I would guess Van Olst would rather confirm that there is some chance that the breeders, who are having their mares tested on his dime, are actually considering breeding the mare to his stallion.
I seriously doubt that engaging in a massive fraud is the intention. What purpose would it serve?
It will no doubt take years of research to get a handle on this, since it is likely that records of live foals from affected stock will not have as much significance as aborted pregnancies or EED.
The Jockey Club seems to be the best at statistics, the Warmblood registries don’t seem as meticulous record keepers as far as mares bred, foals aborted, mares bred and in foal but then later found “not pregnant” etc… If I am mistaken in this belief, then it will be a little easier for the Warmblood registries to pin down the incidence and the problematic lines. It will be a huge undertaking but I’m sure it can be done.
Right. So by your own account, your previous statement to the effect of “nobody was talking about this until 2 weeks ago (sometime in April of 2018)” is wrong, correct?
Sometimes I can’t tell when you are speaking seriously and precisely, and when you are being more general. I find that really confusing when we talk about the actual population genetics and also what you think ought to be done in terms of testing and taking policy steps to control the spread of this genetic problem in WBs.
With all due respect, that depends on your perspective. If you care about the future of the breeding population and the frequency of that allele, it does do some harm.
I think I made this distinction a few pages back-- between those who care only about the phenotype of the individual animal they get from a breeding, and those who care about the population and breeding going forward. You don’t have to care about the population. But if you don’t, own that. But your perspective doesn’t mean there isn’t a downside of any sort to breeding a horse who carries this allele.
Not saying there would be any fraud or tampering of samples. It just seems cleaner to have a chain of possession from mare owner directly to lab. Then no one could claim something was mishandled. Especially if people are already afraid of being “outed” in having a carrier animal.
I do wonder how samples will be handled/processed, if sent from mare owner, to Van Olst, to the lab in the UK. There are some particulars about sending hair samples and I would guess possibly more for blood samples.
Interesting that he mentions hair and blood samples. Does the UK lab have a test that uses blood for testing? I have only been aware of hair roots as genetic material samples used in testing for the lab here in the US.
This is part of a translation from Dutch to English of Van Olst’s website page regarding the testing:
To gain more knowledge, Van Olst, the breeders who want to cover at Everdale in 2018, offers to cover the costs for a test on their mare on the WFFS gene.
The breeder must ensure that hair (at least 40 pieces with root) and a tube of blood (EDTA) at Van Olst Horses in Den Hout. Van Olst will ensure that this goes for research into a laboratory in England. (The test has not yet been performed in the Netherlands.) Van Olst Horses undertakes the costs of this test.
It IS a generous offer for him to make. I wonder what Everdale’s book is like for this year. I’m kind of surprised that there is no mention or information about testing his jumper stallions. It wasn’t until fairly recently that the Dutch studbook separated breeding directions into jumper stallions and dressage stallions. Previously, I believe, they were all lumped together.
Hopefully this will encourage or help nudge other Dutch breeders to test their stallions. If testing becomes more of a normal practice, and mare owners want to know a stallion’s status, then perhaps other breeders (and countries/registries) may be convinced to test.
“A breeder is one who leaves the breed with more depth of quality than when he started. All others are but multipliers of the breed.”
—Sir Robert Baker
(Pretty sure previous posts in this thread referred to the research article.)
So it seems yes, there was acknowledgement of the existence of WFFS between 2013 and now. It only took the most brief of Google searches to find these two articles. Too tired right now to link other examples or articles since 2013.
I have no idea what that quote is supposed to contribute to the discussion?? Do you want to imply that breeders who are still using carriers for breeding are multipliers of the breed?? It that is the case we do disagree very much.
maybe read again Sierra Milton Omertà, The breeders code of silence… Its really an amazing article.
And as cool as this quote sounds… I guess in horses most breeders are multipliers of the breed anyhow…
Thanks and I can give you that statement back… For me its very tough to read your posts regarding this topic because IMO many times they don’t really have a big connection to this topic… It seems to me that you like more to show your expertise on the subject.
Yes I think its amazing that an American mare owner started this new concern about this disease! And its amazing how more and more people get involved since I started the thread after Hilltop made their announcement
I so agree with you and I would assume all the breeders of the carriers so far would agree with you as well. Some of the breeders didn’t even know that they produced carriers. And I even think that was one reason why nobody paid attention so for to the test for WFFS. Nobody was interested because as long as you did not produce an affected foal (which is very rare anyhow) nobody could tell that the horse was a carrier (or defective as some posters in this thread like to describe them)
Simply pointing out that there have been articles available to the general public and to researchers since 2013.
You wrote in post #313:
“But please tell me sources for discussions about it between 2013 and now…”
The rarity of actually seeing a WFFS foal is, in my opinion, one reason that the issue did not develop more interest until this year.
It is thanks to @mary who shared her awful personal experience with WFFS that we are now having open discussions which are generating productive actions such as testing breeding animals.
