WHICH SHOULD WE DO?

         Okay. Coat Funk (CF), a term first coined by Terry Sewell if I am not mistaken, is a problem, a big problem. We know very little about it. Often literature says one thing and experience says another. This is not unlike many problems we have encountered such as dwarfism, epilepsy, thyroid, and auto-immune (and there is a bucket load of those). To my mind there are a number of options:

         Scenario 1: We could identify every animal with every affliction and never breed to it and their direct family (mother father brother sister maybe aunts and uncles) again either by sterilisation or euthanasia of the entire crowd. Some people advocate this very clearly and loudly. One certainly wouldn't have to worry about the ins and outs of the affliction either, just identification. This strict program of eugenics would leave us with few animals after all was said and done, but they presumably would be affliction free - Super Mals, if you will. And that may be worth doing if we could guarantee that the remaining animals would be typey, sound, by the book Malamutes. Wouldn't it just suck if we eliminated all defective Mals just to find out the remainder look more like mangy coyotes!! Doh!!!!

         Scenario 2: Another way would be to identify afflicted animals and not breed to them, but elect to go to their seemingly unafflicted kin and breed to them for the strong characteristics they may offer. You may end up with some afflicted if your choice was a carrier. Or you may end up with a line of unafflicteds and never see the issue again. This option could work and does to some degree, but you do run the bigger risk of whelping a litter of problems. You must know a lot about your animals, and theirs, when you go this route. People who are not forthcoming regarding their animals are a difficulty.

         Scenario 3: The third way I can think of is to breed to any and all regardless of passive or harmful characteristics that may be passed along to the get. Wouldn't the ancestral "wolf" then show up??? The Mal may become a "real" primitive then wouldn't he??

         The first and the last scenarios are the easiest. The first would require a strong governing body (works for GSD's in Germany, oddly enough) that would be able to wheedle out of all people what they have in their back yards and either let what they find live or destroy them. Catalogue all animals and strictly control their breeding. Strict governance is essential in this scenario. The results can be spectacular. The gene pool would then be both small and shallow but the slightest upset of the genes themselves could spell their doom - cheetahs in SA are a great example of this. Those genes must be closely supervised and protected - even more than understood.

         The third scenario requires no constraints whatsoever; just let it all happen, any way anyone wants. The gene pool would be vast and deep in spots and shallower in others. A relatively healthy, but not without its problems, mongrel population would result. Human beings on this planet are a good example of this scenario. By and large the average population is fine, we have some super humans and we have some a little bit less than the average. The latest numbers I have heard on this say that the entire gene pool of the present human population can be only from 10 to 20 thousand individuals of a general population that existed eons ago. Makes me wonder how many Mals there are on this planet right now? Enough?

         The second scenario is the most difficult as it requires knowledge and more knowledge in order to limit the risk of acquiring harmful characteristics and multiplying the positive attributes in the effort to create, then maintain, a certain "standard" of individual Malamute. The gene pool is broader than in the first scenario, but not as broad as the third. It presumes this thought - breed towards good and better qualities, not away from bad ones.

         How we approach the afflictions, CF et al, will determine what happens to the breed. All three scenarios present their own advantages and disadvantages. So what should we do? And that question applies to all afflictions of our beloved Mals. Which should we do, scenario 1, 2 or 3?