Bergamasco, breeders and ethics
IBSA management feels that something has to be done regarding certain actions of some breeders potentially involving all the breed.
There’s someone that recently has without permission taken pedigree data regarding dell’Albera line, has inserted them into a genealogical software and is now throwing around end-of-the-world sentences about the inbreeding coefficient. To those not well introduced to the complex world of genetics, an inbreeding coefficient is how strictly inter-related are the blood lines of a breed. This is expressed with a coefficient figure, 0% being not related ad all. Geneticist have prudently fixed this number around 25%.
As everyone knows, software programs are nowadays probably all well written and they almost certainly do what the programmers tells us they do. But to take in the real world of the living, breathing and tail-wagging dogs the numbers of a software, and deciding blindly on blood lines only looking at that, shows exactly the same perception and naïve blindness as someone looking into a stock prevision program and with that going to invest in Wall Street.
In short, there’s more in the real world that figures coughed up from a computer program. And criticizing a constantly successful broker because what he’s doing is not always computer-approved is most probably regarded by a lot of people as almost sheer folly.
Back to Bergamasco World now. What’s happening here around dell’Albera lines is exactly like that. What’s dangerous is that those breeders are throwing around a lot of pressure, writing countless unsolicited-for emails to other breeders, “warning” them about those startlingly recent bad news.
But, because we’re all actually living in the real world, and breeders as everyone has to earn a living, what’s really happening here is a commercial war for the conquest of the North American market, already successfully covered, judges say, surprise surprise, by many dogs of dell’Albera lines.
All this said, don’t you think it’s slightly disgusting that Maria Andreoli, founder of dell’Albera Kennel, for more than 40 years successful breeder, is not yet a year dead? And that for supporting all their claims those breeders are personally attacking her?