But if a carrier is mated to a clear you will not have a problem. The issue is whether BOTH carry the gene, which is why I asked if yearly blood testing could be carried out at this stage. Does the disease manifest itself early enough for changes to be noted early on.

Like with Von Willebrands in Dobes. Affected to clear produces all carriers but NO puppies will be affected.

Yup dawn, if its a simple recessive gene, but I thought they haven't even figured that out for sure
And if it is they haven't found the gene yet so they can't (ethically) find if a dog is clear they could only say dogs producing affected pups are carriers
So without a test the known carriers shouldn't be bred from

I agree. I just see a stud dog being blamed when the bitch (if we believe the geneticist) is equally so, and has previously and been bred from, so will have passed on the gene there too. It takes two to tango! However you always find the stud dog is to blame!

I know what you mean, reading up on breeding stuff there does seem to be a common belief that its the male who is important, and hence all the breeding back on the same male to his pups and stuff

I think males can be a lot more important. Just been on a working ESS breeders website and it states one of their FTCHs has sired something like 70 litters resulting in over 400 puppies.

However a litter in a small breed, 70 mating's may only produce one or two in a litter. Swings and roundabouts.

Litter size is irrelevant, in both cases the male can pass on it's genes (and therefore any faulty gene) many more times than the female. This imo can make the stud dog a much bigger risk when it comes to genetic disease. It does of course take two to tango, but when discussing individual dogs and bitches, in my example the male will pass on 400 copies of it's faulty gene whereas the equivalent female wouldn't pass on anywhere near as many. I can totally understand why stud dogs are often blamed when it comes to genetic disease, they seem to be much more likely to be the culprits when spreading faulty genes than bitches often due to "popular stud syndrome".

Do you mean Jemima Harris? From what I can see, she's encountered a lot of abuse and much of it unfair. In PDE2 she was generous in her praise of the KC at several points and she is clearly someone who is passionate about dogs and their health. Where is that an 'ego trip'?

To be fair when the problem was found, (probably because the sire was popular, otherwise it would have just been a random case), he was no longer used at stud.

You cannot condemn someone for something that comes to light after the event.

The dog sired a lot of litters, but it was still less than the 5% of 5 years registration totals which is the lifetime limit that is suggested and applied in some FCI countries.

If the dog had sired fewer litters then the number of cases would not have been statistically significant, 30 possibly affected dogs out of some 900, offspring (and far more grand offspring), would actually be a low percentage.

Also there is no way to know for sure how this problem is inherited, and only having affected animals to study can tell us. Most health issues are recessive, or of complex/unknown inheritance, and of course it is likely that not only the sire but the dam carried the bad gene.

Quoting from the owner of Gucci's statement:

"The most important part of my written response to the programme was never mentioned, which was that since Dr Cattanach brought it to our attention – although he had no evidence to back this up – that it was possible JKD was a hereditary condition, we have not used our champion dog, and that is since October 2010."

It would be great if we had crystal balls, but we don't and to blame the stud owner for an at the time of mating, unknown issue, you could as easily blame the owners of the bitches choosing to use a popular sire. Of course an unpopular sire or maiden one could just as easily have faulty unknown genes, produce one affected offspring from it's one and only litter, and no-one would realise, as ti would not be statistically significant, until that animals genes were more widely distributed and then it wouldn't' be known from where it originated.