Gameness is either there or not, you can add wind....how about ability?

[Officially Retired]

Jack the blunder here is you thinking a dog knows what winning and losing is. That's you pushing your ideas and vocabulary onto the dog.

A dog does not have a human definition of winning, true, but he damned sure knows (in his own terms) that he wants to vanquish his foe or not.

What you're doing is quibbling over 'human definitions' as a mask for actually discussing the issue, because (for that matter) a dog doesn't know what gameness is either.

There are no degrees of gameness. Anything short of the final degree is left unknown.

You are confusing DEAD gameness with the mere presence of gameness. Dead gameness is what you're talking about, which means that the dog has so much gameness it will run out of its own life before it runs out of the will to keep fighting.

That's why originally said how honest a dog is. You can say hey that dog took a beatin and kept coming he's pretty honest, so long as he is alive he can live to quit another day.

I find it laughable that you just substituted the word "honest" for gameness here. Again, a dog doesn't know what "honest" means either (), so it serves no purpose for you to change terminology to say the same thing.

Re-naming a proven degree of gameness as "honest" (to try to confuse things) is no way to form an argument, because I am still calling what you describe a certain amount of proven gameness. I can just as easily say, "This dog has shown to be pretty game," as you say 'honest' and we're both saying the same thing--and the dog can still quit another day.

So long as a dogs living there has got to be a shadow of a doubt that there is cur in its ass.

Here comes the "macho talk" that is always joined with this kind of unaware extremism

The correct view is that, so long as a dog is alive, he hasn't shown DEAD gameness ... true (and DUH!) ... but if he came from way back, after getting nearly killed in a 2-hour blood bath, I will happily call that dog, "Very game," or "Game as a live one can be," or some such, and be correct in my terminology.

To assume anything less, would be another blunder.

Wrong. Confusing DEAD gameness with mere 'gameness' is your blunder

Degrees of gameness can just as easily be called degrees of cur using your line of thinking.

This is factually inaccurate, and yet another blunder on your part

Take the existence of HEAT and the concept of TEMPERATURE for example. What we commonly call "hot" and "cold" are actually degrees of HEAT (molecular motion) only ... there IS NO SUCH THING as "degrees of cold" ... and, quite similarly, we also speak of degrees here

Scientifically-speaking, there ARE NO "degrees of cold" there are ONLY degrees of heat (molecular motion)

Therefore, what we call "hot" is something with a high degree of molecular motion, and what we call "cold" is something with a low degree of molecular motion, and it is all based on HOW MUCH HEAT (motion) is going on in the object.

Now then, if we take this same analogy to the dogs, and if gameness is the desire to fight/win, then "how game" a dog is can be viewed in the same fashion as "how hot" an object is, which likewise comes in an infinite variety of degrees

There is never "the presence of cold" in an object; there is only the presence (or absence) of HEAT (molecular motion)
There is never "the presence of cur" in a dog, either; there is only the presence (or absence) of GAMENESS (the will to fight/win)

So, again, you have your entire understanding of everything bass-ackwards ...

Any degree short of death is that much more degree of cur to be questioned.

Wrong and again exactly backwards.

Any kind of will to fight at all is SOME degree of GAMENESS ... short of a dog that won't hit a lick or take one hold ... which is why we call these dogs COLD ... which would be the same as "Absolute Zero" in terms of temperature (no gameness at all / no motion at all)

Be enlightened now

Jack