Re: F&EL

[Barry Cooper <bjc3 at cornell_edu>]

At 01:43 PM 3/9/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi Barry,
>
><< I don't think that changed breeding styles are the cause for the "demise"
>  of the F&EL. Yesterday I attended a NWK quarterly meeting in which it took
>  about 3 hours to auction the fish. If all of those fish were listed in the
>  F&EL it would be quite substantial. >>
>
>     You don't think that people have a smaller number of pairs available
>these days from a MUCH larger group of available species than in the past and
>that it's not worth listing a few pairs in the F&EL?

That's not what I meant to say. People do keep more species now, or some 
people do. That doesn't mean the style of breeding the fish has changed and 
therefore changed whether they want to list in the BNL. My point is this: 
If the BNL were the only way to reach potential buyers, as it used to be, 
people would be listing there. However, that is most certainly no longer 
the case. People have club outlets and online listing avenues that are much 
more instantaneous and easier to use that the effort required to project 
what you'll have available 6-8 weeks down the line in order to get together 
a list for the BNL.

I think the point Edd is making is that the BOT wants the AKA to remain 
involved in trading and distribution of killies, or at least that's the way 
I understand it. He is suggesting, I think, that we need to rethink how we 
do that. No matter what the reasons, people are not using the BNL to list 
fish. Perhaps we can provide a mechanism that will allow most people good 
access, yet satisfy the desire to keep the AKA COE involved as well as 
satisfying the need of sellers to have a way to list small or large numbers 
of fish in a timely way, and to unlist them when they are gone.

The bottom line is that the reasons don't matter. The fact is that the BNL 
F&EL is slowly dying as a mechanism for distributing killies. We need to 
come up with an alternative. You can argue the old story of "not everyone 
will have equal access". I don't believe in that argument. They don't all 
have equal access now and the people that say that hardly ever buy anything 
through the F&EL anyway. Furthermore, there are people all over the country 
that would use an online exchange mechanism and that would get the fish out 
to every corner of the country. Subsequent generations would turn up in 
club auctions, thus allowing almost everyone access to the fish.

At the NWK auction there were both cases - a few precious examples of some 
and multiple pairs of others. I will put in a little boasting here about 
how successful the NWK club has become. We had something more than 30 
people in attendance, we have something like 50 members, and some of the 
fish went for $60-$80 a pair, including a superb pair of Blue Gularis that 
went for over $60 (I can't remember the exact price). Our prez, Brian 
Perkins, is to be congratulated on making NWK a success story.

By the way, our host Chuck Caputo put on a lunch that you would have paid 
big bucks to attend in some restaurants, and the restaurant food would not 
have been as good. Chuck bakes incredible pizzas.

Barry

>At the NWK auction were
>there lots of pairs of just a few species or a few pairs of many species?
>When people are keeping 40, 50, 60 species of fish, it makes sense that they
>would have a smaller number of offspring available than if they were breeding
>15 species. I agree that there are new marketplaces that use to not exist but
>are they the single cause? Just wondering.
>
>Robert
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Barry J. Cooper, Prof. Emeritus, Dept. Biomedical Sciences, Cornell University
Adjunct faculty, College of Veterinary Medicine, Oregon State University
Home address: 27505 Riggs Hill Rd., Sweet Home, OR 97386 (bjc3 at cornell_edu)


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