WoofnHoof

I see your point woof, I just dont think it's been well handled, especially having an idea of how Indonesians react to ultimatums. I firmly believe we had a better chance of making changes by staying in there. And the whole stun gun issue isnt coming from the moslems, it's coming from their Govt. I have to disagree I doubt we had a better chance regardless, the live export industry was put on notice years ago with the first reports, it was only a matter of time before it came to a head and since the Indonesians are giving no guarantees about how and where our cattle will be slaughtered it's no surprise that a stalemate has resulted. We aren't in a position to force any concessions out of them while we are supplying cattle to them and if they don't want our cattle badly enough to abide by basic welfare outcomes then I don't really think there's much we could have done. It's not like we want them to get down and beg for forgiveness we just want them to treat cattle humaely it's not that difficult, if they go elsewhere we can't control that either all we can control is where our own cattle go, if we send them to indonesia without getting any concessions about welfare then we haven't done anything useful.

Yes I've seen it and I see nothing there that has any teeth behind it, and certainly no agreement that the Indonesians will abide by it. the link I posted in the other thread suggests that the indonesians probably don't care if we supply them or not anyway so I don't see them agreeing to our terms for a couple of years before they kick us out anyway. If they want our beef they need to provide some surety that our conditions will be met, if it happens great that's the best outcome if it doesn't well nothing was ever going to change anyway.

None now until the suspension is lifted. Those 100,000 Brians could end up in someone's backyard and wait for a blunt knife. When it's lifted and if the Indonesians will deal with our industry again the MLA will have control of the supply chain. Oh well clearly we had no power before anyway so I don't see much difference.

They might be accompanied but what can they do? The cattle are sold what power do we have to say they must go to certain slaughterhouses? What power do we have to enforce that when in the past they've never had to listen? What if half the shipment goes to a good one and half goes to a bad one, the AA rep can't stand in front of the truck and say 'no you can't take them'. I just don't see what solution would be enforceable without having taken this stand first, to show that we are prepared to stop supply and that we aren't bluffing.

You can send as many vets boners etc as you like doesn't mean anything if the Indonesians won't listen and won't change their practices, why would they when we are still happily supplying cattle to them? It's only by showing that we can and will stop supply that we have any right to dictate terms. Whether it works I don't know but that's the only card we have to play so the government has decided to play it.

It's not out yet, the website I linked says coming soon so hopefully not far away

Since no one in OT is interested I thought I'd post this here :p I've been very impressed with the equisketch records app for horses it's great for keeping track of all my important info and now they've made one for pets which is terrific! can't wait to get it and plug in all my pets details Equisketch Pets

Thanks for the update SSM very interesting times ahead! Thanks for your thoughts too gwenneth1 you will be happy to know that the abattoir up the road from me in Qld utilises handling facilities designed by Temple Grandin

Here http://www.aqha.com.au/registry_services/generic_HERDA.asp Interesting - I don't think the breeder mentioned that at all ;) That is interesting, and of course opens a whole other can of worms!

Lol when she explained it to me I was just reeling with information overload, she's great like that though she explains everything really well so you never feel left in the dark I reckon she would be fantastic to work for just to soak up all that info would be great :D I imagine it would be difficult if not impossible to do ET with dogs? If so the case for cloning could be extremely strong in the cases of bitches that have had to be spayed due to pyo etc assuming there are no genetic factors in terms of predisposition to pyo?

That would be embryo transfer, a very exciting technology which allows performance mares to be bred from while still able to compete. From what I know of it it's quite difficult, risky and expensive and not undertaken lightly. Again not allowed in TBs either. No quite easy, I watched a programme on it the other day. American of course. The mare was irrigated so may many days ofter mating and they just flushed the embryo out, caught it in a sieve and checked the viability of it and then planted it in the surrogate. Lol my vet does it she doesn't think it's easy at all Much easier in principle than in practice I think ;) Slightly OT but I remember reading some research a while back which suggests that genes can be transferred from mother to foetus in the womb as well so that will make people chose their recipient mares carefully lol

I don't see it as rinse and repeat though, from what I can tell most of these animals are going to be used for breeding not just for the sake of having a clone. As I understand it the multiple clones are the result of the original cloning rather than people wanting several copies of the same horse, several clones were initiated because of the high rate of failure at this early stage. I think that is the only reason there have been multiple clones of the same horse, not to make endless copies of the same horse that would be pointless. If the registries follow the QH example then only progeny would be able to be registered and competed which should allay fears about people just reproducing the same horse, each clone's progeny will be different and unique and they will carry the lines forward, the clone is just the bridge between the original and the progeny.

