Five years ago, I had an oops Afghan/Saluki litter. What I got was a bunch of dogs that resemble the early imports, the ‘desert’ type Afghans. Very little coat that sheds out almost completely in summer. I have crossed one of the halfghans back to a pure Afghan and am waiting to see if it took. I am hoping to eventually end up with dogs that will consistently throw a heavily patterned coat that mostly sheds out in the summer, that still look and act like Afghans. I haven’t considered attempting to register them with an open registry.

I did a nearly complete pedigree on both of my dogs and the only non-Border Collie that I’ve ever seen in the entire pedigree goes back 100 years ago to a Bearded Collie who predates record keeping.

There’s another instance of a ROM dog where the father is registered but the mother is not. The going theory is that the mother might not have been a BC. Produced a herding champion dog, btw.

I don’t know of any people taking advantage of the ROM program to intentionally breed in fresh blood today though. I suspect most ROMs are issues of book-keeping, not blood keeping.

I’ve heard about the “Shiloh” Shepherds trying to reforge the GSD and the Dalmation-Pointer backcross. Any others?

One of the the mailing lists I’m on had a short discussion about cryptorchid dogs recently. Another poster and I agreed that in some breeds, a retained testicle is really a minor issue compared with high rates of bone cancer or heart problems or other real quality of life health issues. Immediately someone piped up and said, “But you can’t show a cryptorchid!” Gah.

I wanted to thank you for that “Acid Wash” comment over on Pet Connection. It was excellent.

I’m not sure what it would really take. People like Terrierman P. Burns are very anti-AKC but when I’ve written to him to note that nearly NO ONE is actually taking advantage of any open registries to breed in other breeds, and that even “REGISTER ON MERIT” options are really only used to bring 100% purebreds back into the registry after their ancestors were just not registered or were registered in another country or with another registry, even he didn’t have a good response.

The interesting thing about Border Collies is that the AKC is actually the most open registry for Border Collies. Who knows for how long. But when I wanted to breed the most diverse BCs I could find, I couldn’t do that within the ABCA because even the ROM program is over-ridden by AKC hatred.

But in canines particularly, “dog lovers/breed advocates” relegate these attributes to the bottom of the list of priorities in a quest to reproduce to a notion. Unless and until the market changes, there will be no real motive for change.

The KC has been hit with a lot of pressure, lately. I have not seen a similar movement towards the AKC. What would it take? In the real world, as in, can the major promoters of AKC shows be swayed here as they have been in England?

Without a bunch of damn “there aught to be a law against that” nonesense?

Eli