Good post Malka.

Hip Displaysia is not entirely hereditary. Other factors such as diet, exercise amongst other things can contribute as I know.

To quote Malcolm Willis, a well known geneticist who bred and judged GSDs, BMD's : " Joint laxity through a shallow acetablum or incongruity of the acetabulum/femoral head, contributes to the disease but the degree of effect upon the dog may vary enormously. Some animals are so badly affected that they need major surgery including hip replacement or may be pts, while others appear to cope well enough with hips that, on X-ray, look particularly poor." He goes on to say that in man, females are at greater risk and that heritability of the trait varies from breed to breed. It is also known in horses, cats, cattle and timber wolf.

My first dog was bred from good hipped parents. His brother had a low score but died fairly young. My dogs hip were scored at 36 total - not good - and he was operated on for OCD of the shoulder. The breeder did not tell me to restrict his exercise as a young pup and I didnt know any better so after his puppy booster he had unlimited exercise and rough play with an adult Labrador. He was though otherwise healthy, always had lots of exercise and lived til he was nearly 11. He also won a reserve ticket at Crufts so obviously his movement wasn't affected. Probably most of the dogs at shows who do a lot of winning wouldn't have 100% perfect hips if they were xrayed.

So, it is a very complex condition and even from so called perfect parents there unfortunately is no guarantee that the progeny will be HD free.

I hope your dog makes a good recovery from the surgery and has a long and happy life like my dog did.

Thank you Twix.

For those who are interested, this is an Xray of a perfect hip joint, with the femoral head properly seated in the well formed acetabulum [socket].

That is what the research was carried out for to try and determine what the gene responsible was. This gene is rife amongst Boxers not just a few, it affects dogs in Europe as well. It is there and until it is identified there is nothing that can be done. How can you select dogs to breed from when you cannot identify if they carry the gene or not

Our bitches breeder does not have the sire, he came from a top UK kennel and sadly is no longer alive. Her mother is also deceased

In theory i can see what you are getting at, in practise I think its immaterial as JRD is so rife within the breed and to stop using one dog or one bitch for breeding is not going to make any difference in the grand scheme of things. Her father was an exceptionally well known stud dog in the UK. In actual fact since both her parents are deceased - breeding from either has ceased anyway

But if the problem was known about during the dog and bitches lifetime of breeding surely can you not see that to stop breeding with them is better than to continue. If you only use sound stock then eventually the incidences of this problem will decrease and hopefully one day disappear.


Humans are not animals and equating your story with that of a breeder choosing healthy dogs above infirm just goes to show me that you fail to understand how a good ethical breeder works. Selective breeding is not simply done at one level. It is done over generations.
Take a look at any dogs pedigree, you will see that breeders have long since been selective over which dogs they put to which bitches. How many incestuous couplings are there in the average pedigree? Depending on what the breeder is looking for it can be many or none. The only reason they are there is because the breeder wants to continue a certain characteristic.

If a breeder produces a litter of pups from dog A and bitch A that prove to have an hereditary disease then ethically they should stop using A to A. Now it might be that only one of the pair either is found to carry a defective gene or fails on its hip score which might mean they can put bitch A to dog C and so on. This is selective breeding in dogs. Granted this is a simplified version of it all, but one which I feel gets the message across.

And what do I expect from Dogsey Forum with regards the KC, well friends, if you do not know the power of persuasion/lobbying with regards getting things changed then you really do not know how the KC works. Given enough pressure they will bend and will demand all dogs be hip scored etc not just Boxers but GSD's, Labs etc etc.

Never does an ethical breeder simply shrug off the health of their pups as being . 'These things happen' or so I think should be the case. they should be striving to make sure it doesnt to the best of their ability no matter how many years it takes.

Actually I do understand how a good ethical breeder works and I find the above comment rather insulting and very condescending.