I wouldnt be the least bit surprised. Peter Kerkenezov looks pretty peed off at the moment and has demanded the sacking of the LiveCorp Board for knowing about if for a decade, and he wouldnt be the only one who is outraged. Cattle producers are pretty peed off as well, they've been paying levies under the impression that animal welfare was being taken care of so they could avoid the threat to their industry, that and they do care about the welfare of their animals too.

This is my POV too, I don't see the point of competing a proven animal nor do I think it should be allowed, but breeding is a different story. There can be many different reasons why a stud cannot be used, maybe geographical issues, maybe he won't collect and so the potential for breeding is limited to those females which can be brought to him, severely limiting the introduction of those lines in other areas or countries.

I see what you're getting at I'm just not convinced it's drastic enough to effect change, I think an interim ban would really make them sit up and take notice. They can say they'll shop elsewhere but in reality it's not that easy to source that much cattle and especially when our beef would be very competitively priced being so close. From a purely economic point of view I wouldn't be surprised if it's cheaper for them to just do what we tell them to do. I don't think of it as pulling out altogether I would support an interim ban until all abattoirs are up to standard and some agreement with teeth that enforces regular audits and the power to pull out at any time if non compliant. This is in addition to supplying equipment and training, I think that equipment and training with no teeth behind it is going to do little in the long term, equipment breaks down, training isn't kept up and so there needs to be a strong motivational factor in maintaining the standard. TBH it wouldn't surprise me one iota if the whole expose had been initiated by someone in the industry in the first place, probably tired of seeing nothing done (or the glacial pace of it) and so tipped off AA to do a story on it.

I'm sorry about my tone but IMO it wasnt a beat up at all, how can anyone beat up something that actually happens? It doesn't matter what dramatic music or emotive language or camera angles were used, the fact is that cruelty is occurring no amount of objectivity can alter that it's not a matter of perception or sleight of hand. The fact that substandard abattoirs are in operation to receive our cattle is just not good enough, call me crazy but the MLA has supposedly been working on solutions for years so forgive me if my faith in their abilities (and their promises) is somewhat jaded. They have already supplied equipment like I've said in similar threads you can give them stunners till the end of time doesn't mean they'll use them. All I can see are platitudes and butt covering so it does tend to make me a bit testy which I apologize for.

That would be embryo transfer, a very exciting technology which allows performance mares to be bred from while still able to compete. From what I know of it it's quite difficult, risky and expensive and not undertaken lightly. Again not allowed in TBs either.

I know what you're saying but I still dont agree with it. What's wrong with using the mares and stallions already available. Not enough good ones, then breed them rather than clone them. I just dont get it. there was only one Matine and one Andreas. A clone or it's offspring isnt going to perform the same without the rapport and teamwork those two individuals had regardless of dna. For the same reason any breeding goes ahead, to produce (hopefully) even better animals. The thing with performance horses is when you have proven performance it's very valuable it takes lots of money and lots of time to train and campaign them to a high level so you want to start with the best genetics possible. The hard part with mares is that if you are going to breed with them it should be done fairly early, my mare was bred at 8-9 and the vet referred to her as an 'older mare' in terms of first time foaling. Blue Hors Matine was 13 and if she had not retired through injury would probably have competed even longer, so her breeding potential was very limited anyway. The case with stallions is even more compelling many performance horses are gelded as stallions are a PITA to manage and are sometimes harder to focus on the task at hand so if you have a competition horse who is gelded who turns out to be something special you have lost those genes to the gene pool. Especially in sports like eventing and show jumping there aren't a lot of performance proven stallions to choose from, particularly in Australia, one of our current high performing dressage stallions is breeding the buggery out of everything in this country soon there will be very few Youngstock that don't have him in their lines, another up and coming star had to be gelded recently for whatever reason, they did collect him a lot beforehand but that was because they knew he was a likely contender for London and beyond, usually with young horses you don't know and most people aren't going to go through the hassle of maintaining and campaigning a stallion unless they have a vey good reason to do so, so we have lots of awesome performance horses out there who are a genetic dead end.

Amazing, isnt it - and rspc bloody a. The other thing that amazes me is only 25% of slaughtered cattle in Indonesia come from Australia but the people jumping up and down demanding a complete ban only care if the cows are Australian. What about the other 75%? Atleast with the two Governments now working together making changes it might have an influence across the board (probably not much because they're now saying they want to restrict it to a set number of feedlots and slaughterhouses thanks to the shortsighted animal rights' people) Oh come on you know damn well it wasn't a beat up, some of us can see past the messenger funnily enough. It's very very easy to be able to shrug this off as just some whacky animal rights beat up, far harder to find a solution. And I'm not interested in any solution which allows this sort of treatment to continue while the pen pushers and suits strut around being diplomatic and achieving nothing. If this is an 'improvement' according to the industry we should never have been sending cattle there in the first place. As far as not caring about the other 75% don't be ridiculous we have no control over that. The only control we have is the control of our animals before they leave and control over who we sell them to. We survived 20 years ago not shipping our cattle to them we can survive again, and lead by example. They will want our beef again and when they are ready to do the right thing they will get it. There is a reason we have welfare codes of practice in this country, it's because we give a crap and we shouldn't stop giving a crap when our animals leave our shores for the sake of money. Why bother having standards here if we won't stand by them elsewhere? That just makes us a bunch of bloody hypocrites trading in blood and suffering.

