Dog Health | Ruffly Speaking: Railing against idiocy since 2004

I’ve been working 20 hours a day for a couple of days so I haven’t been able to respond to comments–I figured it was about time to hit a bunch of them. Some of these are quite antique, but I thought they all deserved some attention.

From Samantha:

Does this pup have mange?

A friend of ours called yesterday,some kids in his youth group found a pup and couldn’t find an owner,so they were trying to find a home for it.Knowing the town they found it in,I took it..it would have ended up who knows where.It has some scabs and patches of fur missing.He doesn’t seem uncomfortable or itchy,but he’s pretty skinny.Advice??

First of all, congrats on your new puppy. I hope it works out with him or you’re able to find a great home for him.

Any time a puppy has been neglected, fed substandard food, or stressed (and in this case all three), there’s a possibility of mange getting a foothold. Without seeing the puppy I couldn’t tell you whether that’s what you’re looking at, but it would certainly be a good first guess.

There are two types of mange that you have to worry about: demodex (which is caused by tiny tiny mites that live on every dog’s skin but go out of control when a dog has a depressed immune system) and sarcops (which is caused by a larger mite that burrows in the skin and causes intense itching).

Demodex is always the first thing you think of when a neglected puppy looks less than sleek. It causes hairless patches, crusting/scabbing, pink skin, and in severe cases can take over the whole body. If you’re looking at just a few patches, don’t treat it. Let the puppy’s own body fight it off as he recovers from his recent trauma. Feed him very well (raw diet is best, but if not that a very good kibble–let me know if you need recommendations), worm the heck out of him (a puppy with no history I’d personally use Panacur/SafeGuard on, but you can also use Strongid or one of the other pyrantel brands), and bathe him. As he gets healthy the patches will go away on their own.

If a puppy is not only scabby but intensely itchy, especially on the margins of the ears, you can suspect sarcops mange. It’s the same mite that causes scabies in humans, and it IS transmissable from dogs to people so watch for itchy patches on your own skin. Sarcops used to require a major treatment with super-poisonous insecticide, but now thankfully most dogs can be treated with a course of Revolution. I don’t recommend Revolution on a regular basis–I think it’s much too powerful to be used as a standard heartworm/worming/flea regimen–but for sarcops mange it’s perfect.

If you see fleas, by the way, the scabs can be flea bite dermatitis. I don’t know where you are in the world but fleas are a year-round problem in many areas. If you suspect them, add a course of Frontline or Advantage (no cheapo brands like Zodiac or Hartz) and apply between the shoulder blades two days after the bath.

Good luck and keep us updated!

From Carolyn:

So . . . does that mean that you’re going to nationals, or is that hypothetical for the future (as in Gettysburg 2010).

We were originally planning to go this year, but the fire pretty much killed our chances. I went to the 2005 Nationals in Sturbridge (long before I even had a Cardi) and my goal is to make it a yearly event once kids are big enough to be left for the week. 2010 is a very good possibility, especially if I have anything to show.

From John:

Hi Joanna….Purchased a great dane pup from you a couple years ago and I have to tell you…….AMAZING dog…simply stunning…he practically stops traffic when we are out for walks….He came from a litter that was welped @ june 2006….anyway….thanks again… John Gilman

I was SO thrilled to get this comment. John and his partner are wonderful owners and one of my favorite puppy applicants. And their boy was stunning in the whelping box–good to know he fulfilled his promise.

From Cait:

What happens though, when you end up with a disease gene that simply ends up super-widespread in a relatively diverse population? A low COI won’t help you then. Collies have a decent gene pool compared to many other breeds (The American fancy was well-established before the world wars). Eliminating affected dogs WOULD produce a bottleneck, and even simply breeding for non-affected carriers is going to bottleneck things to some degree.)

I don’t know the answers to these questions and I don’t know who to ask to find out. (Also, any books you can recommend on population genetics? I’m curious.)

You’re talking about CEA, I’m guessing. Collie Eye Anomaly is one of those diseases that there are not easy answers for. Because the gene for it is so incredibly widespread, there’s a real danger that in working to eradicate it you’d heavily weight the gene pool to just a few dogs. Add to that the fact that mildly affected dogs have no issues with quality of life and you might be tempted to say “Well, just ignore it” (as long as it’s mild, that is). What I am not sure of, and you may have better insight into this than I (since I am not a collie person) is whether two mildly affected dogs can produce puppies that are much more affected and have a decrease in quality of life. If that’s the case, there is  more ethical pressure to remove it from the breed.

From what I’ve seen, with the widespread testing that the collie fancy is doing, there’s a great effort to understand the true scope and effect of the disease. That’s exactly the right response; without knowing exactly how deleterious a genetic disease is you can’t make good choices about whether or not to work hard to erase it.

From Nancy:

I have a friend who has had Dandie Dinmonts for years. It is one of those breeds that seems to be heading for disaster. They are saying it is time to outbreed. Bring in some new genetic material, which will have to come outside the breed; perhaps dachsund. Do you feel that this is the only solution? When the genetic pool becomes so small and phenotype so important is it not a given that health and longevity begins to suffer? I am a firm believer in purebred dogs, but sometimes worry that too many breeders focus on looks rather than performance. There will always be those that just don’t want to know if their breeders are carriers. I am also a firm believer in working breeds being able to work, a herder being able to herd, etc.

When a breed is completely backed into a corner and there literally is nowhere for it to go (there are no pockets of healthy dogs anywhere) accessing new genetic material can be the only moral solution. We have to remember that these dogs didn’t ask to exist; we produced them. So if we’ve inadvertently or accidentally or as the result of a disaster (like a war or epidemic) ended up with a breed that experiences a significantly reduced lifespan or quality of life, I would argue that leaving the situation as-is is not acceptable.

I am not sure of which specific disorders in the Dandie are perceived as the worst (please come back and tell us about them, because information on the breed is understandably scarce) but I think if going into a different breed is ultimately decided to be the right thing, the choice of breed is going to be key.

I would never, personally, go to the Dachshund. That’s not because I don’t love them–but they have a concentration of health problems of their own and you want to access the healthiest possible group of dogs. This is not any kind of official recommendation, but just spitballing they may want to look at Border Terriers and Skyes, Sealyhams, Scotties and Bedlingtons maybe? If I were running the circus, I would definitely NOT stick to only one breed. I’d work on re-creating the breed the way the  breed founders did, by mixing the more primitive types and trying to come as close as possible to the original contributors to the breed, using the healthiest possible modern examples. It’s the kind of thing that could be done superbly or could be done disastrously, so a lot is at stake. I know the Sloughi people used DNA mapping and were able to determine with some fair accuracy some of the progenitor/early breeds that mixed with both the Sloughi and the Saluki, so that may be a possibility at least to rule in or out some contributor breeds.

From MCatLuvr:

I sent you a email a few weeks back but it got lost or you are so busy you missed it. How is Bramble and Elvis? Any new pics to share or time to share them?

Bramble is being boarded right now, so no pics of him that are recent. The kennel says he’s doing very well and behaving himself perfectly. Elvis/Bastoche/That Wicked Dog is thriving–I just saw him a couple of days ago and he is hilarious and perfect. He’s incredibly, astonishingly, smart and every time I see him he’s got some crazy new trick or behavior.

From Sarah K

Joanna, There is a Vallhund lost somewhere in your general area, and her last sighting is amazingly like Clue, swiped by a car, and the dog hasn’t been seen. Would you be so kind as to provide me any kind of contact info for the tracking dogs that helped when Clue was lost? The owner would like to contact them to see if she can hire them or others to help find this little lost Vallhund.

I am SO SORRY that I didn’t see this until yesterday. I feel like an idiot that I didn’t see it. The tracking club is based out of the kennel we have our dogs in: American K9 Country in Amherst NH. I am praying that this little dog has been found.

From Kim:

Another dog question. My DD is convinced she’s ready for her own dog. She’s four, nearly five. She wants her own protection dog. Ha! I told her that we all have to start with obedience and at least two other dog activities before we’re good enough to handle protection dogs. She’s most interested in the local therapy dogs group. I’m not sure what else to explore with her and I’m looking for breed suggestions as well as activity suggestions. We will always have at least one German Shepherd. We have at least a year to decide. What’s the best breed for us?

Well, you KNOW I’m going to recommend Cardis, especially for a person who likes Shepherds. There’s a lot of overlap in personality and trainability.

If you’re looking at a genuine small/toy breed, she’s a little young yet. She’s exactly the same age as Tabitha and we’re still supervising Tabi very carefully with Ginny. But the more time I’ve spent with Papillons the more I like them–they’re merry, happy dogs that are incredibly trainable and love everyone. I think Cavaliers are absolutely fabulous, and they’d be my very top recommendation if they didn’t have the horrible heart problems that they do. Cavaliers are perhaps the breed least likely to ever bite a child, at least from my conversations with breeders and trainers. Boston Terriers would round out my little-dogs-in-families top recommendations.

One size up I’d look at miniature poodles (well-bred ones are amazing), English Cockers, etc. My Dane mentor used to have Tibetan Terriers and loved them (and raised them with two kids); some temperaments in the breed are iffy but they’re a very beautiful and fun dog to own.

We’re running out the door, so I’m going to publish this now and come back and add more later.

I have SO MUCH more to write about and think about and wrestle with than this topic. I hate the fact that it becomes The Thing instead of only a thing, most correctly a small thing. It’s like yelling “A! A! A! A!” and leaving off the rest of the alphabet. So I will continue to respond to comments or questions about hip testing but I don’t intend to write many more posts about it. I have PLENTY that is controversial to talk about without ever mentioning hips again, trust me.

So here’s my last thing, what I’ve tried to make a distillation of the questions I am asking.

Let me suggest what may be a helpful analogy:

I am a pharmaceutical company bringing a blood pressure drug to market. This drug, as all drugs do, has side effects.

I must answer the questions “Does this drug lower blood pressure?” and “Do its benefits outweigh its risks?”

Both of those are medical and statistical questions. The drug must be proven to be significantly better than a placebo AND it must be proven that its benefits produce greater health in the population of people taking it than its risks hurt that population.

The answer to both must be yes. A drug can work but have such significant side effects that it is rejected, and a drug can be very safe but not actually work.

The answers to those questions are NOT any of the following:

“I know someone with high blood pressure.”
“I know a doctor who was sued because one of his patients has high blood pressure.”
“I think we need to care more about high blood pressure.”
“If we don’t control blood pressure, we’re going to lose our jobs.”

And, because anecdotal evidence must always bow to studies, the answer is also not any variation on the following:

“I know someone who took this drug and he was fine.” or “I really respect Dr. Smith and he prescribes this drug.”

