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Old 08-09-2008, 15:47   #6
saschia
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Originally Posted by Mikael View Post
[size=2]What I criticise is that there are no Bonititation Standard fore all to follow !!! and that the Bonitation apparently do not work, sense dogs whit serious disqualification faults can pas whit a good result.
Well it is a problem if thing as that happens. The problems which are maybe a cause for it are several, these I my thoughts on the matter:

1) Not enough judges. And I don't mean any judges - for dog show, the judge can be a person, who has his / her primary licence for any breed and obtained the licence dor CSW only later, and sometimes based only on very dubious knowledge (otherwise there would be no such marks as "too light eye", "too narrow posture" from international dog shows). For bonitation, you need an experienced judge, somebody, who works with wolfdogs already a long time and who know the breed and how it was meant to be. To get judge licence in Slovakia, you need to be active breeder and have 5 litters! That's very hard to do, so now, with Sonya gone, we have only two judges in Slovakia.

2) Tough breeding rules. Breeding rules are made by clubs and they reflect the momentary situation in the population of wolfdogs. Breeding rules need to be tough, so that we don't spread unwanted traits into the population. On the other hands, sometimes it happens that a line of dogs is about to go extinct, because there are no animals from that line, which would be bonitated and wouldn't have some bad traits. So sometimes situation is like this - a dog (maybe last opne in a line) is bonitated and it is found that it is too low, or has no mask, or has bad character or it has bit heavier had/bit open lips etc. Now, judge knows and breeding commitee knows that this is not good, but maybe it is on edge (64 cm - but maybe the dog is standing wrong, character between Ob and Oc, lips not quite open) - so if the judge gives worse mark, this animal is lost for breeding and diversity of the breed goes down. So they decide to put it in notes etc.
The Slovak club this summer decided, that the breeding rules should be less tough. Not that we should use animals with bad traits for breeding all the time. But that if an animal has some bad trait that removes it from breeding, but is very important for its blood or other important reason, that it could be used once, after the breeding committee decides so, and its offspring is thoroughly observed and everything is documented. So this decision might help in motivating the judges to rather give worse marks than better marks, if they feel the animal is at the border, for example.

3) some clubs in some countries, or individual breeders, if the country has no club, do not like the bonitation procedure implemented in Slovakia and Czech republic. And as they are not required by their FCI organization, they do not go for bonitations, or they organize bonitations with for example different test for character. We are not able to make them follow our rules. We have no say about if puppies from their litters should or should not get pedigrees, because this is governed by their FCI organization, not the global one. And it is sometimes very hard to persuade them. There are lot of myths about dog behavior - that for example defence training makes the dog aggressive, or that you actually have to train defence to be able to pass character test at bonitation. There is sometimes also problem with training - for example I think that a lot of problematic behavior of a dog during character test is that being left alone is something very new for it, and the chain makes very strange sound... And I know that leaving your dog tied somewhere alone is not possible in some countries - my friend, when she left her dog in front of a shop in Germany, found it a couple of minutes later surrounded by a mob of people ready to call police and dog rescue, because they thought it was abandoned.

So there are a lot of issues here and not all of them can be resolved in a short time. It is important I think, that we cooperate, that people who have experience go and educate others, that people are willing to listen and discuss without personal attacks. That people try to make clubs and try to understand and believe themselves that there are many things important for breeding and that even if they want to make money, they should follow some rules. But this can also be helped by us, by going and letting know people that for the same money they can get pups from bonitated and X-rayed parents and that they can buy with some guarantee and not a "cat in a sack".

Well sorry for terribly long post, hope I have not bored anyone to death ;o)
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