Wow, long time since I posted to rec.pets.dogs, nice to see Robin N
and others are still around. Anyway, I recently took a long, hard look
at my breed and the bloodlines I prefer to work with and realized just
how few of them I would consider worth breeding are still around, and
then of those, how few were even placed in homes where they would be
accessable (two I can think of off hand were resold to people who
could absolutely care less). In this particular bloodline we've lost
nearly all of our past/foundation dogs, with only one vial of semen
left on two of the most notable ones, both of which are likely to go
to waste. There are on the other hand a small handful of bitches
remaining based on the old stock and I had to wonder, what is AKC's
stance on freezing ova from a bitch for later fertilization and
implantation into a surrogate bitch? I've searched AKC's website and
asked a few people but nobody was sure..

From what I can find on googling the internet on freezing ova,(unlike
freezing sperm or embryos) it simply has not met with great success, so
I'd say that's why the AKC has nothing on its website about it - the
technology just isn't available. The biggest hurdle to this technology
being when the egg is thawed.

Here are a couple of links:
http://english.www.gov.tw/WHO/contentPage_news_71.htm
http://www.21cm.com/reproductive.html

Atrox wrote:

Wow, long time since I posted to rec.pets.dogs, nice to see Robin N
and others are still around. Anyway, I recently took a long, hard look
at my breed and the bloodlines I prefer to work with and realized just
how few of them I would consider worth breeding are still around, and
then of those, how few were even placed in homes where they would be
accessable (two I can think of off hand were resold to people who
could absolutely care less). In this particular bloodline we've lost
nearly all of our past/foundation dogs, with only one vial of semen
left on two of the most notable ones, both of which are likely to go
to waste. There are on the other hand a small handful of bitches
remaining based on the old stock and I had to wonder, what is AKC's
stance on freezing ova from a bitch for later fertilization and
implantation into a surrogate bitch? I've searched AKC's website and
asked a few people but nobody was sure..

Dee Jay wrote in
:

From what I can find on googling the internet on freezing ova,(unlike
freezing sperm or embryos) it simply has not met with great success,
so I'd say that's why the AKC has nothing on its website about it -
the technology just isn't available. The biggest hurdle to this
technology being when the egg is thawed.

Here are a couple of links:
http://english.www.gov.tw/WHO/contentPage_news_71.htm
http://www.21cm.com/reproductive.html

I was talking with a repro. vet over the weekend - she thought this was
an interesting problem. The dog world is still pretty focused on saving
sperm, with embryos a second-best, staggeringly expensive option. She
doesn't think eggs are, on the whole, more fragile than sperm, but
because there are so few of them, relative to the number of sperm in
semen, any damage significantly reduces your odds of success.

I am interested in seeing the world of cloning mature. I think we have
a lot to learn yet, but wonder whether eventually it would be easier to
keep a girl's genes around past her lifetime in the form of cloned cells
than by keeping an unpredictable half of them in the form of
difficult-to-harvest, fragile eggs.

--
Kate
and Storm the FCR
arfenarf at hotmail dot com