Janba

Has SA recently introduced the SR? I should also have said that while the ANKC controls the main and limited registries the individual states maintain their own SR and AR registries but dogs can compete in any state under that registration.

In Australia we have had mixed, working registry and non-registered purebreds dogs competing in our ANKC sporting events for decades, depending on which state you lived in. When non ANKC dogs were first allowed to compete in NSW (about 25 years ago) there were 2 registries, -the ANKC for their purebreds and the supplementary register for all others (who had to be desexed) and the dogs competed in seperate classes. About 15 years ago in NSW it was voted to allow all dogs to compete together and about that time a 3rd reistry was formed. We now have the ANKC main and limited register dogs, associate register (AR) who have to be desexed and the sporting register (SR) for BCs, Kelpies and Koolioes registered with one of the working registries and they can be entire. I think most other states are similar except QLD who will only let you register 2 AR dogs in your lifetime. The only time they AR can't compete is in conformation and in agilty, obedience etc is at breed specialties. At the recent BC nationals SR dogs competed in the performance. Niether the SR or the AR can compete in conformation. While we are a lot smaller country and so do not have the numbers competing in performance events that you would in the US the practice of allowing all the dogs to compete together does not seem to have led to specific breeding of crossbreds for performance. Nor has it led to many people breeding working registry dogs for sports (the ANKC does not allow any of our working registry dogs to be put on their main register and only registers them individually for sports). There are people who breed their ANKC borders specifically for sports and a one or two who breed from stock that can be dual ISDS/ABCA/ANKC registered but that does not impact at all on the working BCs. I personally have nothing against competing against any type of dog in performance and it does give me the oportunity to compete with any cdrossbred/rescue I may have. I should probably add that for agilty we only have ANKC or ADAC (all dogs can compete) and obedience and tracking only the ANKC events.

I finally got the hang of "dangerous ground" in training today and the difference it made to my dog was incredible. He has always crept in a little in the stops and by making the area in front of him dangerous he stopped cleanly and held it. It also worked in making him keep a bit more distance off the sheep and it was so stress free. It was like winning the lottery.

Cole who has a thick coat and is very black doesn't seem affected by the heat at all. The picture in my signature was taken at the beginning of February on a day in the high 30s and he was eager to work and the heat didn't seem to affect him (we did only work each dog for 10 or 15 minutes maximum). His parents were both born in Scotland so it isn't that his line has adapted to the hot conditions.

It was a shame the fog cut some peoples runs short. Bernard Arends finished 17th, one place out of a finals run.

I am now going to have to add our sole Australian representative Bernard Arends and Maccas (and to be fair he is an expat NZer) to my favourites after day 2

I'm going to have patriotic to this side of the pond and vote for Jim Wilson and Tweed (NZ)

I wouldn't call it damage control on the dalmatians as the uric acid problem would have nothing to do with AKC or any other selective breeding. You don't get a world wide population lacking a dominant gene that can't be actively selected against by physical appearances alone in the time dog showing and registration has been around. Also it was a vote of the DCA membership that opposed the registration of the backcross dallies and tha ANK followed their decision. I agree that it was not a good move on the DCA part but the decision is being reviewed and we may see backcross dallies being accepted in the near future. That depends on the desirability of the traits introduced. Have you read about the breeding of bob-tailed boxers in the UK to overcome the anti tail docking legislation? A corgi was bred to a boxer and the subsequent bob tailed pups bred back to a boxer for 4 or 5 generations. These dogs were given KC registration and exported to many countries that disallow tail docking. These dogs are becoming very popular among the "fancy" and stud dogs are being used extensively so the inflence of that one corgi is increased each generation. The same with the backcross dalmatians where I feel the breeding program should probably have had more than the one original outcross. I don't know what you answer is with the AKC as while we have similar issues with falling registration numbers etc we don't have that many alternative "purebred" registries and our ANKC doesn't recognise any of the working registries except greyhounds so our working dogs are relatively safe. Our alternative registries are for things like designer crossbreds. The gap filled by the falling ANKC numbers seems to be filled here mostly by backyard bred DDs and puppy farms and to me most of them are far worse than what is happening to some of the ANKC breeds. Hybrid vigor means nothing if you don't start of with genetically and structurally sound parents, especially if the two parent breeds suffer the same problems.

