Well, here’s a cite that estimates the mutation rate for humans. From the abstract:
That last sentence is interesting…
Now, I’m not sure how useful the traditional population equilibrium ideas are when talking about dog breeds, with such small populations. Selection pressures will be very uneven and stochastic (one breeder selects for X, and selects against Y, but another breeder has different priorities). Additionally, the availability of veterinary medicine will mean that many mildly deleterious mutations won’t be selected against unless there’s a careful effort, like the examples given above. Still, the smaller the population, the faster a new allele will become fixed.
We got our pet dog at 2. His papers say cockapoo, and his tail got cropped at birth, but he really is a border collie / cocker spaniel cross. No spaniel rage in him at all, but lots of border collie intensity.
OK, but you should be able to apply such ideas to wolves, and the mutation rate in dogs ought to be the same as it is in wild wolves (even though the selection pressures are entirely different).
I know nothing about dog breeding, so I assumed that each breed (excluding the novelty ones) had enough of a diversity of parentage that you could safety remove genetic defects and that these defects resulted from overbreeding by puppy mills and such.
I thought if you would take say, a Sheltie, then that breed would have a variety of lines to choose from and you would have a low risk of defects. If you bought 2 shelties and decided that from those two, you were going to start your own Sheltie Breeding Empire, then you would exacerbate the recessive genetic defects in your original two bloodlines…