Any or all of those may be true statements, but they have nothing to do with whether this drug should be approved.

Let’s apply that to what I am hoping is the question here: Does following OFA’s recommendations
lower the proportion of painful hip changes in our breed?

THAT’S the only question that is relevant. Because following it DOES have side effects–we cull certain dogs and we favor the genetics of other dogs. Those are powerful and potentially dangerous decisions, so we shouldn’t be making them if we get no benefit.

And we most definitely should not be making the use of this “drug” a condition for being called a reputable breeder.

So we need to stop responding to that question with “I know a dog with hip dysplasia” or “I think we need to care more about hip dysplasia” or “I got a dog from breeder X and she had hip dysplasia” or “we’re all going to get sued if we don’t eliminate hip dysplasia.” And we need to reject, as a justification, “I really respect breeder Y and she has always OFAd.”

The OFA self-reports a decrease in failing scores over the last 30 years. However, a careful reading of the statistics shows that the vast majority of the “improvement” was before 1990. Since 1990, which is at least six generations and in some breeds more like ten, most breeds have shown only a tiny improvement. That strongly indicates to me that between 1970-whatever and 1990 was when breeders were figuring out which hips would fail, and learning not to submit them. I could be wrong, but it’s pretty striking how the “improvement” abruptly slowed to a tiny trickle.

Since 1990 there’s been a small improvement in most of the breeds. However, that result is not “controlled.”

If I look in my kitchen and the floor is dirty, and then ten hours later the floor is clean, I can’t give my husband credit if I know that both my daughters, my mom, my best friend, and the US hockey team was also in my house in those ten hours.

Since 1990, we’ve used OFA. We’ve ALSO changed the way we feed, vaccinate, exercise, supplement, and so on. We’ve also gotten even better at not submitting films we believe will fail.

That’s why the only number you can trust is one derived from an experiment where it is absolutely known that there’s only one factor in play, only one person on the house with access to the mop.

Some Cardigans are dysplastic.
Some Cardigans have painful hip arthritis (note that this is not the same as the statement above).
We are pretty constantly in danger of being legislated out of breeding.
We have responsibilities to our eventual puppy buyers.

None of those statements are being debated here, and unfortunately none of are relevant. The ONLY thing that is in question is “Does following the OFA’s recommendations decrease the proportional amount of painful hip arthritis in our breed?”

The best study I can find, the only one that is controlled, says that the influence of OFA’s recommendations is not statistically greater than zero, even in long-legged breeds it was designed to fit. If it were a drug, it would be rejected as being no more effective than a placebo. And it has demonstrable side effects.

So you tell me. Why are we pushing this “drug” as a sign of “good breeding”?

I wanted to address comments specifically in a post, because I know that not everyone reads comments. I am not including identities because I want to be VERY CLEAR that I am responding to issues, not people. If I use “you,” it’s the collective you and includes myself. I am making no statements about individuals or breeders with names.

I don’t know. Your posts along these lines always give me a lot to think about, and I certainly agree on some levels. For instance, the fact that every dog that is sound, mentally fit, & healthy has a place in a breeding program if so desired. And I think it takes a trained eye to be able to tell what faults will eventually cause unsoundness. But I am nonjudgmental when someone breeds a dog that isn’t “typey” or has some glaring faults, as long as the dog is sound. I could care less about a dog having the CH in front of their name. Some of the best Cardigans in history have come out of less than stellar parents, and I think that is a lesson worth studying.

Yes, I think it really is. I suspect, however, that those “best” Cardigans were not really anomalies when you look at the whole pedigree–at least in terms of soundness. You can have a bitch with a wonky topline and still breed her wisely if you know that the bad topline is not throughout her pedigree, or if you know that the stud dog you’re considering for her reliably corrects toplines. It ends up coming down to our two tests: Does it affect her life? Yes. Will it affect and hurt future generations? If you’re fairly sure the answer is no, it’s a good and ethical decision to breed her. 

To a certain extent I think this mindset follows down to “fault judging” versus finding the virtues of a dog. Many people fault judge and will decide that so-and-so shouldn’t be bred because of xx fault. I also think that what you should consider for the whelping box is vastly different than what you should consider for the show ring.

Yes, yes, and yes. If you have a dog who is likely to produce well (and by “well” I mean my oft-repeated phrasing about a happy, healthy, long, pain-free life), it is a solid contributor to the next generation even if it is not shown, or shown heavily. Breeders SHOULD show, and I think it can’t be a low priority. As political and unfair as it is, showing makes you put your money where your mouth is. It’s a peer review activity, where you “show” the products of your breeding program. But it’s not invalid to say that the products of your breeding program don’t have to be every single dog you’ve ever kept. Many good breeders keep back animals, especially bitches, that they feel will produce well but would not necessarily be the best choices to represent them in the ring. Now you have to be very careful–there’s a fine line between keeping a dog back because it is a solid producer and keeping an unsound or nasty dog out of the show ring but thinking up ways to justify breeding it. Keeping dogs out of the ring can’t be an invitation to kennel blindness. But as a strategy, yes, it’s valid.

And, of course, the issue with trying to do only the “valid” and relevant tests is that it’s not always clear which are which. I’ve heard many arguments that hips are not a relevant test in Cardis, but having lived with an OFA “mild” who DID show symptoms (while his OFA “moderate” dam did not), it’s hard for me to accept those arguments. Like above, I don’t get judgmental of those who choose to breed borderline hips when the dog seems very sound, as long as they do so thoughtfully. But I also can’t accept that idea that we should give up on trying to improve hips just because the tools are flawed. 

For me, the question on hips again comes down to whether it hurts the individual dog and whether it hurts the next generation. In some breeds that answer is completely obvious. In ours I really think it’s not. You saw it yourself in dogs that did not follow the “rule” of severity of dysplasia equalling pain level. And the answer to the second one, hurting the next generation, seems to be VERY poorly understood. I think we can say in Cardigans that an OFA-type view has moderate–not super, but moderate–value when it comes to analyzing the health of that dog as he or she stands there. It does not seem to have a lot of value when it comes to predicting how that dog will produce the next generation. The question is not whether the tools are imperfect–the question is whether they work AT ALL.

And I also feel that because of the AR activists, we need to be very careful about differentiating ourselves in as many ways as possible from mass-market breeders. That’s a tricky line to walk.

I want to address this one more fully below, because I think it is a VERY VERY BAD IDEA to be thinking along these lines. But since it’s repeated below, let me write about it once and not twice.

Comment 2:

“EVERY DOG WHO IS REMOVED FROM THE POPULATION HURTS THAT POPULATION.” – No, I won’t go there. And then you don’t go there either as you go on to talk about eliminating dogs with unsound structure or temperament from the gene pool. However, structurally sound dogs with cosmetic problems (such as mismarked or coat length) need not be eliminated in my opinion as well. And color? Well, most know how I feel on that issue.

Removing any animal from a population hurts that population. That’s how it works. It’s not my personal agenda; it’s ecological fact. No change is neutral, no removal without cost. The question is whether the removal benefits the population more than it hurts it. 

Nature performs this task with incredible efficiency and also with incredible conservation. She never unnecessarily removes an animal; she leaves the maximum number who can survive to reproduce. Barring a bottlenecking event like a flood or a volcanic eruption or something that kills a ton of animals in an unnatural way (i.e., in a way that doesn’t prove whether or not they would have survived in their environment), populations will stay at their maximum possible, breeding as widely as possible, maintaining the richest gene pool possible. The extent to which we screw with that process is the danger we put populations in. 

I am sure you know the term “no sacred cows.” We need to make sure we’re not falling into groupthink or conventional wisdom; we have to tell the truth even if nobody else is. For some reason, breeding has become something we view almost as a necessary evil, and it’s really better to not breed. That’s how the majority of “breeders” feel, or at least how they behave. I’ve heard people brag that they’ve been in a breed for 30 years and only bred four litters in that time, and they really do think that makes them a better breeder than someone who has been producing three or five litters a year over that span. 

That is, in the words of Trollope, a damnable lie. It is utterly contrary to the way you behave if you want to produce and maintain the healthiest possible population. We need to stop thinking that the best way to be good breeders is to not breed! We need to be breeding the largest possible number of dogs to the largest possible number of dogs or our gene pool will disappear. It should be “I neuter wisely,” even more than “I breed wisely.”

I strongly agree with [the above] statement about needing to be careful in today’s political AR climate. We need to be the guardians of our breeds and do our best to raise the bar, not lower it.

Now, see, here’s where I get the major heebies.

It is utterly vital to realize that the HSUS and the more generalized animal rights agenda has absolutely nothing to do with discovering who has the healthiest puppies. If you are laboring under the delusion that we have ANY kind of defense against their agendas because we do four health tests instead of one you are VERY VERY wrong.

And, if we’re honest, no matter how careful we are we can’t guarantee health. We can’t even guarantee that the puppy we’re selling is going to live a longer or better life, or have a better temperament, than the most raddled Malti-Poo from Petland.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you know that the dog we are all foolishly and totally in love with is Ginny, a genetic nightmare of a designer dog with a mouth that can’t even close properly. If I had a houseful of Ginnys I’d be in heaven. And the worst experience I’ve ever had with a dog I owned was a purebred with a pedigree as perfect as you could ever imagine.

That’s why I think it’s a really terrible idea to even pretend we can “promise” a product, or to say that our dogs are “better” than the worst reject from a puppy mill. Owners love their dogs, and what makes dogs “better” from their standpoint has nothing to do with the way we tend to define it. We can say they are sounder, we can try to educate them about conformation, we can talk about the ability to do a job. Ninety-nine percent of that will go in one ear and out the other. And then we’ll sell them a puppy, they’ll make a hundred dumb mistakes, they’ll create a fear-biting dog, and they will be convinced that we’ve ripped them off. Promising “better” is a dead end.

What we can do is WARRANTY health, stand behind our dogs; fix problems and replace puppies. But we should be doing that just because it’s the right thing to do, not because it will decrease litigation or liability. I’m afraid that ship has already sailed, and we’re going to be in court whether we like it or not and it will have nothing to do with whether we have healthy dogs.

The HSUS and its ilk make no differentiation between responsible and irresponsible breeding; their only goal is to end breeding altogether. The HSUS is asking for lemon reports to prove that unhealthy puppies come from breeders, that breeders produce unfit animals (and they do-I don’t care how many tests breeders do, if you have more than a couple of litters you will produce puppies that die young and even horrifically, sometimes due to genetics but usually due to the fact that they’re living things and some living things die young), that breeders create animals with bad temperaments or bad behavior, and that breeders treat their animals cruelly, and therefore you should never buy from a breeder.

