MAY 2020

Feels like Winter is coming, cold winds from the South and West blowing in clouds of Umbrella grass AKA Fairy grass. I have a few other names for it!!! The 6 foot high dog run fence

Whip wasn’t too happy, he couldn’t find his water bucket!

Naka tried a few different spots for a nap but couldn’t get away from it.

Down my road. As you can see, the country looks pretty bleak. No sorghum crops to speak of and not much winter oats either. It’s shaping up to be very similar to the last few dry winters. Not many sheep here to feed this year anyway.

Great to hear of good rains down around Dubbo and Nyngan.

The biggest item of news is the result of the CA testing which arrived by email last night. I’ll post the results below. I was fortunate to have been told about CA before I bred many dogs, and will always be grateful to the Hazlett family, Riana Kelpie Stud.

After seeing a couple of affected pups bred elsewhere I was determined to avoid it if possible. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it: although there are various types and levels, the pups I saw were very “well bred” and stylish little workers BUT they kept falling over. It was soul-destroying to watch and I can still see them in my mind’s eye. Then the breeder asked me to put them down. Something I’ll never forget.

A long time ago the Working Kelpie Council was aware that certain sires left affected pups, one dog in particular was used a lot, and some breeders who were committee members at that time avoided those lines. For much of the last 20 years I’ve been trying to dodge them too by using ‘clear’ lines as insurance, knowing that you usually need both parents to carry a recessive gene to get affected pups. I imagine many old time breeders blamed the bitch for ‘crook’ pups and continued to use the sire for breeding. No test was available until recently, and testing is still a work in progress.

In Australia CA hasn’t been a huge problem for breeders because of the large population of kelpies, but when they were exported it was a totally different demographic and cases appeared…. Kathy Christian was a keen Kelpie fan and had a terrible experience with CA which was financially and emotionally destroying. She was instrumental in getting the hunt for a test started and gave samples for the research from her dogs. We owe her a big thank you.

Well, after all that! I’m very relieved that my sires have tested clear due to good management, good luck, and the breedings done by others which have been able to rule out some dogs as carriers. Now we can test, it’s possible to mate a carrier to a clear and thus preserve the good working traits of the carrier. The down side? I doubt there is a line of dogs remaining that could be considered clear, I’d like to know if there is! The kelpie gene pool is quite small and it’s a tragedy that this was allowed to happen. I tried a sire from a suspect line recently and the pup that’s tested positive is by him.