Evaluating conformation in Chinook puppies

Why is conformation evaluation important?

The Chinook is a rare breed and with a small breeding population. It's critical for breeders to evaluate litters for health, temperament, and conformation in order to place puppies with families who are a good match for them, including homes that will keep them intact until their breeding potential can be determined. Generally speaking, Chinook breeders place half a litter in breeding homes and the other half in pet homes that agree to spay or neuter the puppies.

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Developing your critical eye for conformation strengths and weaknesses.

Knowing that conformation evaluation is one of the critical assessments for breeders to complete, we're sharing this pictorial article to show what we have learned about conformation evaluation. This article demonstrates how the Chinook breed standard is used to evaluate puppies for conformation purposes. We are not experts on litter evaluation. We have learned to look at our puppies with a critical eye and have been asked to help others evaluate their litters. We rely on experts for final litter evaluations but have found that our evaluations are generally consistent with the experts. We encourage you, when you are starting out, to engage experts to help you evaluate litters and to develop your eye for evaluation over time!

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Different breeders do conformation litter evaluations at different times. Some wait until the litter is seven weeks old before conducting an evaluation. Some of us evaluate the pups starting at three days and finally at five or six weeks. Of course, once we learned what we were looking for, we could note what we're seeing in pups across the 8 weeks.

 

The puppies are evaluated against each other, using the Chinook breed standard as the guide. By viewing the puppies against each other, subtle, and sometimes substantial, variations in quality can be seen. This helps the breeder identify the overall best pups in the litter who become candidates for future breeding. Puppies with multiple conformation faults would not move forward to be bred and will be placed in pet homes. These faults are often undetectable to the untrained eye and generally will not impact a dog's quality of life. 

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During the evaluation process, here's some tips to help your success:

• Organize 3-4 people to conduct a litter evaluation, 2 to hold puppies and 1 to conduct the evaluation. If you have a 4th to record observations, that is helpful. If there are only 3 people available, the evaluator takes notes. 

• Puppy holders have to be patient and willing to hold a struggling puppy securely until the puppy settles down. Once you are familiar with this process, you can include holding the pups in this way so they are accustomed to this prior to the evaluation. And begin developing your skills!

• You're primarily looking at the head (including skull, muzzle, bite and neck), forequarters (front), hindquarters (rear), body, color and coat.

• You fully evaluate each pup, bringing back the best pups to evaluate against each other. With a large litter, this means some of the pups will be evaluated several times against different siblings as the pup moves up in the evaluation process. Choose two puppies and get started.

• Notice the color of your puppies and have your holders wear shirts that make it easier to see the pup clearly (e.g., white shirts for tawny pups).​

 

Let's look at an example of evaluating puppies. Our photos will show examples of pups who are 3 days old and some 5-6 weeks old. At each phase, we've listed what the breed standard requires. Here's a link to the UKC Chinook breed standard - UKC-Chinook-Breed-Standard.pdf. If you review the breed standard with each section, this will all begin to make sense!