If we breed with the HSUS’s threat as a motivator, or with some mythical definition of perfect health as the qualification for responsible breeding, we WILL fail. Don’t forget that we’re breeding dogs with a deformity, and even though we know that their quality of life is not hurt we’re automatically viewed as sickos who like deformed dogs. In other words, if we cater to that approach we will be neatly forced into not breeding at all.

Think about this carefully: If you were taken to court and asked to prove that the puppies you’re selling are “better” than a group of ten Aussie-doodles, could you do it? Because that’s what you’re saying you can do. You’re saying that because you health-test and somehow breed only “elite” dogs, raising the bar, you’ve differentiated yourself as “better.”

The prosecutor leans over and says, “So you’re saying that none of your dogs have ever shown any kind of reactivity or aggression toward other dogs? How about kids-is every single one of the dogs you have in your house completely trustworthy with children? Will they happily approach the elderly and disabled? Has any dog you’ve ever sold bitten any other animal or human? Has any dog you’ve ever bred been diagnosed with any genetic health problem? OK, well, plainly you’re in trouble there, so let’s go on to our expert witness. Dr. Wilson, can you show us a study that establishes that the defendant’s dogs are healthier than these mixed-breed dogs? OK, well, are the defendant’s dogs able to run normally? Oh, they have a deformity, yes. Why would anyone choose to breed dogs with a deformity? Well do they have any hip dysplasia? Oh, these deformed little dogs have hips that are twice as loose as the mixed breeds’ are? So… in other words, there is a documented history of bad temperaments, bad behaviors, bad health, and they’re congenitally deformed and damaged.”

You could NOT defend yourself. You would not have a single leg to stand on. “Raising the bar” is what we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better, to tell ourselves that when someone comes knocking we’ll be safe. WRONG. This is one thing I CAN guarantee: If breeding Cardigans were put on trial according to the animal rights agenda, our breed would be shut down without hesitation.

So forget the animal rights organizations-they do not respect you, they do not make ANY differentiation between you and the guy who has a thousand dogs in rabbit cages full of filth. They will work just as hard to destroy you as they work to destroy him.

You breed for the BREED. For the DOGS. Not because somebody has a carrot or a stick. You find out the truth-about genetics, heterozygosity, soundness, movement, health, testing, all of it-and you breed to hand off the best and best-prepared population to the next generation of breeders.

Being a guardian of the breed needs to be something you take very seriously, and that means understanding and owning your decisions and working to understand the situation and the actions that will benefit the entire breed.
We’ve GOT to stop defining it as “doing more health testing than my neighbor does.” Even if that were a positive, it’s about five percent of what makes a healthy population. What about disease resistance, heterozygosity, population dynamics and geographical diversity, founding members, 200-year projections, growth rates, fecundity, fertility, lifespan, survival rates, biomechanical fitness, and the hundreds of other topics that we know about PINE TREES, for crying out loud, that every property manager has to know about his CLUB MOSS but we conveniently ignore in dogs because ooo, we’re such great breeders because we x-ray hips?

The long-term health of this precious, precious population, this endangered species, this cup of wine so close to spilling, think of it however you want. Bringing it from |here| to |there| demands every single bit of us; it demands tearing down the sacred cows and looking at the truth. It demands actions that are defensible scientifically and morally. It demands seeing the whole picture. That is the ONLY motivation; nothing else will stand the test of time and nothing else is fair to the dogs.

OK, sports fans, imagine standing on the 50-yard line and looking at an entire football field full of Cardigan Corgis. Tens of thousands of dogs, representing the entire national population of the breed. 

It is your job to get from this football field to the next field, the field ten years from now. You can use any of the thousands of dogs in this field, and success will be measured by whether you have a result pool (the ten-years-from-now field) that is at least as long-lived, healthy, athletic, sound, happy, and sane as your current pool. Bonus points will be awarded if you can improve on at least one of those axes without hurting any of the others. 

So how do you do it?  Stop for a minute and really plan it out before you read on.

My instinct is that most people thought to themselves “I should be as picky as possible, health-test everybody, prove that each dog is healthy, make sure that only the ones who are incredibly high-quality in terms of conformation and show success are allowed to breed. I should build the next ten thousand dogs from the most elite pool of this one.” That’s the conventional wisdom, the way “good breeders” do everything, right?

I want to suggest to you that a strategy like that will bring most breeds swiftly and inevitably to the grave.

Because here’s what is NOT being taught as conventional wisdom, and the entire breeding community needs to be smacked upside the head with it.

EVERY DOG WHO IS REMOVED FROM THE POPULATION HURTS THAT POPULATION.

That is FACT. It’s population ecology 101. A huge proponderance of all animal behavior is designed to create a population that is the most unrelated it can be–where the genes are as much UNlike each other as possible. That’s why bachelor males are kicked out of packs and herds; it’s a huge reason that animals try to get away from each other and form territories; it’s why we evolved different genders and all the millions of behaviors that govern breeding.

Maximum genetic variation is essential to a population that can withstand stress. If you lose genetic variation, you end up with substantially lower resistance to disease and you stand a good chance of concentrating deleterious genes. Loss of genetic variation is why we have such huge problems with cancers in Flatcoats, or epilepsy in Poodles, or Fanconi in Basenjis. 

One of the ways that breeders continually shoot themselves in the foot is by eliminating founding lines–if there were ten founding stud dogs of the breed, back in 1930, and they together produced ten thousand dogs that are living in 2008, are they evenly represented? Or are eight thousand of the puppies the descendants of just two of the founding dogs, two other dogs have disappeared entirely and their genetic material is now gone forever, and the other six have just a few hundred puppies in the entire world that are now living? 

Because of what is winning and what is in fashion in terms of hot kennels and top stud dogs, the entire world will rush to just a few dogs, like people running to the side of a sailing ship. This overweights the gene pool and it decreases the ability of the population to respond to threats and diseases. 

If, for example, we end up with a ton of heart disease, and Cadno and his descendants represent a pool of dogs with no heart disease, even if Cadno Cardigans have, for example, longer legs than we’d like we’ll find them extremely valuable. If that line was abandoned in 1970 because the Golden Arrow (or whatever) descendants were tearing up the green carpet and had such glorious short legs, we’re going to be stuck.

Why is the conventional wisdom so different from this? Well, one HUGE problem is that we have a collective guilty conscience, and we’ve bought a certain amount of conventional wisdom that comes from other breeds, and we’re under the thumb of a lot of groupthink that is actually coming from animal rights, so we have made it a virtue to remove every single dog from the gene pool that we possibly can. 

That’s where you get the “I know it isn’t perfect, but it’s SOMETHING” line that is used to justify neutering dogs based on everything from the DM test to the fluff test. In the back of that is a thought, however subconscious, that it’s good to neuter and iffy to breed, so the more stringent, even nonsensical, we make the requirements the more moral we are as a group of breeders.

We in Cardigans have a wonderful, healthy breed with very few issues. One of the best ways to KEEP it that way is to breed toward maximum genetic variation–in real-world terms, that means breeding as many individuals as possible to as many individuals as possible, spreading the genetic material as far as we can. Sharing the wealth. It’s not good to neuter but iffy to breed; it’s BAD to neuter and GOOD to breed. 

I know this is already making people itchy, but I challenge you to prove me wrong. It’s supported in every population study I have ever read–loss of breeding animals is a bad thing.

So the question is NOT how to choose the best from this football field. The question is how to REMOVE the weakest.

After all, that’s what happens in nature; it’s how all living things evolved. The term “survival of the fittest” is a little misleading; evolutionary pressure doesn’t choose which animals survive. It’s “death of the weakest.” Nature kills those that are not strong, leaving behind every single individual that WAS strong enough to make it. Those are primed to breed as widely as is practical for the population, keeping the population at its maximum level of genetic richness.

So how does this apply to our field of dogs? It’s our job to wisely remove the weakest. It’s not plucking the very “best” out and elevating them–if you do, in just a few generations your population will lose the great majority of its genetic material. It’s deciding who “dies” in the population, who does not get to reproduce. Thankfully we can do it by sterilizing or separating and we don’t have to actually kill them, but the effect on the population is the same.

Remember, every loss to the population is a negative. It is NOT a neutral decision, ever. That means that the benefit to the population of removing that dog must outweigh the negative effects of removing him or her. If it does not, you are hurting the population and sending your breed to the pit.

So, for a moment, forget anything to do with health testing and let’s just try to choose which dogs to “kill.” It’s honestly better to think of it as killing than neutering, because it correctly communicates the gravity of the decision. It is a great and terrible responsibility to remove dogs from a breeding population and you SHOULD do it with no little fear and trembling.

If you’re going to kill a dog, you need to make sure that you’re doing so based on two criteria: The “fault” needs to hurt that individual dog AND that fault needs to be reliably communicated to the next generation. If the faulty dog won’t pass on that fault, he or she should not be removed. 

I would say that the first dogs we remove are those that have broad issues of unsoundness. We are absolutely sure that major issues with body shape a) hurt that individual dog, and b) are reliably communicated to the next generation and therefore hurt that generation.

So if a dog cannot run freely, walk without pain, eat its food, and live to a normal old age, its genes should be killed off. Very unsound bites, fronts that end up painful and arthritic, swaybacks, terribly unsound movement, etc. I would also add congenital shyness to this list; a dog who is born so shy that it cannot be happy in normal society would never survive if it had to live in a community of dogs or run down game. Ditto with ingrained reactivity and willingness to ignore the bite-humans taboo. Environment is ALWAYS king of behavior, but you know what I’m talking about here. That bitch who bites judges and you know that three of her puppies also bite people? Don’t be blaming the owners; look in the mirror for that one. Perpetuating what is in effect a mental illness is bad for the population.

If we’ve killed off the unsound dogs–please note that I did NOT say the “untypey” dogs–we should be left with a group of dogs that is basically able to make a next generation that will succeed. They all have strong, sound bodies and would be considered at least average to good in conformation and movement. We now start applying the kill criteria that are much, much more slippery. These are health testing and selecting for “type.”

I want to talk about type first because I am terribly worried about the fact that so many dogs are “killed” for totally superficial reasons. Jon Kimes got here first, but maybe he’ll allow me to expand on this.

The proper Cardigan head is called proper because it is a SOUND head, a healthy, long-living head that allows the dog to do its job. So if a dog has a tremendously clunky head, a Lab head on a Cardi body, that’s not a superficial fault. It goes to soundness and, while it is nowhere near as unsound as a very forward front or a straight shoulder or cowhocks, there are good valid reasons to try to remove it from our healthy population.

