

  Yes, like begets like, but the maxim goes farther back than the first generation. Characteristics are inherited from the ancestors—some from the parents, some from the grandparents, and to a lesser degree but still very important, some from the great-grandparents.

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