Petition to the ARC President and Directors

For the reasons stated below, we the undersigned members of ARC believe the MPs addressing the use of foreign owned Rottweilers need to be revised. ARC MPs need to be revised to accept the hip and elbow tests of foreign countries of foreign owned Rottweilers for breeding purposes and not require them to meet the specific test requirements of ARC member owned breeding dogs. This should include disclosure of all foreign health clearances to the club and perspective puppy buyers. The recently purposed MP revisions are an improvement in some areas, but still impossibly impractical for breeders using foreign owned dogs, Since the last MP revision requiring foreign dogs to be re-ex-rayed after 24 months (A PERIOD OF 9 YEARS), not one foreign dog owner has complied to these ARC MP requirements. That alone, demonstrates it being impractical. It just serves to keep the better producing foreign dogs out of our genepool further restricting genetic diversity and stud options. Those of us basing our breeding programs on breeding to dogs from other places, have been using frozen semen from foreign dogs born prior to 2008 and exempt of the 2008 requirements. That source is about to dry up. It would of been nice if one of the committee members had been one making it a practice of breeding to foreign dogs and had encountered for themselves how impractical these mp requirements are. Since there isn't and they can't fully appreciate the difficulty of convincing owners of sometimes 5 to 8 year old dogs to re xray and resubmit to OFA so we, as ARC members, can stay in compliance. Those breeding domestically only, don't understand or see the problem. Those not breeding to foreign dogs rationalize it isn't their problem, but maintaining genetic diversity is everyone’s problem. The only way to maintain it is to bring in new bloodlines.

The newly proposed idea to create an ARC Stud list can be useful to inform ARC members to choices, but this does not address the need for new bloodlines. A recent intensive search of OFA resulting in a list of all the pedigrees of eligible breeding males in the OFA data base. The majority go back to the same bloodlines over and over again. It isn't just about the number of choices for ARC members, but also the genetic diversity of those choices which is most important.

To put this into perspective historically, Our Rottweilers have benefited greatly from the use of foreign bloodlines. Over 50% of our Gold Sires are either imports or sons of Imports. In the early years, there was less demand for quality imports in Europe. America was able to acquire many great dogs from Europe easily & reasonably cheap. Today the US is competing against countries all over the world for these same quality dogs. This has driven their cost sky high. Sometimes a nice import is brought in but over all we are getting imports of lesser quality. Frozen semen is the new way to get access to some of

these foreign top producers. Frozen semen is today's method of importing new blood into our American bloodlines.

For these reasons, we the undersigned believe it is in the best interest of the ARC, our Rottweilers and members for the current MPs to be revised to state foreign Hip and Elbow ratings evaluated under two years of age on foreign owned Rottweilers be accepted for breeding purposes.