Similarly, the extremely foreshortened radius and ulna in the front legs are sound. Thick, short dwarfed bones are actually healthier than longer, thinner dwarfed bones. So, as with heads, a dog up on too much leg is quite possibly still sound enough to  breed, but it’s a genuine fault. 

Markings, on the other hand, or coatedness. Let’s examine them according to our two criteria. Does having white around one eye hurt the individual dog? It MAY, to a very marginal extent, if the dog does not have good pigment otherwise. But clearly white in and of itself doesn’t hurt working dogs; every livestock guard dog, the big hounds, the big sporting dogs–they all have a ton of white around the eyes. So it certainly isn’t a slam dunk. Now #2: Does having white around one eye hurt the next generation? Since white-headed dogs can clearly produce lots of color when bred wisely, the answer to that is no, unless you breed stupidly. 

The “off” colors are even more superficial. They have no detriment to the individual dog and are not passed along unless, again, you don’t understand color genetics or how to breed the standard colors.

Coat is similar. A long coat is NOT disadvantageous automatically–the long coat we call “poor” is no longer, softer, or more open than many breeds with distinguished working records have. And coated dogs can clearly produce dogs with standard coats.

Both of those–markings and coats–are part of the “game” of showing dogs. If you want to show dogs, you follow some rules just because they’re part of the game. So Labs can’t have any white, but Tollers need it. Rotties can’t, but Berners must. All of them are just part of the stuff we accept when we decide to show. They are NOT reasons, and I’d challenge you to prove me wrong, to kill off dogs from the population. If a dog is sound, healthy, built to live a long and good life, has working conformation and a sane temperament, it’s really not very defensible to kill it when it can clearly produce worthy contributors to the next generations. 

So back we go to our football field. We’ve taken out some ugly heads and the really bad tails (we’ve probably left in the tails with hooks, but we’ve taken out the tails that go way up over the back because they’re a sign that the dog can’t move the way a working dog should). We’ve taken out long, weak legs, and a few other un-typey dogs. 

It is only NOW that we’re at the place where many breeders begin–at health testing. That is VERY deliberate. The dogs who were going to hurt the population because they were so unsound were “killed” long before we’d even consider winnowing them via health testing. 

And here’s where I make my big pot-stirring statement:

I think that many people get the whole motivation behind health testing completely backwards. They feel that they’re doing it to “prove” that their  bitch or their dog “is healthy.”

If you go that route, then there is no end of testing that you can and should do. In fact, there is no end to the testing you MUST do. After all, just because I know that his hips are healthy doesn’t mean his heart is healthy, and doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have one or more factors for von Willebrands, and doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have autoimmune thyroiditis, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a rare storage disease, doesn’t mean he has healthy patellas, doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have elbow dysplasia, and on and on and on it goes. If proving that a dog is healthy is what breeders are supposed to do, then you need to line up a hundred or more tests and you can’t be making any excuses.

Others will say that they are doing it to prove that their dog or bitch is healthy, but only until and up to a certain dollar amount. Again, bad idea. That encourages you to do a lot of cheap tests rather than better, more expensive tests; it also sets up a false expectation of, among other things, puppy prices (at least to a certain extent, health testing is passed along to the puppy buyer; that’s just reality, so if we have to get expensive testing done we should just do it and charge more for puppies rather than whining that we can’t do it because we don’t make it back in the puppy sales).

The only reason that makes ANY sense is that health testing is to remove the right individuals from the breeding population. It MUST be a removal process is because that keeps the focus on what actually WORKS. If a health test protects the integrity of the population by reliably removing dogs who will hurt that population, it is worth it and not only worth it but mandatory. No matter how much it costs or what kind of trouble it is or what we have to pass on to puppy buyers.

So, for example, because Danes have cardiomyopathy, a disease that typically begins to show between the ages of two and four, and because cardiomyopathy is reliably genetic but there’s no DNA test yet, I did serial echocardiograms on my stud dog, to the tune of $ 400 each time, and his prospective mates got echoes too. Because I was working with a line that had clear GENETIC hypothyroidism (where you can trace it down the pedigree very reliably), everybody got full thyroid panels; because hips are at least somewhat genetic in Danes everybody got PennHIP tested. I routinely had to put over a thousand dollars into each breeding partner before the breeding. It hurt a huge amount, financially, but tough for me. If I wanted an “in” to that breed, that was what I was buying. If I wanted to get into Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, I would feel that I had to do an MRI on each breeding dog to check for syringomyelia. No matter what it cost, it would be absolutely necessary.

Now here’s the part that people get mad about: the opposite also applies. If a test does not improve the population more than it hurts it, then we shouldn’t be doing it, or if we do it we shouldn’t be removing dogs based on its results, because we’re skewing the population–running to the side of the sailboat–for no reason; we are hurting our future generations.

Because Cardigans are so healthy and don’t have the huge issues that other breeds have, we’re in that situation with the majority of our health tests. The stuff we see as health problems are only somewhat genetic and the tests are very unreliable, but the tests exist and they will multiply. I’d put money on the fact that in 15 years we’ll be able to test for twenty or thirty disorders that are only weakly connected to the gene test. 

I believe in testing, believe strongly in it, but for those disorders where there is no clear link between the result and the life of the dog (DM is a great example of this) I think we need to be ignoring the results of the test for a long time, breeding as usual, until we can say “Yes, we now know that dogs with positive DM tests live, on average, four years less than dogs with a negative DM test.” That’s a real reason to start killing those dogs off. If, as I suspect, the line is more like “Dogs with positive DM tests live, on average, three months less than dogs with a negative test,” then we are REALLY foolish to be chucking thousands of dogs from the gene pool–if we “kill” carriers and at-risk dogs, probably more than half the population of the breed–for that. 

So if you are looking at the available battery of tests for your dog, please first be serious about whether the dog is sound and can live a normal life, is safe and sane and happy. If the answer is yes, then by all means do the testing, gather information. But don’t be a slave to the tests if they do not clearly pass the two criteria: They must affect your individual dog and they must reliably change the next generation for the better. Do whatever research you have to do to make sure you really know, genuinely UNDERSTAND, the answers to those criteria. Because we really do, as a community of breeders, have to fill that ten-years-from-now field. And every single breeding decision changes that result. We should be doing so very, very thoughtfully.

When I started out in Great Danes, I was thoroughly convinced that I had the answers. I don’t know why on earth I thought I had the right to be that arrogant, and thankfully I didn’t talk about it too loudly and make myself look really idiotic, but I was SURE that somehow I could, by following all the recipes I had read about and researched, actually get a better result than anyone else. I really did think that the problems in the breed were because others had become complacent. I “knew” that if I never bred without an OFA number, never failed to test thyroids, did a yearly echocardiogram on all my dogs, that I was a good breeder. Not just a good breeder, a BETTER breeder than the other good breeders.

I bred my first litter with the feeling that nothing could possibly go wrong; my ducks were all in a row; my co-owner had signed off on the stud dog; it was going to be a litter for the ages.

I

Was

An

Idiot.

Looking back on it I just cringe. Nothing terrible happened, although seven hours into the delivery, covered in blood and placenta and trying unsuccessfully to bring back a dead puppy, I had a BADLY needed moment of “OH LORD WHAT HAVE I DONE?” Those puppies did well, I placed most of them well and some of them spectacularly and a couple of them horribly and got them back and, much wiser, rehomed them better.

But I can barely stand to look back on it just because I can remember what it felt like, that sense of total justification and assurance that I was DA BOMB because I was so terribly serious about following the rules. I want to go back there and smack myself upside the head and knock some of that hubris out.

I was a fault judger, of breeders.

Fault judging is that thing that everyone says separates the new breeder from the old, and when you can stop fault judging you are finally on the road to somewhere. So when you look at a dog you don’t say “short neck,” you say “gorgeous topline, fluid mover” while also realizing that yes, the dog is lacking in layback and could use a longer neck. When you fault judge that one fault is the ONLY thing you see, and it disqualifies the dog for you, often completely nonsensically.

And oh, heck yes I did that. I have a catalog from a Nationals, my first Nationals, where beside the name of a dog who was far and away the strongest and soundest and most short-coupled stallion of a dog in his class, I have three words: “not enough stop.” I really thought that I was all that and a bag of chips because I could see that fault, and at that moment you could not have paid me to breed to that dog, because look at that ugly ugly slide down from the ears to the nose.

Like I said, idiot.

We make the same mistake when we fault-judge breeders. Ignore the fifty champions and the couch full of 14-year-old dogs at their house, because they don’t OFA. Dismiss their multiple ROMs and ranked stud dogs because so and so got a dog with bad elbows from them, and I’ll never make bad elbows, no sir I won’t. Because I follow the RULES, man.

I am not far enough removed from that moment when I was up to my elbows in goo and realized exactly how little I knew, and I never will be, to say that now I am some kind of guru. If anything, the longer I stare at dogs and the more I know about them the more I realize that they are perpetually slightly astonished at how stupid we are. I’ve read that “Please, God, make me the person my dog thinks I am” bumper sticker and it makes me giggle, because my dog thinks I’m a clumsy ox with a speech impediment, a useless nose, and a magic pocket that grows hot dogs. She hopes that if she plays with me enough and speaks loudly and slowly enough I’ll improve, but she hasn’t seen a lot of hope for me.

So I am hardly “there” yet. But I maybe have moved far enough from that moment to be able to be slightly more accurate, at least for myself, about what makes a good breeder.

The rule: Good breeders use health testing organizations (like OFA).

The truth: (and if you’ve been reading my blog over the last week you can skip this part, because I’ve devoted thousands of words to it already):

It’s absolutely correct that good breeders have extremely high standards and do every breeding carefully.

However, I would object to the idea that there’s an epidemic of Cardigan breeders out there ignoring the facts and breeding stupidly.

We DO NOT HAVE a method for making perfection if by “perfection” you mean dogs with hips that look like sighthound hips (which is not really my version of “perfection,” but I’ll grant the point). The tools, honestly, suck. Relying on OFA ratings produces a result that is not statistically greater than zero. In other words, it works no better to produce healthy puppies than not using it at all. So why on earth does it make you a bad breeder to realize that? PennHIP is a pretty good method for the breeds upon which it is based (Lab, Golden, Rottie, Shepherd) but a careful look at the statistics provides no such assurance for Cardigans.

Insisting that good breeders use OFA or PennHIP to improve quality of life is like giving someone a fork and telling them to build a house–the tool may make them feel like they are doing something, but the end result is not going to satisfy the requirements.

