Thoughts I Had Coming Home From The Dog Show BY CAROLINE COILE Frozen Assets
dog from working lines. She ended up with two very hard to place puppies, along with a promise of free storage and surgical AI in the future. In another case a BIS winner was DNA tested before being bred and his parentage found to be inaccurate. AKC cancelled his registration. The stud owner had to get DNA samples from all her stored semen, and the bitch owner from all her males. It turned out the facility had shipped out the semen from the chosen dog's brother. The dog was reinstated with a new sire. They sued, and the stud owner was awarded $8000 (in part because she had lost several breeding units doing DNA on the other frozen dogs) and the bitch and offspring owner was awarded around $10,000. The amount also included the DNA test- ing as well as the shipping and insemination costs. "The facility was never nice about it, so we got a lawyer," says the stud owner, whose name cannot be disclosed as part of the settlement agreement. Too often workers don't examine the labels as they should, so mix-ups between semen owned by the same person occur. In one recent case the breeder wondered why her litter resembled her other stud more than the planned one, so she DNA tested them at several years of age. She was right. She brought the mistake to the facility's, AKC's and the puppy owners' attention. The registration was changed, the owners were just as happy, and the championships they had earned stood. The unhappiest ending comes when dogs are inadver- tently bred to semen from another breed. There was the 2009 case in which a Pembroke breeder sued a facility after her dog was inseminated with Great Pyrenees sperm. In at least one case a frozen semen mixed-breed litter was the result of a spiteful worker who managed one last caper before being let go. But before you get too worried about wrong stud dogs, it's very rare and probably more rare than mismatings when sending bitches to the stud owners for live service when they own more than one stud! Ownership Then there's the topic of ownership. If you thought co- ownerships were bad with living dogs, just wait until you see the headaches they cause with frozen semen. No two freezing facilities seem to treat the matter the same, so while one may insist that the semen be under the control of only one party, others may let any of the co-owners con- trol the semen. What happens if one co-owner tires of split- ting the storage fee? Or one agrees to breed to a bitch that the other disapproves of? Some even acknowledge whoev- er brought the dog in for collection and freezing to own the semen; something to consider the next time your friend offers to dogsit! What happens to the semen after the owner's death? Some facilities ask for a "next of kin" so to speak---would
At virtually any large show you can see the special vendor with a line of happy male dogs leaving. It's now routine to have our dogs' semen frozen. But it's far less routine to ever use it. For some, just knowing their dog has a pellet of immortality, or a straw of insurance, is enough
to justify the expense. Fewer will ever use the semen, whether because they don't have the right bitch, are never asked, or find it too costly. Of those who do use it on an outside bitch, very few have considered the important dif- ferences from a financial viewpoint to consider compared to the traditional way of breeding. Oops... Let's start with the first concern: What happens if the semen is lost? And yes, it can happen. Many have heard of the Whisperwind Poodle case, in which 122 frozen semen samples from five Standard Poodles were allowed to thaw due to an error after being stored there for ten years. The facility's insurance company offered to pay out $1000, rep- resenting actual costs of collection and storage. The semen owners went to court, and in 2012 a jury awarded them $200,000. This value was not based on the value of the puppies that could have been produced, but on the lesser value of the stud fees that would have been earned. While the Whisperwind is far from the only such lawsuit stemming from lost semen, it is the most expensive to date. The take home message: If you have irreplaceable semen, store it in more than one facility. Tanks can fail, Mistakes can happen. In fact, mistakes happen more than you might think. Kelly McIntosh was ecstatic to finally get her Aussie bitch- --she'd already had two failed attempts with chilled semen, one because they missed her ovulation and the other because the package was lost in transit and showed up three days later, ruined. The third time was a charm---or so she thought. She arranged to have frozen semen stored at the vet and surgically implanted. Three days later the veterinarian called and apologized; she'd implanted semen from a working Aussie whose semen had just been shipped in. The mistake wasn't realized until the botch that dog was supposed to be bred to showed up and they couldn't find his semen. They did arrange for one of the very last straws of that male to be rushed in and the bitch did have a litter of puppies, but that was small consolation to Kelly, whose conformation bitch was now in whelp to a
74 • S how S ight M agazine , S eptember 2017
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