Show Shine and COI

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Both show shine and COI play a big part on ShowDog.

Show shine is one of the traits of your dog. If you go to the dog's info page and look at all of their traits, you will see on the bottom row: Show Shine. SS (Show Shine) plays a part in the dog's showing career. If the SS is too low, it can affect the dog's placings. The highest and perfect SS is 20 (a dark blue colour, just like any of the other perfect, or close to perfect traits), and it may seem like it is hard to get, but many dogs have a 20 SS. Some high quality dogs may not have a career as a show dog because of a low SS, which is quite sad if you have a high quality dog, but he/she has a very low SS. Whether a dog's SS is low or not can depend on the breed and how competitive the breed is in the showring. If you have a rare breed you may be able to get away with a lower SS than if you have a very competitive breed. The way that I measure whether or not a dog is worth showing because of SS is the colour of the trait. You want to look for a dark blue, or maybe even the medium blue, but only if you can get away with it. A low SS cannot be prevented. It is more of a chance trait, but if you breed two high SS dogs, you will probably get better SS puppies.

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COI is a little more difficult to understand. The easiest way to understand COI is to make sure that when you breed two dogs together, that the last four generations of both the sire and the dam are not the same. The closer the pedigree is to each other, the higher the COI of the puppies will be. You can have a pup with 0.00 COI, and it can be quite easy if you just explore the lineage of the mother and father. The rule is if the COI of the puppy is under 15.00 then the dog will not be affected by the COI, but if the number is above 15.00 then it can affect the placings and show results of a dog. You can check a dog's individual COI by going to their info page, and on the box with their main information look for the COI. That will tell you their COI. The COI of a dog never changes and it will stay that way for the dog's whole life. When you are breeding a pair of dogs with both the dam and the sire in your kennel, click on the "Breed" button on the dam's page just like you normally would. When you see the chart where you can compare traits between the two, look at the third column. It will tell you the average COI of the pups. My rule is as long as that is under 15.00, you can breed them safely. It works the same way when breeding with a stud. Go to the stud page and select the stud you want. Click "Breed to this stud" and the chart will again appear. You can see the COI of the litter the same way.

My personal rule for Show Shine is get as close to 20 as possible, and nothing under 18, or maybe on rare occasions even 17. My rule for COI is nothing over 15.00 will I keep myself and show, and nothing over that will I sell as I know that they won't perform to the best of their ability as show dogs. Along with that, lots of people won't buy dogs with a high COI or low SS so watch what you breed and sell.