If you do decide to breed her you need to look at pedigree. It would be best to find a male stud that has produced good quality puppies. You should be able to go back atleast 4 generations on both dogs to ensure that the puppies should turn out healthy. For example, take liver shunt, genetic testing will do little to ensure that the puppies will not inherit it, you have to know the line of pedigree and whether any of those dogs have had liver shunt or passed it down. The dogs can and should be tested for it but sometimes it does not show up until they are much older. Even when you know the dog's lines you arn't guaranteed 100 percent that a puppy will not end up with it, it is the safest way however.
As far as size goes I would look at the parents, grandparents, great grandparents and etc.. to see the size of the puppies they have produced. I know of some breeders where their first, second, third generations all produced small puppies and then the fourth would produce bigger puppies and the fifth would be the original size. So you can't always go by the parents' sizes. I have heard of some studs bred to bigger females produce small puppies no matter what the size of the female was. Size and weight can be a very tricky thing to determine or predict.
And for the age to breed her, I was always told atleast one and half years old and had two to three heat cycles. |