The response often given is “Well, it’s SOMETHING. So we should use it anyway.” I’d disagree. You don’t make decisions that have the potential to dramatically shift the gene pool without good reason. As I said earlier, the numbers should serve us; we don’t serve the numbers. Our goal is supposed to be to produce healthy, happy, pain-free dogs, not a carat on a number line. If the carat doesn’t reliably equal those healthy pain-free dogs, it’s foolish to elevate it above any other piece of information we have about the dogs in question.

The rule: Good breeders never do questionable breedings.

This generally means, or is meant to imply, a breeding that doesn’t follow rule 1 above. I’ve rarely heard anyone say that about, say, breeding to a stud dog who is cowhocked. It’s code for “she bred without an OFA number” or “He knowingly bred a dog with one dysplastic hip.”

That was one of my huge hangups; I developed big statements about certain breeders in that breed or in others, statements like “Well, I always thought he was a great breeder, but now I know THIS juicy fact and my opinion of him is ruined!” Again, I was an idiot. And I was also nasty and mean-spirited and I am ashamed I ever built those air castles of meanness.

The truth: Listen–every single breeding we ever contemplate, every single breeding we do, no matter what letters or numbers are before after, or under their names, is “questionable.” We’re producing living things who don’t tend to follow neat little patterns. And that’s not rationalization; that’s fact. Breeders who break the “rules” generally know about fifteen thousand percent more about the breed than I do, and they know far better than I do how much you have to give up and let go and sometimes breaking that rule is the best possible thing you can do for your breeding program.

So let’s put aside health certifying agencies for a moment. Let’s look at breeding choices apart from that.

The rule: Good breeders only have a small number of litters, maybe one or two a year at MOST. (This often becomes “I’ve been in the breed for 28 years and only bred six litters in that time!” or similar)

The truth:

This is a really bad one, a really insidious one, calling people bad breeders if they don’t apologize for every litter (which is what I sometimes think is being implied–that good breeders only breed if you have no other choice, or only breed with extreme reluctance).

The breeders who have done the greatest good for this breed, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to now, didn’t fall into the belief that fewer breedings are somehow automatically better. That’s an extremely effective lie that has permeated even the good breeder community. The fact is, good breeders DO test breedings, do “experimental” breedings, see what happens when Joe is bred to Mary because maybe Joe would be good for Marsha as well. Many of them would say that you don’t even know what your stud dog does or doesn’t do until you’ve seen five or six litters grow up, so it’s only after those litters that they start really using him with wisdom and intent. Fewer breedings is not better; those that breed a litter only once every five years are not the ones that change the breed. They may go along with the breed changes, make a few really nice dogs, but they’re not a force for improvement.

The rule: good breeders do not compromise.

Unlike “questionable,” which the secret decoder ring translates to “She didn’t submit those x-rays to OFA,” “compromise” means a breeding that the speaker personally thought was a bad idea. Generally one or more of the pair was ugly, or had some screaming fault, or in some other way the breeder did something that the speaker is super-super-sure she’d never do. “Oh yes… I think it’s so sad the way she had to compromise to breed that bitch.”

The truth:

Good breeders know that there is NO SUCH THING as a breeding that does not force a compromise. You will NEVER find a dog for your bitch that is absolutely perfect; you will never ever feel that there is not something you’re giving up, or something you’re really hoping doesn’t show up in the puppies. There will be some breedings that you are absolutely thrilled about and some that you aren’t (for example, breeding to a male that you think is ugly because he’s got a beautiful sister), and good breeders know that sometimes the very best puppies come from the latter and sometimes those oh-so-fabulous breedings are a genetic disaster.

If you DON’T go into a breeding agonizing about what might show up if the thing that makes the male less than perfect and the thing that makes the bitch less than perfect happen to meet up in the puppies, you have no business breeding. Breeding IS agonizing. If you don’t lie awake at night worrying about puppy owners standing in your driveway with pitchforks and torches, you shouldn’t be breeding. Your conscience should be screaming at each and every breeding, because that’s what keeps you from getting careless and foolish.

The rule: Good breeders make happy puppy buyers.

This usually gets whispered as “I heard that Bigshot So and So got a puppy back because it was a fear biter and it had to be put down!” or “I heard that Top Winning So and So sold a puppy and it was CRAP!”

The truth: The number of times I have seen the downfall of a puppy and can absolutely say that it was the breeder’s fault is very, very, VERY small.

Puppy owners are like any other buyers of any other products, except that most people who buy a fridge understand how to use a fridge, whereas the majority of people who own dogs are well-meaning but completely clueless.

No matter how well you screen, there will be a few complete dipwads who buy your dog and then blame you for everything they do wrong, and no matter what you do they will try to bad-mouth you every chance they get.

And, if you breed long enough, there will be at least a couple of evil, abusive dipwads you’ve got to get dogs back from, and you’ll have to threaten lawsuits and police involvement, and those owners don’t generally take out an ad in Variety talking about how great you are.

What makes a good breeder? What’s the REAL rule?

What makes you a good breeder is that you clean up your own messes. You own your decisions and the buck stops with you. You DO x-ray hips and you DO look at eyes and you DO keep track of the longevity of your dogs so you can make truth statements about your breeding program.

If you produce a puppy that is a disaster of one kind or another, you replace it. If one of your puppies needs a home, you take it. If an owner is dissatisfied, you make it right. If an owner is a danger to the dog, you move mountains to get your dog back.

You answer every phone call and you stay up until five a.m. talking an owner through the death of a young, healthy dog, a death that you will then blame yourself for and cry over for weeks. You listen patiently as an owner says that their vet says that it’s your fault that Buffy is now crippled. If it’s true, you don’t argue. You stand ready to accept that blame. Because I don’t care if you do a full-body MRI screening and only breed to dogs with genitals of solid gold, you WILL produce a crap puppy every now and then, and probably far more often than that.

One more thing: the Cardigan CAN AND WILL die out as a breed if we’re not careful. It is teetering on the brink of complete collapse in every country but this one. Three hundred puppies a year is what the UK has determined is a self-sustaining number, and I would add that those three hundred should be largely unrelated to one another for true health of the population. That means without the US population, there are not enough unrelated well-bred individuals in all the other countries put together to avoid the extinction of the breed or (virtually as bad) such a severe genetic bottleneck that the health and soundness of the breed would be destroyed. Because the US population exists we’re in acceptable shape, but not good shape. We’re definitely not in a position where we can make the gene pool even smaller. We should not be looking for excuses not to breed; we should be looking to use the largest number of dogs that are as unrelated as possible as wisely as possible.

What IS true is that the Cardigan is not a breed in a health crisis. “Despite” our very best breeders not OFAing–go to the ofa site and look at the names that are NOT there–we have a breed that lives a ridiculously long, happy, healthy life. Before we start saying that people shouldn’t be breeding, we need to have a good reason to stop them from doing so–we need to be able to say “Your breeding practices are proven to make unhealthy puppies that don’t live a long time.” Until and unless we can do that, we have no basis on which to criticize.

Charlie of Finnshavn Cardigans, who is an amazing owner, breeder, and repository of information as well as a true gentleman, calls this tack of criticism “the faceless theys.” As in “If we don’t make this rule, THEY will destroy the breed.” Evidently these trollish THEYS spring up and take over if we don’t beat them back with a sword made of PennHIP scores over the fiftieth percentile.

All those horrible THEYS makes it really quite incredible that you ended up with the super-nice dog that’s at your feet right now. After all, that dog is the result of decades and centuries of breeders who didn’t follow the rules as well as you’re going to, you there with the sword.

I was that person, standing on someone else’s shoulders, holding a puppy they and the fifty people whose shoulders they were standing on had handed to me, beating them around the head and criticizing them for not doing as good a job as I was sure I was going to do. You can understand why I now cringe and hate to think about it.

Like I said, I am nowhere near where I want or need to be to even BEGIN to be a good Cardigan breeder. But the one huge thing that has changed is that I am trying to know, and tell, the truth. Not the rules, the truth. Even though the truth is a lot harder and a lot more dangerous and allows in a lot more mistakes and even a few breeders who aren’t in it for the good of the breed. Because I think that the only way I can do this with a clear conscience is to make sure that I am not acting out of fear, or guilt, or envy, or the desire to make myself better by labeling others as worse. The dogs, and my friends, and my puppy buyers, deserve the very best of me. The part of me that acts, to quote a very wise book, “reverently, soberly, discreetly,” and above all with love.

These last two posts will hopefully finish up the “Adopting a Dog” series; the rest of the posts are here.

Some of the dogs that I think are great candidates for low-risk adoption (in other words, the breed tends to be easy to get along with and friendly with people and cats and other dogs and doesn’t need a ton of exercise) are either brachycephalic (short-nosed) or achondroplastic (short-legged).

The short-legged dogs get extra adoptability points from me because they tend to give you more bang for your buck, exercise wise. Most were bred specifically because they could do the same job as their taller compatriots but at half or a quarter of the speed; think about Bassets and Bloodhounds, Cardigans and Shepherds or Collies, Sussex Spaniels versus Springers. They have every bit as much ability and talent as the taller dogs, but a lot of generations of breeding went into making them a slower, less driven version. So they tend to be able to be mentally and physically satisfied with less exercise.

The short-faced dogs make up a large proportion of the bred-since-forever-to-be-loving-companions breeds, like Pugs and Tibetan Spaniels and Pekes and Shih Tzu and Boston Terriers et al.  They’ve been bred in great abundance by bad breeders and puppy mills, so they tend to show up in rescue reasonably often. Again, these are breeds that are designed to be undemanding (except in upkeep and grooming) and loving, so they can be great dogs to rescue.

However, since both qualities (short legs, short faces) are a) mutations and b) very visually striking, when a dog is poorly bred these aspects of their bodies can go very wrong. Bad breeders know that buyers want cute, short legs. So they’ll breed anything with cute, short legs, regardless of the potential for great harm. They know that people want short faces and big eyes, so if it has a supershort face and big eyes, it’s a prize, even if the dog is horribly impaired.

So unless you want to take on far more than just the normal (huge) responsibility associated with a dog, you’ll do yourself a big favor if you start with a structurally sound dog.

Let’s start with faces.

(I’m going to be filling these in with pictures over the next day or so, because it’s difficult to find pictures that I’m not infringing on copyrights to use. And if I can’t find pics that are royalty-free, I’ll give you links instead.)

Poorly bred brachycephalic dogs have issues with eyes, skin, nose, palate, and teeth. You can quickly assess these and know whether you’re dealing with minor or major problems.

