Page 122 - THE SLOUGHI REVIEW Issue 15

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Letter from Dr John E. Burchard to Mrs Helly Vogt, President of the Working Committee
Breeding Questions & SHSB, SKG dated 23.12.1986.
Zurich
23.12.86

Miss Helly Vogt
President
Working Committee Breeding & SHSB, SKG
Emmengasse 9, 4249 Blauen (Bern)

Dear Miss Vogt,
During an unfortunately very short visit to Switzerland I had occasion to read a copy of your
letter of October 11, 1986 to Mme A. Rey.
You can imagine that I am not enthusiastic about the content of this letter. Firstly, I find the
decision to exclude Labaan and his offspring from breeding wrong - not because it is a dog
bred by me, but rather because I consider the reasoning and thus also the conclusion
to be objectively incorrect. Secondly, and even worse, I must state that the statements I made
to the General Assembly of the SWC have been twisted and distorted in your letter to support
what I consider to be a factually incorrect assessment of the matter. I do not wish to
reproach you personally for this, as I assume that this interpretation was plausibly suggested
to you by a thoroughly interested party. Nevertheless, under these circumstances
I feel compelled to endeavour to correct.
At the aforementioned meeting, I was quite impressed - unfortunately in a negative sense -

by the polemic and lack of objectivity of the statements. As a natural scientist, I am used to
the fact that in my profession, you first and foremost endeavour to gain knowledge of the
objectively ascertainable facts in order to then derive the appropriate course of action
from them. Breeding dogs may be more of an art than a science; nevertheless, it is very
important, especially when breeding old dog breeds that originated outside Europe, to have
the most correct information possible about the source or imported material used for
breeding in order to avoid serious mistakes. In the case of the current offspring of Oriental
sighthounds (to deliberately use a neutral collective term), especially in Europe and the USA,
things are very much in disarray. This is primarily due to the pronounced Oriental
romanticism surrounding these animals, but also sometimes to a certain not very
praiseworthy interest policy.
The following statements are based on those I made at the general meeting of the SWC:

1. I did not and do not have the ambition to distinguish myself personally as a dog breeder.

Rather, as far as my own breeding activities are concerned, I wanted to breed dogs for my
own hunting use. Of course, this does not mean that I did not attach any importance to breed
affiliation. On the contrary, I always kept strictly to purebred representatives of the Arabian
sighthound breed found in Saudi Arabia, which is called "Sluqi" in the local Arabic dialect. As
the source animals I used were widely known for their quality, this assertion would still be
confirmed today by appropriate questioning.