I am struggling to understand the ANKC registration of dogs for sports. What is you ILP and what dogs are accepted ? Here in Australia our ANKC has its own registry with main and limited registration (cannot be shown or have offspring registered), but also has an Associate Register(AR) and a Sporting Register (SR) for participating in sports. AR dogs can be any breed or cross and must be desexed. SR dogs are registered on one of the working registries and don't need to be desexed and if they are bred their pups would be registered on the working registry not ANKC ETA SR and AR dogs can't be conformation shown.

Is the crossing of a TB with an Irish draft really hybrid vigor or is it that the two parent breeds aren't as physically suited to a sport like eventing as the crosses? If you think what a TB was developed for it is to be as fast as possible and to win races which involves a certain amount of flight reflex and hot bloodedness. Soundness over many years also isn't really selected for as most racehorses are retired by 5 or 6. Irish drafts were a multipurpose breed for farm work, harness and riding and bred to be more docile and steady temperament and required to work for many years. It is the same with many of the warmbloods you see, if you look at their pedigrees many have a lot of TB in them, at least here in Australia. It is purpose breeding a sports horse.

Why to another breed? If the population of a breed is large enough it is quite possible to outcross to a line that has no common dogs in a 10 generation pedigree and a lot further back than that, especially now that the import and export of dogs is more commonplace. In a breed with a small gene pool or because of a wide spread incidence of inherited problems it may be neccessary to outcross to another breed to ensure the health of that breed. Google the dalmatian backcross project where a pointer was used to introduce the gene for uric acid metabolism as the gene is missing from the entire dalmatian population and most certainly was well before show breeding. The backcross dalmatians aren't recognised by the AKC.

I also don't see the point in this especially in relation to the beardie. These breeds and BCs don't neccessarily share the same genetic diseases even if they originated from the same dogs. Beardies as far as I am aware don't have a problem with CEA and no pure BC last time I enquired has tested postive to MDR1 whereas it is a problem with collies and shelties. I have not heard that TNS has been found in the breeds you mentioned but they could suffer from related disorders.

I agree with this. Selecting for a trait such as working ability instead of conformation will have no effect on the incidence of things like CEA, TNS, black vs red coat or any other dominant/recessive characteristc unless you actively select away from it or for it. The reason I see that selecting for working ability maintains more genetic diversity than selecting for conformation is that you don't tend to lose genes from the population. An example of this is the coat length in Aussie show dogs. Smooth coats are not acceptable so the gene for the smooth coat has been lost from the gene pool but is still present in the gene pool they were originally bred from - the working BC. The loss of the smooth coat in itself does not seem to be a problem but what genes have been lost that are genetically linked to the smooth coat?

I have a feeling that the reason that it appears that all TNS dogs (and I am assuming you include carriers in these dogs) seemed to be linked to breeding in things other then working ability is because most of the people who are testing and allowing their results to be made public are the non working BC people. Until a decent random sample of dogs are tested and the results made public you can't make assumptions about lines. This also applies to the working BCs. I also think the incidence in the show lines will probably come down as more dogs are tested. At the moment the results are very heavily weighted with dogs related to known carriers or suspected carriers the same way that if you took the incidence of TNS carriers in our working dog population from the tests performed it would show a falsely high result because most of the dogs tested are ones who are closely related to mjk05's litters parents. ETA Didn't mean to hijack mjk05's question

I would be doing what you are doing now but not repeat a mating that has produced a problem nor a similar mating with any close relatives unless you test. I have never been of the opinion that carriers should be ruthlessly culled unless you have a high frequency of a gene and no way of testing for it. I don't know what your rules there are for registering re CEA but I assume they are similar to the ISDS and that does not preclude registration of pups from carriers provided they are mated to a DNA clear dog or bitch. Similar rules could easily be applied to TNS or any disease that can be tested for. What I have been trying to say is that if you have a low frequency of a gene culling a bitch who has produced affected will have no affect on the % of dogs in your population that are carriers. My ISDS dogs mother was a DNA CEA carrier but she was put to a clear dog and he is DNA tested clear. The bitch I almost bought instead was a DNA tested carrier but while she has probably turned out the better worker there were things in her temperament that didn't suit me. He has an obedience titled dog in his lines so maybe I had better castrate him now as he is not a "real working dog". ETA Just out of interest have you found that the number of CEA affected dogs is dropping now that the DNA test is available?