EYES: The eyes should have CORNERS, and the body of the eye should not be bulging out of the socket. You should not see a white when the dog is relaxed. I’ve seen this the very worst in rescue Pekes and Pugs, probably because people think the goggly eyes are cute when the dogs are puppies. Many of these dogs have nothing holding the eyes in except skin; the eye is not at all seated in its socket and it actually looks like the dog is looking out of the sides of its eyes. This shallow seating of the eye means that ANY stress of the skin or ANY blow to the eye area can cause the eye to proptose, or come out of its socket. A proptosed eye can be saved if you are VERY fast and don’t panic, but even if the eye is cosmetically saved it often loses function because the muscles and nerves are stretched and damaged when they eye comes out.

UNHEALTHY

MORE NORMAL

.

Next, if this is a long-haired dog (Shih Tzu, some Lhasas, Affenpinscher or Brussels Griffon, etc.), look carefully at the eyes and the coat surrounding them. Many dogs that come into rescue have been neglected in terms of grooming, and when hair is constantly rubbing the eyes it can make the dog blind. The eye should look clear, not even a tiny bit foggy, and there should be very little tear production. That red-brown stain below the eyes is OK, though anyone who tells you it’s “normal” for these breeds is actually incorrect (the color is from a type of yeast, so changing the diet and grooming carefully will almost totally fix it). Even a tiny bit of green discharge would be normal for a rescue. But if the dog’s eyes are structurally normal, you will not see streaming from the eyes; the hair will not be wet.

NORMAL AMOUNT OF STAINING FOR A RESCUE

Blind from neglect: http://photos.petfinder.com/fotos/VA117/VA117.8331694-1-x.jpg

So, again: Eyes that do not bulge; little or no white; coat around the eyes should be dry; eyes should be bright and not foggy.

SKIN: The big issue are the wrinkles. It’s entirely possible to keep a short-faced dog’s skin clean; this is another case where people will try to tell you that it’s normal for the wrinkles to be dirty. In a rescue, especially one that has not been groomed yet, DIRT is to be expected. Major inflammation, especially if the skin smells bad or the dog is scratching elsewhere on its body or has very red paws and chest (indicating lots of licking), is a sign of allergies. People rescue these dogs thinking that it’s just that the dog hasn’t been groomed and they end up with thousands of dollars in vet bills because the dog is systemically allergic. Now I feed a raw diet and I am at the vet every other week, so for ME allergies would not be a deal breaker. I am pretty sure I could fix them.  But it’s something you need to think about if you are not as dog-obsessed as I am.

(Allergies are not because the dog is short-faced – they’re because short-faced dogs are so often exploited by bad breeders, and bad breeders don’t care about the immune system and they’ll bred whatever has its bits and pieces. So allergies are a huge problem in all popular breeds. But whereas a Lab with discharge all over the place and red staining everywhere looks obviously ill, a Shih Tzu with the same condition just looks horribly neglected. Learning to tell the difference will help you, even if you decide to take the dog home, because you’ll be mentally and emotionally prepared for what may be a lifetime of special effort for this dog.)

Staining from constant licking: http://photos22.flickr.com/25199407_b26442e2ab.jpg (this is AFTER a groom–the dog is normally very, very red in those areas)

Irritation/infection in face wrinkles: http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblogs/pethealth/dogblog3new.jpg

Good clean wrinkles:

OK, NOSE: The bad thing that happens when these breeds are not carefully bred is something called Stenotic Nares. It can also show up in well-bred dogs, but good breeders know what it is and will make sure the dog gets it fixed before there’s long-term damage.

Stenotic nares basically means that the nostrils are too narrow. When you look straight-on at a dog’s nose, each nostril looks like a comma. In a healthy dog, the comma is wide and the dog breathes easily and silently through its nose. In a dog with stenotic nares, the comma is very thin and the passage for air is very tiny. When the dog is forced to breathe through its nose it whistles or snorts.

Stenotic nares requires a simple fix – a vet actually bores a larger hole through the nostril.It needs only a few sutures and some vets do it with none. The reason you want to avoid a stenotic dog, especially an older one, is because when a dog cannot breathe through its nose, it breathes through its mouth. But the dog’s body is not designed to breathe like that constantly. Dogs pant, but most of the time when they’re relaxed their mouths are closed. It’s extra effort to keep the mouth open, and the heaving can be complicated by (or may even cause) the last and perhaps most major issue.

A spectacularly severe stenosis below (most are not this bad):

Immediately after surgery (that’s why it’s all red and you can still see the suture to the left of the nostril – this will heal and look like a normal dog nose:

PALATE: The soft palate on some (SOME, not all) short-faced dogs extends too far into the back of the mouth and the beginning of the airway. Sometimes it’s normal when the dog is born but becomes inflamed; sometimes the dog is born with it. I strongly suspect, though I am a layperson and don’t have good data on this to show you, that the mouth-breathing that dogs with stenotic nares are forced to do contributes to their palate problems. However it happens, the result is the same.

The dog can breathe, but it’s breathing past a flap of tissue. Every breath requires more effort to move the flap and let air in.

Everybody “knows” that Pugs and Pekes sound like asthmatic old men, right? WRONG. That sound, the grating or hoarse intake of each breath, is the palate. Healthy short-faced dogs do make more noise when they breathe IF THEY’RE EXCITED, but the breaths should be easy. They should NOT make noise when they’re relaxed and they should NOT have heaving sides when they breathe.

Not only is a problematic palate uncomfortable for the dog, the vastly increased effort each breath requires tires out the heart. Dogs with palate issues tend to also have heart problems, especially if the condition has gone untreated for years.

Like stenotic nares, palates can be treated fairly easily. It’s not a risky or complicated surgery. But it IS expensive and if the dog is older the damage may already be done. This is another case where I’m not telling you not to adopt the dog – just do so with expectations of substantial intervention as soon as possible. It’s not something you can let go for months after you bring the dog home; imagine what it would be like to feel like there was a piece of Saran Wrap in your throat.

So nose and breathing recap: The dog should breathe easily and silently through its nose. If the dog is excited to see you and won’t stop panting, feed him a tiny treat. That usually makes them close their mouths for a few seconds and you can hear the breathing. When the dog is excited, a little noise is OK. When the dog is just sitting around, the breathing should be quiet even if the mouth is open.

OK, last but not least: TEETH. Bad breeders don’t care if their dogs have teeth coming up in the dogs’ ears as long as the dog has a functional reproductive system and makes cute puppies. For that reason, many of the poorly bred ones have SERIOUSLY bad teeth, both in bite (how the teeth meet in the mouth) and in health. I will do bite checks myself, but if you’re not experienced with dogs you should ask the foster home or animal control officer or shelter volunteer to show you this. You can make it very non-threatening if you ask them to show you how to brush the dog’s teeth once you get him home.

The teeth should be reasonably white in front, though they are often stained in back. Brown or tan staining is normal for a dog over three or four years old but is not normal for a puppy and would indicate something is going wrong. The teeth should be ivory/tan at worst; NOT grey. The gums surrounding the back teeth should not be red or puffy. When the dog eats a soft treat, he shouldn’t drop it or act like chewing hurts. The front teeth should be somewhere close to each other – an overbite or underbite of a quarter-inch never hurt anyone, but an overbite of a full inch makes the mouth very subfunctional. That, by the way, is what Ginny (our “designer dog” who probably cost someone a few thousand bucks) has; her lower jaw is so much smaller than her upper that it fits both behind and inside her upper jaw and her teeth do not meet anywhere except at the final molars. Similarly, a very exaggerated underbite (where the bottom teeth are in front of the top ones) makes it more difficult for the dog to eat and leads to malpositioning of the teeth and the potential for more decay.

Chloe obviously gets some traffic related to her overbite:

http://frauchloe.blogspot.com/2007/07/for-all-folks-googling-dog-overbite.html

Pretty severe underbite:

http://cbr.homestead.com/files/hayley/haley_underbite.jpg

Tomorrow: The achondroplastic dog.

I’ve been reading Nathan Winograd’s blog, which always makes me cry and get furious and very hopeful and inspired at the same time. And it also brings up topics that I want to write about, especially for those of you who have not been subjected to my rantings for years now. Specifically, I have been thinking about the rising tide of breed-specific legislation, which all comes down to “I am afraid that dog will bite me or my child.” When you really parse it, that’s all it is. So with all the dog bite conversation going on, I thought it might be helpful to explain a little bit about what happens in a dog bite, and what is going through a dog’s mind.

First, though, and this is VERY important–on this all behaviorists agree.

There is no such thing as a dog who does not bite. There is only a dog who has not yet bitten.

This is the key to it all. Every dog has a threshold beyond which it WILL bite. For some dogs that threshold is so high that he or she goes to their grave having never yet bitten, but that doesn’t mean that they were incapable of or never would have bitten. For a dog, a bite is a form of communication. They do it to each other constantly. For most dogs, biting a HUMAN has a major taboo attached to it, but if pushed hard enough they will break that taboo.

Second important thing:

There is a huge difference between play, punishment, and predation.

There are three main reasons dogs bite. Play, punishment, and predation. A play bite–very typical in puppies or unsocialized dogs–can do a lot of damage, but the dog had no clue it was doing anything wrong. It was “taught”–or never un-taught–that biting is an appropriate thing to do with humans. This is very typical when you have a dog with a very active mouth anyway–Shepherds are like this, Border Collies, Dachshunds, Beagles–and somebody thinks it’s hilarious that the puppy bites their hands. So they play all kinds of great bite/tug games with the puppy with hands, gloves, toys, laughing when the puppy leaps up to grab the toy from their hands, laughing more when the puppy nicks their knuckles with teeth. Unfortunately, they don’t laugh so hard when the puppy leaps up and bites a kid’s cheek. The puppy has NO CLUE that what it did was wrong. It is playing with a child the way it’s been encouraged to play with adults.

Then there’s predatory biting. This is probably the most dangerous type of bite, because it’s the way a dog eats–biting and then grinding down. This is the kind of bite that is triggered, unfortunately, in some breeds VERY EASILY. A breed that is designed to have a high prey drive–this would include most of the terriers, some of the sporting and working dogs, some of the hounds, and specific individuals of ALL the breeds–will be triggered by fast-moving objects, high-pitched noises, or the look of a “downed” animal. This type of bite response is particularly risky around young kids, because that’s exactly how kids behave. They run fast and clumsily, they screech, they make tons of noise, and they flop around on the ground. Even the highest-drive dog *usually* won’t attack its own family, but strangers will open the predation floodgate and can get bitten. You can absolutely train a high-prey-drive dog to be safe around kids, but 90% of people who own dogs don’t train them. So your friends and neighbors have probably never done a thing.

