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THE BU EDITORIAL
Virginia Zurflieh, editor
Happy New Millenium!
We’re delighted to report that not only did the world NOT come to an end (our
pc’s didn’t so much as burp :-), but Y2K promises to be the beginning of a new
"Age of Enlightenment" for our breed and our parent club on a number of fronts:
BOXER HEALTH
The establishment within the
last ten years of the ABC Boxer Health & Research Committee and the American Boxer
Charitable Trust, plus the joint ABCF/AKC funding of a study of Boxer Cardiomyopathy,
heralds a new openness about Boxer health problems and a new determination to actually do
something to solve them. One caveat: There is still a lot of finger-pointing and
"not-MY-line-ing" going on, and it needs to stop. Until we have conclusive
scientific data and firm guidelines from the researchers, we must take care that we
don’t develop a mental disease -- "BCM Hysteria" -- that ends up being
worse than the canine heart disease we’re trying to eliminate!
A TRULY NATIONAL NATIONAL!
BU applauds the majority vote
to move the ABC Specialty & Futurity to the center of the U.S., where it will be more
accessible to West Coast members and exhibitors. Far Westerners historically have had to
trek or fly nearly 3000 miles to show their puppies in the Futurity, and that situation
has been a bone of contention for all of the 19 years I’ve belonged to the ABC. Now
let’s all pitch in and get this move implemented in time for the 2002 ABC! Click here for the
ABC site application with a list of the criteria a new site has to meet to be considered.
EARS
Kudos to the progressive 41%
of the ABC membership who voted FOR giving breeders a choice of showing their boxers
cropped...or not...without penalty. The ABC Standards Committee was mandated at the ABC
membership meeting in May ‘98 to revise Amendment A -- the "Natural &
Cropped Ears" amendment to the standard -- and now they need to begin to develop a
choice-friendly amendment to put before the membership the moment our mandatory five-year
"time out" is up. For several years, the American Veterinary Medical Association
(AVMA) has included an overtly anti-cropping position statement on their web page under
"Animal Welfare." At the AVMA national convention this past July, the AVMA
adopted an anti-cropping and docking resolution proposed by the American
Association of Animal Hospitals (AAHA), a mainstream association of veterinarians, NOT a
radical fringe group. No, neither of these position statements constitutes an outright ban
on cropping for AVMA members...yet. But the handwriting is on the wall, and Boxer
breeders and judges need guidance from the Boxer Standard now...while we still have
a choice.
WHITE BOXERS
As long as we continue to
favor flashy Boxers in the show ring, the white ones are not going to go away. With the
most recent revision of the ABC By-Laws and Code of Ethics (over ten years old now) we
were tacitly allowed to "place" white puppies. That was a very welcome change.
There’s simply no effective argument against the breeders who feel that it’s
morally unacceptable to kill healthy puppies. We propose that the next logical step is to
amend our Code of Ethics to allow for AKC Limited Registration of white puppies. This
would accomplish two things: 1) We would get a more accurate picture of the percentage of
whites being born into our litters today; and 2) we might thereby be able to find out
approximately how many of those whites are deaf. That information - far from encouraging
the breeding and showing of white Boxers - would instead enable us to strongly encourage
the breeding and showing of plain Boxers, if for example, we learned that the
percentage of whites and deaf dogs was much larger than we had assumed. Dr. Bruce
Cattanach, the British geneticist and Boxer breeder, suggests that the way to banish
whites from our litters is to make sure that one member of any breeding pair is a plain
boxer. The knowledge given to breeders by Limited Registration could give us the power to
solve the problem! |