And I repeat:

Unless breeders hip and elbow score their dogs nothing will change.
We have had the HD problem within our breed and now we are quite fanatical about them not being bred from without certain health tests. Firstly hips and elbows, the majority of elbows are coming out at 0;0, we have driven our breed average for hip scores down to 18 from the high 20's (that is from the ones that bothered to score, of which there were few), also it needs to be understood that not only does genetics play a part in the score, but environmental factors such as over exercise as a youngster and poor nutrition being 2 of the factors involved. So you need to understand what your hip score is telling you. The environmental factors are just that, environmental, and you can do something about them quite easily by ensuring that your puppy owners understand the importance of not letting their puppy run up and down stairs, jump in and out of the car, go for long onlead walks etc. Also the right type of feeding must be understood. By using only hip scored dogs you are able to influence the genetics, it will take several generations to bring it down, but if everyone is committed to it, and takes part and does their bit it can happen.
The other things we test for are MRD, firstly we were testing our breeding stock, now we routinely litter eye test at around 6 weeks, this will then show which pups have the lesions in the eyes, as long as these pups are not used in the breeding programme, and go on a neutering contract with a pedigree marked Not To Be Bred From, then we will begin to see less and finally no lesions in the eyes, the eye vet I see reckons that about 25% of our breed are carrying these, both my girls are clear eyed and I only breed with clear eyed males, and I have to date had 3 puppies fail their eye test, so a lot less than 25% in my case, but it does show that (as my eye vet said) it is a recessive gene and only by constant monitoring - just as in hip and elbow scores - it can be driven down.

Barry, thinking that the KC will bow to lobbying just goes to show me that you fail to understand how the KC operates and how it effects the rest of the dog breeding world as a whole.

People have lobbied the KC for years, and progress was very slow. Pedigree Dogs Exposed brought about change much quicker. There are lots of reasons for that, some even highlight that the KC itself is at the mercy of breeders.

Additionally, you don't take into account BYBs and puppy farmers who do not even register their dogs with the KC.

If you want to lobby anyone, lobby parliament - that is the best way to make sure breeding ethics change. Just look at Sweden for example.

I do agree with you about not repeating matings where previous offspring have resulted in hereditary disease, and one could argue doing so is tantamount to wilful negligence.

Btw, the tone in my first paragraph, and to a lesser extent the rest of the reply, is phrased to mimic one of your own - just to highlight it's not very cordial.

Yes indeed, it can happen, and again I would like to say humans are not dogs, if this were a forum discussing health issues within humans I would not say to you 'don't have any more kids'.
However as this is a forum discussing health issues within dogs, I can say, breeding further with animals that produce offspring with genetic faults is ethically wrong.

Oh and regards your not understanding what an ethical breeder is...

My mistake.

Humans and dogs have virtually identical hip structures.

In your post #33 you said:

and in your post #38 you said:

I responded to you in post #39 explaining exactly what that hip Xray meant, and in your post #42 you said:

Even when I confirmed that yes, you are correct, the head of the femur on the left of that Xray is not properly seated in the socket, you still went on to say that hopefully someone else will come in and help me understand what it is I am looking at a little further.

How many more times do you need confirmation that the Xray showed that the femoral head was not seated properly in the socket?

Humans and dogs have virtually identical hip structures, and as Dawn said, these things happen.

It appears to me that your knowledge of hip structures is very little indeed. You might be an expert on hereditary causes of HD and other such problems, but you still cannot accept the fact that these things happen.

It can, and does, happen in humans with perfect hips going way back generations, which is why I mentioned my daughter, and it can, and does, happen in dogs with perfect hips going way back generations.

These things happen.

I do not intend responding to you again.

YES they do happen! And, we don't know how the OP's pup has been raised.

I can't comment on other Boxer health issues like heart, epilepsy, or kidney disease but as the OP was about the dog having bad hips (and possibly another sibling affected) here are some figures:

In the last 4 quarters of the Breed Record Supplement supplied by the KC no elbow scores were recorded and a grand total of 10 Boxers were hip scored. The lowest score was 9, the highest was 25. For a reasonably athletic medium sized dog this seems quite a high score to me.

In the same time frame a total of 4,761 Boxer puppies were KC registered so although i havent trawled through all the health results of the sire and dams its possible a very high percent have not been scored. If you bear in mind that the KC charge £20 per pup registration this brings the KC a revenue of over £95k from this breed alone so I for one cannot see the KC ever refusing to register pups from unscored parents and they accept registrations from known BYB's giving the reason that they know of them and don't want them to slip under the radar. The breed clubs can only recommend using low scoring dogs in their code of ethics but are powerless to make it a legal requirement.

There are a lot of other factors other than hip scores to take into consideration when breeding. Type, temperament and longevity for example. You could breed, if you were lucky enough, from a sire and dam with 0:0 hips but there is absolutely no guarantee that the offspring would be HD free.