OK, punishment. This is the kind of biting that is the most common, and least understood. Every dog has an escalation of actions when they want someone or something to stay away from them or cease doing whatever it is they are doing. They’ll stare first, then stiffen, then growl, then snarl, then bite. In the dog’s mind, they have given huge paragraphs of ample warning before they resort to biting; it’s just that we don’t speak dog and we usually don’t pay any attention until the dog actually bites. A punishment bite is not intended to hurt; it’s a bite that does not grind down. When another dog is bitten like that, it doesn’t do a thing. Unfortunately, we have no fur and very thin skin, so we get small wounds. But the dog’s intention was only to make sure that you understood not to do that again.

Punishment biting is difficult to understand because it is built in layers. Each layer of intrusion or stress builds the dog up toward the threshold of where it’s actually going to bite. VERY common layers are location, pain, age, touch, noise, strangers, fear, territory, food, and sex. So, in other words, imagine you have a dog who does not like having his feet touched–very common in dogs. Feet touching alone would never make this dog bite, and you’re not even really aware that he doesn’t like his feet touched because it’s not a major issue, just a minor one. NOW imagine that you have friends over, their kids are running around yelling, the dog is in “his” chair, and a toddler holding a Frito comes over and grabs his foot. You’ve just piled location, territory, touch, noise, strangers, and food on top of each other. The dog can’t stand it anymore, and he nips her hand. Everyone screams “Oh no! Rowser can’t be trusted anymore!” In fact, Rowser hasn’t changed even a tiny bit–it was all there to begin with, and Rowser was probably tense as a board and nobody noticed.

So how to you prevent the bite in the first place? Well, unless you are very experienced and have a lot of dog savvy and know when things have crossed a line (and I would say that most people don’t), you don’t EVER play with a puppy in a way that uses mouths for fun. Fetch is great. A million commands are great. Seek and find, scent games, teach the puppy to climb in and out of a box, anything like that. But don’t teach any games that use teeth anywhere near human skin, and actively discourage ANY contact between a dog’s mouth and human hands. Dogs should be convinced that human skin is like an eggshell, and will be horribly hurt if they even accidentally brush it.

Second, separate prey-driven dogs from prey. This is so simple, but so few people do it. Dogs that have ever shown an instinct to chase (cat chasers, for example, or squirrel chasers, or the dogs who run the fence line) or who get excited by toys or noises should not be out loose at pool parties, during games of tag, or near kids who are going to be on the ground. Just put the dog inside. If someone says “Oh, why don’t you let Sasha out, she’d love it!” say a polite but firm no. Prevention is much easier than stitches.

Third, be aware of layers, and learn to watch your dog for signs that stress is building. It is useless and cruel to force a dog who is afraid of kids to be in the room “because he’s got to learn sometime.” Never push a fearful dog. Everything about this has to be positive, with tons of treats and praise. No punishment ever works when the dog is afraid. Work from puppyhood to desensitize the “layers.” Handle the dog all over all the time, especially the big ones like feet and tail and genitals (I know, ewww, but put your hand in a washcloth if you need to and pet him ALL OVER). Expose the puppy to noises, to strangers, to kids of all ages and genders. Don’t let a dog “own” any furniture. A dog should always give way to the human, and if he decides to own a chair then he’s not allowed on the furniture at all. Don’t neglect age and pain–the threshold for any elderly or painful dog is incredibly low. When the dog is showing signs of aging, keep him or her pain-free with medication and also keep in mind that it’s a management issue. Older dogs have a right to their peace and quiet, so offer a room or place where the dog can get away and no children or other stress is allowed.

Never separate or get between two fighting or squabbling dogs unless you really know what you’re doing. Major damage to a dog is better than major damage to yourself or a child. The especially dangerous dog fights are the ones heightened by the presence of food or when two or more dogs are attacking a third dog. Yes, I KNOW you can’t bear to see the poor third dog get hurt. But if this fight is serious, the dogs have moved from punishment to predation. They will not realize it’s you or your kid and they will use predation bites on you (or your child). One predation bite equals a crushed hand or a life-threatening facial injury. Do not be so foolish as to invite a dog to do this to you.

And, finally, remember what I said earlier. Ninety percent of all dog owners do NOTHING to train their dogs. So don’t assume that because you have a Beagle and he’s great that you can trust friend X’s Beagle. Never leave kids and dogs unsupervised. Teach your kids to NEVER touch, talk to, or make eye contact with strange dogs, even if they act friendly. Be impolite. Ask your friends to put the dog in the bedroom if he’s getting excited or looking tense. Don’t be afraid, and teach your kids not to be afraid, but DO be firm.

While I agree with you generally, your take on COI is off. Outcrossing decreases “genetic diversity” by melting all of the strains and family types of a breed into one pot. The problem is you gloss over the negative recessive traits and those traits come back to haunt your breed, you have no repository of “clean” genetics to turn to.

I totally agree that breeders need to know what they are doing and why they are doing things. You can’t ethically breed dogs by following a recipe, and you should have a strong idea of where you are going not only in this generation, but for several generations to come.

Please Google “Of Peas and Pups” as it is the best free source of information on the topic.

Hoorah! I get a chance to re-address this topic.

Let me say first that I am thrilled beyond belief to see any breeder making decisions based on more than just “Well, her grandfather had two BISS wins, and I certainly want a piece of that, so I think I’ll breed to him.”

The article “Of Peas and Pups” was written in ’63 by a German Shorthair Pointer breeder who was very influential in the breed. It is ABSOLUTELY worth reading. When I summarize it, I’m doing so not because I don’t want you to read it on your own.

Of Peas and Pups is maybe the best example out there of the reasons that breeders stick within very, very tight pedigrees. The point of the article is, in short, predictability is good. Maximum predictability is better. Perfect predictability is best of all.

This is a quote:

We also learn that only pure parents produce pure offspring…Our dogs of course, are not genetically pure and never will be, but whatever minute contribution we can make toward that goal of genetic purity, will be to the everlasting advantage of the breed in the generations to come….

We can see that (in most instances) hybridizing or outcrossing , whether it be of breed or strain or type, complicates our genetic arrangements…..Ideally, we want HOMOZYGOSIS or the homozygous state for every allele. This is a dream not to be realized unless this old world spins a lot longer than it has already.

The author gives examples of the things you want predictability on. Nose, instinct to run, size, shape, fearlessness, etc. He strongly asserts that if you do a lot of outcrossing (breeding to unrelated dogs) you may get a few really able dogs but you won’t be able to reliably count on the outcome. You’ll be breeding somewhat blind because the dogs will be quite different from each other. Maximum homozygosity (where all the genes are the same, no recessives–or ALL recessives, depending on the gene you’re talking about) leads to maximum predictability.

YES. YES YES YES.

This is EXACTLY my point. Only I want you to imagine it like this:

You’ve got seven three-foot lengths of yarn in a rainbow pattern. There are lots of colors in repeating patterns down the entire length, in a random order (so sometimes it’s blue-red-orange, sometimes blue-red-red, etc.). These seven pieces of yarn are your seven breeding dogs.

You also have a paper towel tube–that cardboard insert thingy–with six small holes drilled in it. These holes are just big enough for you to see inside the tube.

Now use an imaginary Sharpie pen (which is all I ever have around here in real life, since my kids steal them constantly) and mark the holes with your six top priorities in breeding. Let’s say tracking ability, dark eye, tight hips, good bite, running drive, angulation. All of these are really, really good things to have in a dog, and I am all for making these predictable.

Now drop the ends of all your pieces of yarn through the paper towel tube and get ready for the magic.

Looking ONLY through the tiny holes, carefully pull one piece of yarn past the other pieces of yarn (or vice versa) until what you are seeing through the holes is exactly lined up. Through the dark eyes hole you see red-green-yellow or what have you; through the tracking hole you see blue-yellow-red, etc. In each hole you see all the identical pieces of yarn making the same pattern.

Hallelujah! You have just successfully inbred (or linebred; it’s the same thing when it comes to this experiment) a perfect breeding population according to Of Peas and Pups. No matter how you breed these seven dogs together, you will ALWAYS get a dog with dark eyes, tight hips, lots of nose and run, good angles, good teeth. Absolute predictability, absolute prepotency (prepotency basically refers to how much influence the parent generation has on the offspring generation–a numerical prediction of how much the kids will look like and act like the parents).

Unfortunately, that’s where Of Peas and Pups ends. It’s all a rosy glow of predictable production of perfect puppies with nary an outlier in the bunch.

Unfortunately, it completely forgets the rest of the yarn.

When you develop perfect homozygosity for traits, you’re developing perfect homozygosity for traits. The six–or ten, or twelve, or fifteen–you can see, the ones you’ve been trying to influence, you really can get just about perfect. And for many breeders, these are not just looks or ability. They inbreed to avoid health problems too, and they do a very good job of it. You really can develop a population completely free of, say, von Willebrands, or PRA, or other simple genetic diseases (simple meaning that the gene means the dog gets the disease, that there’s not an environmental component). You can even make a lot of headway against disorders with a major environmental trigger.

Unfortunately, even if you can manage, say, fifteen holes in your cardboard tube–and that would be an INCREDIBLE number to succeed in as a breeder–the VAST majority of the genetic code (those repeated strands of yarn) is still hidden from view.

And some of the stuff you CAN’T see, and may not in fact see for generations, would be labeled something like “resistance to parvovirus strain CCXI” or “production of tumor necrosis factor under specific conditions” or “unique myelination of nerves.” Hundreds and thousands and quite possibly millions of these traits are ALSO being made completely homozygous.

This is what makes an intensely homozygous population–your seven dogs, and in some breeds virtually the entire population of forty thousand dogs or four hundred thousand dogs–INCREDIBLY vulnerable.

Here’s how it works: Your population of predictably beautiful and birdy dogs chugs along pretty happily for a while, but then a new environmental threat or pressure comes to bear. Very often this is a disease, but it can also be a diet change (the way we feed dogs has flip-flopped in an incredible way over the last 50 years, with generations being fed almost entirely differently than the prior ones and differently from the subsequent ones) or a husbandry change (more weight, less exercise), or a vaccination change, or any number of things.

In a maximally heterozygous population, where the yarn doesn’t match up on almost any region, the dogs’ individual bodies will respond in many different ways. If the threat is a virus, some dogs will have genes that code for a protein that does a better job than the other dogs’ proteins at sticking to the viral coating and therefore coding for an antibody. So those dogs will get over the disease much faster. Other dogs will have a greater fever response, a more labile body temperature. So those dogs will spike a fever instantly and possibly kill more viral particles. And some dogs will have a sluggish reaction and very little immune response and they’ll die.

When you have a homozygous population, there’s no ability for some dogs to zig and some dogs to zag. Every single dog will respond the same way to the threat. And for some threats that’ll be a good thing, because they all survive (that’s how you breed plants resistant to certain fungi, for example). But for other threats it will be a catastrophic thing.

