After a four-day trial this month, a Clackamas County Circuit Court jury found that the sperm bank had lost or damaged Weiner and Barcroft’s frozen reserves of dog semen. Weiner said he still has a small amount of King’s semen left, but he’ll no longer sell it because he has so little of it.
Yep, it's a story about Labrador Retriever breeders. But you looked anyway....
The trial exposed jurors to the high-stakes, sometimes precarious world of breeding elite hunting dogs. Dick Weiner and Brad Barcroft claimed the Sandy-area sperm bank negligently allowed the sperm of six prized, long-dead Labradors to thaw and become useless after a freezer mishap in 1997. Weiner and Barcroft alleged the sperm bank then hid its mistake for nearly two decades until a former employee of the company shared the news with them in 2016.
The pups produced weren't exactly cheap, at $2,000 to $3,000 apiece. So the breeders did lose a substantial amount of potential income. Naturally, the "sperm bank" is appealing the ruling.