No one is saying that you have a problem in your dogs or that you are producing a lot of TNS affected pups nor that you should run out and test UNLESS there is a problem with a close relative. It is this statement that I had a problem with The only reason the we know that there is TNS in that dogs lines is not from affected pups but because a healthy non affected dog was DNA tested and found to be a carrier. If you go back 4 generations in that dogs lines to before the breeding for agility at least one dog in that 4th generation was a carrier and that line will have produced carriers in the pure working population as well. The line may never have produced a TNS affected pup and may never produce one but they may be unlucky enough to breed a carrier to another carrier one day. It is the idea that breeding for anything other than working ability increases your chances of TNS. It does if you introduce show lines, but if you stay away from KC lines the chances are no higher than in the working BC population where you can also see pedigrees of inbred and line bred dogs. Culling of a carrier bitch that has been unlucky enough to be mated to a carrier dog will not lower the frequency of the gene in your population unless you also cull the sire and both their untested close relatives and do not breed from any of their untested offspring no matter how low the frequency is.

So if they had bred the dam to a good working dog or a top trialling dog resulting pup would not have been a TNS carrier?

In a TNS affected litter the most likely scenario in an affected litter is one or two pups who get sick and die, the carriers in the litter are as healthy as their clear littermates in regard to TNS symptons. When the pup dies at 8 weeks from an infection do they blame the bitch or just say it was the runt, these things happen? The frequency of carriers of a lethal recessive gene tends to remain stable in a population under normal conditions if you don't actively select away from it and culling the odd bitch won't affect the frequency of the gene particularly if she has already produced a couple of "healthy" litters or the farmer blames the dog and breeds her a different dog next time and it doesn't remove her carrier relatives. If the frequency of carriers is 5% in the population now it will still be about 5% in 20 years under normal breeding conditions i.e. no increase in the rate of inbreeding or very predominant sires etc. No one is saying go out and test everything or that it is a big problem, but it is the people who are saying that it is not in a true working pedigree and that it is only an Australian show dog disease that are the problem. From what mkj05 has said I know someone whose very promising dog has a chance of being a carrier and another person whose good dogs are also closely related. Do I tell them so they can DNA test if they want to or just say chances of them being bred with a carrier are very slim so just let it slip? . Nobody pointed to the famous names in that pedigree or said anything about them being carriers. It was just a pedigree of a carrier dog who had no Aus or comformation blood. If the pedigree had had no known dogs in it someone would have come on said it wasn't a "true working pedigree" I also don't know why people keep bringing CL up. No one has said it is in anything but Australian show lines and even then the frequency of affected dogs was very small - less than 40 recorded litters with affected pups.

I have traced the pedigree I posted to before the BC was recognised as a show dog in the UK, or Aus for that matter and this is definitely pre dog sports as we know them, and could find no Australian blood. I am not saying that you should all rush out and test you dogs, unless you have a problem litter like mjk05, but not discount the possibilty that it is there.

I found that pedigree interesting especially as it has some well known dogs in it. I have managed to convert it to a jpeg

I had wondered about that litter after a thread you had posted on another board.

Was this the thread? http://www.bordercollie.org/boards/index.p...digree&st=0

He's not listed on the BC health database as that only lists dogs whose owners put them on there. The dog Is Henniker Spyro ISDS 259652 http://www.anadune.com/abcd/genetics.php?s...93&gene=tns http://www.thekennelclub.org.uk/download/4...tnscarriers.pdf also a 5 generation pedigree http://www.anadune.com/abcd/pedigree.php?s...=5&export=1

I do have the pedigree of an ISDS registered dog, who is also KC registered, that contains nothing but ISDS dogs registered in the 8 generation pedigree I have and who is listed on several databases as a TNS carrier as well as the KCs carrier list and the pedigree contians some very good trialling dogs. I won't put the dogs name here on a public forum but will pm you the name if you want. Although he doesn't fit into your "non kennel club" pedigreed Border Collie he has nothin but working lines that I can find going back to before the advent of KC registered dogs