It is VERY well established that homozygous populations are super vulnerable to what are called plague diseases–not “the plague,” but a term that population ecologists use to refer to any disease or threat that sweeps through the entire population.

The second huge threat to very homozygous populations is that of polygenic disease.

Genetic disease is very, very rarely a simple thing. There are a few diseases that have a one gene equals one disorder formula, but this is only a tiny minority. Most diseases have a complex recipe of genes interacting with each other, with the eventual symptoms triggered by environment.

So, for example, the gene sequence for osteosarcoma might be RSTAUU, where each letter represents an entire gene (a sequence of many base pairs).

If you look across the entire population of dogs, a whole bunch might have RS, a few have TA, a very small number have RSAUU, a proportion has UU, etc. It’s pretty rare that they all occur together in one dog.

But what happens when you align all those yarn pieces, when you remove heterozygosity, is that those cancer genes get aligned too. The dogs that tended to be just UU also had iffy bird sense, so they were selected against and disappeared from the population. The dogs with just RS had light eyes, so they’re gone too. The result is a ton of dogs with RSAUU and another ton of dogs with TA.

A dog with RSAUU won’t get cancer. Neither will a dog with TA. Nobody INTENTIONALLY bred cancerous dogs. They looked like two entirely healthy populations.

But when they came together, a population with a huge proportion of dogs that will get the entire RSTAUU sequence was created. And that is something that is INCREDIBLY difficult to undo.

And we have precisely that situation in Boxers and Goldens and Flatcoats right now–such enormous cancer rates that the effective lifespan of the breeds has been cut nearly in half. Breeders are aware of the issue, appalled by the cancer rates, and are working like the dickens to reduce them, but when you have a polygenic disease it’s very difficult. You don’t know if the reason Ch. Besom’s Big Boy was cancer-free until old age was because he actually didn’t have cancer genes, or if it was that he was TA. You don’t know whether your lines have TA or RSAUU, so if you breed your cancer-free Ch. Lori’s Twinkle Toes to him you could end up with a super healthy litter or you could end up with a disaster. And even if you do end up with a healthy litter, you might wreck it all in the subsequent generation.

In other species, when you find yourself in a corner you either kill every member of your breed and start over (this is what happens in plants–you let Soybean Strain WW23, which turned out to be vulnerable to a certain insect, get plowed under and you buy WW24 from the seed company the next year) or you breed your way out by accessing completely different genetics. You take your Alpine goats that are producing an uncomfortably large proportion of skin diseases and you breed to Saanen bucks for a year, then breed those kids back to your Alpines. The ADGA (the goat version of the AKC) has a specific provision for this; as long as you use registered animals you can cross-breed and then breed back into purebred status with a letter attached to your registration number.

The AKC has no such plan or provision except under VERY specific circumstances. I applaud every breed club that has gone that route and has sought out alternate breedings when it became clear that they had bred themselves into a corner; I sincerely wish more would follow suit.

But the point is that with an almost entirely closed studbook (i.e., we can’t breed into different breeds or to unregistered dogs), we remove genes at our own great peril. We do not have any idea, and probably won’t for another fifty or a hundred years, what protective or preventive genes we lose when we move toward maximum homozygosity.

It is well worth considering that a huge proportion of all behavioral adaptations on the part of complex animals, from fish to humans, are designed to get you away from breeding with your relatives. Losing heterozygosity is a quick trip to species death.

Because we control our dogs’ breeding decisions, we can do a great deal of good, we can select away from disease, we can select for traits that maximize the dogs’ abilities to do their jobs. And we MUST do those things. But I strongly suggest that we treat a high coefficient of inbreeding with no little caution, and we move toward maximum heterozygosity wherever it is possible. For the long-term health of our breeds, far beyond next year’s sweep of the trophies, it’s something we must consider.

I’ve been meaning to highlight this report, which is a summary of lectures given at the Canine Health Foundation’s Parent Club Conference (“parent club” means the big-mama clubs that make decisions for an entire breed, as opposed to the local clubs–so my local club is the Yankee Cardigan Welsh Corgi Club, but my parent club is the Cardigan Welsh Corgi Club of America–and each parent club was encouraged to send delegates to this conference).

The Canine Health Foundation is the research-supporting arm of the AKC. It donates millions of dollars a year to fund studies and research on canine health, and it relates directly to breeders via the Canine Health Information Center (CHIC). CHIC was set up to have a centralized repository of health-testing information; each participating breed designates the health tests that they consider best practice for that paricular breed. If you get all those tests done on your dog, the dog recieves a CHIC number.

The upshoot for breeders and owners is that the CHF is a little different from the larger vet organizations in that its main audience is a body of educated and dedicated breeders, not pet owners. For that reason they, I think, sometimes feel freer to make recommendations that other bodies feel are too dangerous because of the “unwashed masses” assumption (that all pet owners are stupid and won’t show up for vet appointments, and that they’re stupid and won’t keep dogs safe or fenced, and again that they’re stupid and if left to their own devices will prove to be the downfall of dogdom, so we say or do whatever we have to to get them in to our offices and get their dogs taken care of and sterilized).

So, here are some highlights:

- While spaying is still considered beneficial, health-wise, because of the risk of pyometra and mammary tumors, the best studies show that neutering actually has a deleterious effect on dogs. This report is the first time I’ve seen it put this baldly–as recently as a year ago I was hearing that the risks and benefits were basically balanced, but this is an excellent retrospective analysis of evidence that neutering gives a several-times-higher risk of several cancers, of obesity, of ACL tears, and even of some behavioral disorders. The implications of this finding for breeders are staggering–neuter contracts are now called into question, as are recommendations that performance dogs (agility, obedience, and so on) be neutered, training facilities refusing to accept unneutered dogs, etc.

- As breeders have been yelping about for years, there is no evidence that mixed-breed dogs are in any way healthier than purebreds, and in fact mixed-breed dogs are more likely to have some of the genetic disorders that breeders routinely test for (hip dysplasia is one, thyroid is another). However, this effect, which should lead to a longer lifespan, is ruined in some breeds by the concentration of extremely bad genes (such as cancer in Boxers). So owners, ask your potential breeder, if you are puppy-hunting, what bad genes exist in the breed and what they are doing to minimize your puppy’s chance of getting them. And breeders, you now have good studies to point to to disprove the idea that cross-breeds are healthier.

- The “chicken and egg” scenario of ACL tears has been reversed (this is actually quite dramatic). It used to be assumed that the arthritis vets were seeing in post-ACL-tear joints was because of the ACL tear; this research shows that in fact the ACL tears are due to arthritis and bacteria/inflammation in the joint. So the current therapy, which is surgery, can provide physical stability to the joint again, but has not cured or even addressed the root cause.

- (This one is WONDERFUL) Core vaccines are defined to be rabies, distemper, parvovirus. After the puppy series, distemper and parvo vaccines are to be given NO MORE OFTEN than every three years, and seven- to ten-year intervals should be seen as absolutely normal. Rabies is still mandated to be given every three years, but longer-term challenge studies are being done. Titers are to be seen as very useful, but the levels of the antibodies are immaterial. Any positive titer should be seen as a sign that the dog has an adequate antibody response and does not need to be vaccinated. Bordatella vaccine is largely unneeded except for “lap dogs” who never leave a house or yard and are never exposed to other dogs and are then kenneled in a kennel-cough hotbed. Leptospirosis vaccine should be given only where lepto is a current problem, and never at the same time as other vaccines. Lepto has a very high reaction rate, especially in small dogs. Lepto vaccine is ineffective after nine to twelve months.

Nutritional
– Probiotics have been shown to be effective in many ways, including strengthening overall immune response, and should be considered for every dog.
– High-fat, high-protein diets are dramatically better than high-carb diets (to this I give a resounding “No DUH!” but I suppose it’s good to have it finally ratified by a governing body). In particular, high glutamine levels are very protective.

The full report, which is an absolute must-read for breeders and serious owners and has lots more than I’ve summarized in this post, is here.

There’s a reason Bramble looks like he could take on the world, and why he’s got muscle definition like that when he’s only five months old. It’s because his breakfast yesterday morning was a big hunk of chicken topped with a delicious pile of ground beef lung.

Our dogs don’t eat dog food. Well, no, that’s wrong. Our dogs DO eat dog food–the food dogs and wolves have been eating for the last ten million years or so. Kibble is a VERY recent invention–no older than perhaps forty years in its current form (Ken-L Biskit and Milk-Bone and similar bread-like products existed before that, but at least according to the older breeders I’ve asked and the vintage dog care books I own, you always fed them with fresh meat).

When Doug and I got our very first dog together, I knew I wanted to feed her better than the Dog Chow that was fed to all the family dogs when I was growing up. I was very proud to scrimp and save and buy a “really good” kibble (Iams, yech!). But I began to do research on the Internet, and I started to read about this crazy thing called BARF. Back then there was ONE book, Billinghurst’s Give Your Dog a Bone, a rambling, badly proofread, self-published paperback book written by an Australian vet who had watched the switchover from dogs eating raw table scraps and hunted food to dogs eating kibble and was appalled at the deterioration in health he saw.  I paid $ 40 for one copy and read it cover to cover.

BARF, which is a term we no longer use, stands for Bones and Raw Food, or Biologically Appropriate Raw Food. Billinghurst insisted that dogs had been eating raw human-provided scraps and a few fresh kills since wolves first started hanging around human encampments. So why were we messing with what worked? It’s a very simple question, and it’s rather inescapable in its implications. At no time has a wolf or dog ever stalked and killed a wild semolina loaf.

That first dog was tragically killed when she was seven months old (a story I will tell sometime), and a year or so later we decided to try again.

And this puppy came out of her airline crate (this was also our first purebred dog and the first one ever shipped to us) and was greeted with a chicken leg quarter, not a bowl of kibble.

And the rest, as they say, is history. We haven’t had a bag of kibble in the house since then, and it will be ten years in January. I raised three generations of Danes on it, the corgis of course, and every rescue dog goes on it immediately. I don’t know how many total I’ve fed raw, but counting the puppies it’s got to be close to fifty at this point.

And, because I have the spiritual gift of bossiness, I make friends and family feed it too. My rule is that I don’t want to yard-pick big smelly poops, and I don’t want my dogs eating your dog’s poop because it smells like undigested kibble, so if you want to come over and play your dogs have to be well-fed too. Not everyone feeds a completely raw diet–Sparky gets a grain-free kibble, Wilson gets a lot of raw and some canned, Bastoche gets mostly raw but some grain-free kibble, etc.–but nobody’s on an inappropriate diet. So I get to look out and see this:

Little shiny muscular streaks of lightning.