Akita Dog Interview-IV

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This article appeared in the Winter 2000 issue of Akita Dog, a quarterly publication of the Akita Club of America, Inc. It is reprinted with permission of the author and copyright owner, J. Creason.

So, at the conclusion of the registration process, what did you realize, if anything, after handling all of these records for the dogs?

Well, there I was in Virginia with all these records and no one was going to have access to them except me. I thought this wasn't right. I believed that Akita owners should be able to research the pedigrees of the dogs in the background of their dogs' pedigrees. So, I wanted to do something to make this data available.

I was in communication with Joe Vogl, who was the President of the Akita Club at the time, and also William F. Stifel, Executive Secretary of the AKC. We were all discussing this, and ultimately the concept of the ACA Akita Stud Book Register came about.

The stud book REGISTER is a compilation of all the pedigree data relevant to AKC foundation stock registered Akitas. It is not a listing of all Akitas ever registered with the ACA (generally referred to as the ACA Stud Book). It includes 4 sections with which you can generate pedigrees:

Banner Text The 1st section is the litter registrations: every litter that had foundation stock Akitas or Akitas ancestral to foundation stock Akitas. (528 litters)

Banner Text The 2nd section is every individual Akita that was registered as foundation stock. This included both living and deceased Akitas. (1862 f.s. Akitas)

Banner Text The 3rd section is every individual Akita that was not individually registered as foundation stock but was ancestral to a foundation stock registered Akita. This section was needed to fill in the gaps and allow the generation of a complete pedigree going back to every Japanese import behind each foundation stock registered Akita. (269 Akitas ancestral to f.s. Akitas)

Banner Text The 4th section is a 3-generation pedigree of every import listed in section 2 or section 3. (340 imports)

Transliterating the Japanese Import Pedigrees
Now, in order to do the import pedigrees, I had to learn to transliterate some Japanese. I had to get help from some people with whom I was communicating by mail in Okinawa; people whom I had met through registrations when I couldn't figure out how to do some transliterations on my own.

So this was quite a learning experience for me, never having known any Japanese. I acquired a number of Japanese dictionaries including one very large character dictionary and spent a lot of time learning to read and recognize the characters.

I studied the import pedigrees for which we already had official transliterations and learned to recognize the familiar characters that recurred in many of the other pedigrees. I always tried to be sure to transliterate, not necessarily the same character, but the same dog's name the same way in every pedigree where it appeared. As a scientist, I have a natural attention to detail. Fortunately, it seemed to carry over into reading Japanese characters and being able to spell transliterations of Japanese names.

Is this a book that people can still use today?

If they can generate a pedigree that goes back to a dog in foundation stock, then yes, they can still use it. People have asked me how to use The ACA Akita Stud Book Register to connect that data to what they see in their current dogs' pedigrees. It can be used in conjunction with the monthly issues of The American Kennel Club Stud Book Register (beginning with Volume 90, Number 5 of May 1973) to generate past and current pedigrees.

To the best of my knowledge, the copyrighted pedigree data presented in The ACA Akita Stud Book Register is not published by anyone else, including AKC. (The only data that, to my knowledge, are not published currently are the 3-generation pedigrees of the imports registered since AKC reopened the Akita Stud Book in 1992.) Incidentally, the number of errors I've seen in pedigrees prepared by breeders appalls me—not just errors in spelling, but errors of lineage. The stud book can be used to check a pedigree for accuracy.

Using Pedigrees
People can use the pedigrees to see the relationships that exist in the backgrounds of their dogs. If you have any curiosity beyond a standard 3-generation pedigree, if you're interested in researching pedigrees, the stud book register can be used to follow all kinds of hereditary temperament problems and diseases that are cropping up in this breed.

People are linebreeding; people are inbreeding. Without looking at pedigrees, you don't know what you're dealing with. And, it may be that you don't have to use the stud book register to look at your pedigrees, but people better be studying their pedigrees and I mean going back way beyond 3 generations.

Obviously pedigrees are important to genetics and health, which is the reason that Dr Angles requested pedigrees in the UC Davis Canine Immunogenetics Project.

That's right. I also understand that he was presented a copy of The ACA Akita Stud Book Register to use in conjunction with his Akita genetics studies. Getting back to your question, when it comes to breeding, there are a lot of things that need to be considered. Now, I'm not a breeder but a few things seem obvious to me. You look at pedigrees, you look at conformation, you factor in what's going on in the show ring, and you take into account health history and genetics.

If you can go back far enough to bring the stud book register into play, the stud book can help. But, what the stud book register can't tell you is the health issues, genetic diseases, temperament problems, any of that. It can only give you lineage, sire and dam, dates, etc. It also can show you inbreeding or linebreeding patterns when you generate the pedigrees you want.

Which is a starting point.

I believe the best way to address the study of genetic disorders in conjunction with pedigree research is to have an open registry for hereditary Akita diseases and disorders. Liz Harrell proposed an open registry in the '70s, and in return, received a death threat, a phone call announcing that she would ruin lives, plus a great deal of hostility. Barbara Bouyet mentioned in her Akita Dog interview that she proposed such a registry without success. On the Akita-L list, I also proposed to set up and maintain an open registry in 1998, and it was opposed vehemently.

I think it is a serious mistake to keep these issues secretive. Without information about carriers of hereditary disorders, breeders are playing Russian Roulette.

Proposing an Akita Open Registry
I propose that, as a membership requirement, the ACA mandate participation in an open registry for hereditary diseases and disorders. One of the main purposes set forth in the original ACA Articles of Incorporation is to preserve and protect the Akita breed. Specifically, it refers to ". . . advance the welfare of the Akita dog in America," ". . . promote better care, control, breeding and selling practices. . . ." I can't think of a better way to do it than this.

There are far too many Akitas with life-limiting hereditary diseases being produced and used in breeding programs by uninformed breeders and some others who should know better. The ACA needs to put the welfare of Akitas ahead of breeders' egos and special interests in keeping the hereditary problems in their line secret.

Where to next?