There would be no point as they couldn't be registered, I see no reason for the registries to allow clones to compete, the performance has already been proven the whole point of cloning is to allow the animal to be bred from. All TBs need to be DNAed to be registered, it is then up to the ruling bodies for that breed to decide the extent to which that clone is used. If they allow progeny of the clone to be registered they can restrict numbers of registered progeny which they should already be doing seeing as how popular sire syndrome is alive and well in many breeds even taking cloning out fo the equation. I doubt the puppy farmers would bother cloning it's expensive and they don't care about bloodlines anyway, far more effort goes into producing a clone than just whacking a couple of entires together so I don't really see a market opportunity there, they might tell buyers that the pup is from some cloned champion but without papers and DNA it's no different to the way they already tell people their pups are registered and by some champion. Ultimatelynit does come down to the registries to ensure that clones are used and applied responsibly but most pure breed registries are taking a hard line approach and no allowing clones to be registered at all so I dare say they will regulate the use quite strongly. Currently most of the horses I've heard of being cloned are performance horses who aren't necessarily pure and therefore are controlled by the performance registries. These animals are clones of top performing geldings and have been produced for the purpose of breeding, not for competition. Since the application can extend to dogs as well (and most likely will in the future) then it is certainly relevant IMO. If a young champion dies before they could be bred from that line could be lost forever. What if it didn't have to be? For breeding of course. There is no point recreating the performance and I don't beleive clones should be used in competition (I doubt anyone would bother it's a lot of work and a lot of money to get to that level) but performance horse breeding is a big deal and a mare of that talent could have produced some awesome foals.

If they really want something in your house, that is probably true. But I think most crims would overlook a house with a dog if the house next door didn't have one, or the house with the alarm if the house next door didn't have one. You hear a lot of stories about crims who case a street and make notes which houses have dogs, alarms etc I'm very confident with dogs and I would definitely decide against breaking into my house Yep a woman I know had a home invasion (didn't have a dog at the time) and when she went to court one of the pieces of evidence they found was a map of the area with red crosses on all the houses with dogs. They are a good deterrant but as has been pointed out if they are targeting you or your property specifically a dog will not hurt them. I also agree that it's not really the best thing for police to be advising people to go and get a dog as if they were a set and forget alarm system. Dogs are deterrants but they are still living breathing creatures that require adequate care and consideration. Re the size thing I remember hearing about some insurance research a while back which found that all dogs are equally valuable as deterrants no matter the size or breed, little dogs can make a lot of noise and they always know where you are before you know where they are ;)

Why not? Nature has been cloning for years. Assuming that there will be restrictions on numbers (including numbers of progeny which I think should be in place regardless of whether the sire is a clone) and competing them I don't forsee huge issues. I think it would be a very good thing for widening gene pools and opening up more avenues of choice for breeders, many many horses are lost for breeding because of gelding and age there are lots of exciting possibilities for the future of breeding performance animals. is the most watched dressage performance on youtube, this awesome mare was to be bred but broke her leg in a paddock accident and had to be euthed, it would be circumstances like these that cloning could allow those genetics to be passed on to the next generation of dressage stars

Yeah that's right I just meant in terms of cloning him for breeding purposes I didn't see much point if he was already available for breeding but apparently he is no more so in that case it's more a case of prolonging his breeding life.

Ah I can see why they cloned him to a certain extent then but I suppose it depends on how many of his offspring were already available to pass on the line as to whether it's really worthwhile, otherwise you just end up with another case of popular sire syndrome No need for multiple clones IMO but maybe they were 'spares' given that not all clones are viable? The TBs don't even allow AI (officially) so they would never allow cloning, they DNA horses for registration too so a clone would really be no use to the TBs as it can't be registered or raced and neither will it's foals.

I don't see the point of cloning an intact stallion doesn't the AQHA already accept AI? Surely it would be cheaper just to import semen? Maybe he doesn't freeze well but still if he's already reproducing I don't really understand why they felt the need to clone him. The value I see in cloning is to make available for breeding those horses that otherwise wouldn't be able to breed, such as geldings and actively competing mares who, by the time they are old enough to retire from competition could very well be too old for breeding. Any other purpose seems a bit superfluous to me. Similarly when it comes to dogs I see the value in this to make it easier to retain bloodlines and if a desexed pet happens to end up a fantastic example of the breed and worthy of breeding from then the opportunity would be available for that.