Il mio diario: pensieri, osservazioni, racconti e leggende sul dogo argentino

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29-12-2006 Il Dogo Argentino II >> >>

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8-12-2006 Parlando di “etica” >> >>

18-02-2009

HUNTING DOGS

Dear friends and readers of my crazy words, several people are asking me for which reason do I try to select a new breed. They always ask me: Do you want to make a true hunting dog or are you trying to select a dog tougher than a pit bull?

Well, to be honest I am looking for both targets. In fact, dogos are good hunters, amstaff are good hunters too (the terrier' spirit always comes out) and the sleuth-hound I am using to the project are specific ones for hunting wild boar, deer and badger. From this inbreeding we could not receive other than a truly valid hunting dog.

Referred to the second question, if I am trying to select a dog tougher than pit bull, first of all I want to state that I don't think it would be ever possible to select a breed better than pit bull, under a "pound by pound" point of view, but I hope to be able to select a breed as strong, well balanced and rich in gameness as a pit bull, but with his mind directed on the wild boar and not interested in fighting against dogs. Also I want to tell another important thing: I don't agree the philosophy of the dog fighters, because in their philosophy, right or wrong my opinion could be, I see an absolute lack of piety and I can't accept it, because I admire and respect a true fighter really very much. In spite of that, I have to recognize that, thanking this pitiless, we have dogs in who legend and reality run on the same level. They are really unbelievable animals. Speaking about fighting dogs, we have to divide the whole situation in two big parts, parts that stay both far away from my new breed:

Pit bull: Pit bulls are the only true, original, fighting dogs. They are the faithful reproduction of the old English bull dog, born in the centuries around the Thousand year. He was a dog especially bred to fight against his similar. Today, in my own opinion, pit bulls are not only a pure breed, but are also a "type of dog". In fact the breed they belong to is determinate by proportions and not by height or weight (size). That's why we can see perfect pit bulls weighting only 12 kilos, while others arrive to 40 kilos. In spite of this huge difference, what really matters is the way in which the dog is built up, his proportions, his balance. These factors determinate the race. Nobody could say that a pit bull weighting 12 kilos is worst than another weighting 25 or 30 kilos. Simply they belong to different classes. For fighting, like it happens among human being, pitmen fix a weight, i.e. 20 kilos. If your dog weights 20,100 kilos you have lost the fight, also without fighting. Pitmen are very tight regarding this point. Because of the above, we could see fantastic contenders weighting 12 kilos and others, as good as the first, weighting 25 kilos. But nobody will ever organize a fight between dogs belonging to a different weight' class. In spite of the above, when a pit bull weights more than 27 kilos he enters into the "catch weight" category, that is a kind of "open class", in which the contenders are allowed to have any weight and a difference in weight doesn't matter. They exist also pit bulls weighting 35 or more kilos, but they are not well considered by pitmen, because they don't have almost opponents and, for instance, their records are very poor. For this reason it's very difficult to evaluate the gameness of a heavy pit bull. It is more: many pitmen believe that how more is the weight, so lower is the relationship among weight, power and gameness, which are the factors that make pit bulls a different breed respect to any other breed.

Other fighting dogs: In this group we could put the bandogs (they come out from pit bull crossed with heavy breeds, like filha, akita inu, tosa inu, several types of mastiff, etc.), charplanina, Asian (both of them are heavy shepherd dogs, mainly used in the Eastern Europe, especially in the former Yugoslavia), and tosa inu, mainly used in Japan, Korea and China. Tosa inu has 3 different types: light (35/40 kilos); medium (45/50 kilos); heavy (more than 60 kilos). People breeding the above mentioned breeds, say that doesn't exist a pit bull that could win against one of those dogs, if they have gameness and if they are well trained. Effectively I heard about heavy dogs that could defeat, and also kill, pit bulls, but it should be necessary to know the realistic quality of the pit bulls they fought against. Pitmen are convinced that a good pit bull weighting 30 kilos would never lose against any dog, and facts say they are right because I heard that, soon or late, those famous big dogs, considered like "pit bulls' killers", lose their invincibility when they meet a good, "catch weight" pit bull. This result is generated by a peculiar reason: when you fight against a good pit bull, or you kill him, or you lose and, according to the information I got, it isn't an easy job to kill a pit bull weighting around 30 kilos. Yes, it isn't an easy job because a pit bull weighting 30 kilos has the same strength of a dog doubling him in weight, and he lasts three times more.

The new breed I am trying to select now, will have a weight of 25/30 kilos in females, and 30/35 kilos in males. This, at least, is the result I hope to achieve and what I programmed under a theoretic point of view. He will be an agile dog, well built and proportioned, with a very strong but never heavy head and tie lips. Finally, the blood line will be 45% amstaff, 45% dogo, 10% sleuth-hound. Through this project, that changed my breeding life since several years now, I hope to be able to select a really excellent hunting dog, capable to have good results on our tough mountains. In other words, I hope to achieve the same qualities like pit bulls have, but directed only to hunting sport. I hope, through this script, to have answered to some of the many questions I received from friends and other people that are interested to my project. I know this is a matter we should discuss about during hours, and I also know that only time and direct experiences will give us the answers we need to have and we expect to have. But, from the above, I believe that it's an evidence that my will is not breeding a fighting dog, because no fighting dogs have been used for the selection of the new race. Thank you for your kind attention. Paolo Vianini

Note: The information about pit bulls and other fighting breeds have been found on internet. I don't assume any responsibility because of wrong information.Paolo Vianini