ADRK dogbase is a computer programme cum database, which keeps track of all rottweilers and their breedings in Germany. The dogs are tracked from their birth till their death.
t has a whole lot of info on every breeding, every litter, every title, hip/elbow ratings, every ztp and korung evaluation. It gives a breeder access to invaluable information about the dogs contained in a pedigree, written evaluations done during the dog's ztp, hip/elbow scores, and the ability to calculate inbreeding coefficient, homogeneity coefficient and probabilities of certain traits on breedings. This is an extremely valuable tool that assists breeders in planning breedings and in making good breeding decisions.
As a tool in selecting breeding partners for their dogs, the breeders can look up at the 6 traits which are constantly updated for every dog. Those traits are:
1 = HD
2 = ED
3 = undershot
4 = skull size
5 = cheek bones
6 = bone strength
For all these traits, the base value is 100, any value >100, increases the probability of that trait showing up in the offsprings & any value <100 relatively decreases the probability of that trait showing up in the offsprings.
For e.g. If a dog shows for its Trait 1 (HD) the number 115, statistically there is a greater chance of hip dysplasia in offspring of that dog. If a dog has in Trait 4 (skull size) also 115, this means that he has a high probability of being dominant for larger skull sizes.
An example of a "good" HD number is around 95, a great one is around 85-90. It is not hard to find hips under 100, but good elbows (since they have only recently been examined) are more difficult to find. As a result, "100" is almost a good number for elbows, less than 100 is great and less than 90 is outstanding.
From the breeders' perspective, the first two traits are more important because the importance of avoiding/minimizing the incidence of HD & ED in every litter cannot be stressed enough.
These numbers keep changing when the offsprings and siblings get their HD/ED done.
So, when a breeding is planned, the breeder looks at the HD/ED numbers of his breeding bitch and depending on that, he selects the stud, so that the combination of the particular pair has good HD/ED numbers.
In certain countries, ED++ is not allowed for breeding. They make an x-ray of that particular dog and depending on the x-ray report, decide whether to allow breeding or not.
But in germany ED++ is allowed for breeding. They have dogbase and if the ED++ dog has a reasonable ED score(less than 110), it can be combined with a partner with excellent ED scores to produce a good combination..
While x-rays are important to find out the hip/elbow status of the particular dog, dogbase is more comprehensive in that it takes into account the littermates and progeny.
So the breeders can avoid to a large extent the failures of trial and error methods of selecting breeding partners based only on x-ray report. Instead of selecting partner based on just x-ray report, if a breeder can select good HD/ED dog base scores, then it will be very useful for the breeding program.