[I]"With all due respect, that depends on your perspective. If you care about the future of the breeding population and the frequency of that allele, it does do some harm.
I think I made this distinction a few pages back-- between those who care only about the phenotype of the individual animal they get from a breeding, and those who care about the population and breeding going forward. You don’t have to care about the population. But if you don’t, own that. But your perspective doesn’t mean there isn’t a downside of any sort to breeding a horse who carries this allele."[/I]
The Baker quote I posted about breeders relates to MVP’s comments about the short term breeding goal of an individual foal in contrast to a longer term breeding goal for the well-being of the future population.
I would think that my post #319, having quoted MVP, would be understood as supporting MVP’s comment about short term and long term breeding goals. But I see from your comment that you did not make that connection.
So now I will explain why I posted the quote from Sir Robert Baker: “A breeder is one who leaves the breed with more depth of quality than when he started. All others are but multipliers of the breed.”
In our current discussion:
>>A person who has the long term wellbeing of the breeding population as a concern is an example of what Baker refers to as a breeder—-one who aims to improve the breeding population.
>>A person who is interested in what a single breeding produces may have a short term breeding goal that does not consider how that individual breeding may impact the future of the breeding population.
I hope with this clarification you might now have an idea of what that Baker quote contributes to the discussion.
But if you do not, I don’t know that I can find another way to explain it. So please just ignore my posts if they are not clear to you.
Then I guess I did understand it right the first time I read it I just wanted to make sure…
I hope you know how this must sound for breeders finally understanding why their foals died and testing for WFFS. I am not sure whether this guy you quoted lived in times where genetic testing was available. So I think he was thinking about other things when he wrote this… But just to make you understand what you just quoted.
There is a breeder he lost a foal in the most horrible way imaginable . It simply dissolved itself while still alive before his eyes. He had no idea what was happening. In the past the stallion owner told him to hush it up and it was probably all bad fate and nobody could do anything about it. He even might have culled his mare from breeding (while the stallion owner continued to breed his stallion ) now this breeder is able to test and to understand what happened. Also he is able to manage his breeding situation in a way that this will never happen again. Also maybe it wasn’t his only mare. Some breeders believe in their lines and breed with different generations of their mares. So he might have more carrier mares.
He is finding out all this in the last couple of weeks and I assume this is a lot for a breeder to deal with. Should he cull all his mares?? What is going to happen with the older mares who have never been ridden… will they go to slaughter?? Or end up in bad situations because he can’t afford to keep them all?? Maybe he likes his mares and is proud about them. Now they are defective?? There is a lot to think about
And on top of all this he has to deal with you just throwing out that he is simply a multiplier of the breed and not a breeder…
IMO many this discussion here was in many ways way of topic and dictated by personal assumptions and personal situations which had nothing really to do with this situation, but this kind of tops it…
Yes Mary was the one starting it in the US but you are not quiet right. There was a case in Europe a couple of years ago and that owner worked really hard to make it known… She was not successful because everybody ignored her, but she was trying. And BTW now that there is more public interest in the topic, another breeder in the Netherlands told about the death of his foal as well. I think there are more cases just so far they were not really made public because the public was not interested!!
Maybe I don’t understand your point… But I really really hope you can understand my point… I am aware that a lot of people think only in black and white.
But this situation is not only black and white. This is a situation which has many many different aspects to consider. Yes there is a goal in the end to diminish or maybe even eradicate the genetic defect in the breed. But the straight way to it will hurt a lot of people in a way that they will not be willing go for it.
So I think in the beginning it is maybe more important to get going. Once everybody is going there will be a way to reach the goal. And I am very very sorry that so many people here simply don’t want to understand that Everybody is thinking about their personal ideas and there is no room for the need of others… Very sorry about that.
BTW there is a genetic condition in connemaras (something about their feet) and it started some years ago that people recognized the condition and started to think about ways to do something. And this year they started to require that every foal has to be tested. Some things start slow but have a good ending. The starting thing is the most important part…
It is ridiculous to accuse others of “not caring about the population” if their opinion is that a carrier is not “defective” or other negative description. Same thing re: people who say that a carrier is “defective”.
It’s not too late. In fact, the key to having those studies of the recessive allele’s frequency in the population being low rather than high in the future is testing as many horses as possible now. BTW, if you breed a heterozygous individual to a homozygous (dominant) one, you’ll always have those odds of producing a homozygous dominant one. That’s a constant. The point is to limit the number of heterozygous horses out there.
So much of this is really simple Mendelian genetics and distinguishing between the consequences of one mating and the change of allele frequency in a population over time, and appreciating the difference between genotypic results and phenotypic ones.
I know I sound like a broken record on this, but there are so many misunderstandings embedded in statements on this thread that could end if folks would review the basic science in play. You don’t have to take my word for any of this, but you do have to conform to the facts of population genetics.
