Can anyone please provide introductory idea in a layman's vocabulary about dog breeding and genetics that can be used for breeding specific characteristics in dogs?

Saurav,

Talk about asking for a simple answer to a complicated question!!!! The genitics for many of these chacteristics are not well understood. By that I mean that you can't identify a single gene responsible for a trait and breed for it the way you can several other things. An example is the gene that turns a persian cat in to a himilayan. This is a recessive gene that can be easily bred for. Plus you can identify cats with one of the recessive gene and breed them to a cat with one or two of the recessive gene and get mixed litters. Color is another area in the same breed of cat where you only deal with 3 genes to produce six different colors, throw in the recessive gene to change them from solid to himilayan and you add six more colors. So by dealing with 4 simple genes you have 12 possible colors of kittens.

Now on to working dogs. We are working with not a single gene to produce a chateristic, but a combination of genes for each of the desired chacteristics. Breeding dogs now becomes more like cooking while blindly reaching for ingredients. The only method you can use is to select dogs with desired chacteristics and breed them together and hope to get what you want. Since the genes operate in combination you will not get exactly consistant results. You will have puppies with a range of the desired chacteristics in a litter.

Hope that helps.

Fred Lanting's book, "The Total German Shepherd Dog" offers some very good insight into genetics. Unfortunately, much of what is offered is opinion based on observation. I have not read the second edition of this book, so it is possible this has changed.