I think the obvious way to solve a lot of issues would be to stop dogs being shown if they can not pass strict health tests. Of course many breeders will not buy this idea because (despite what they say) many of their dogs are incredibly unhealthy and are NOT being bread for the good of the animal/breed but for the breed standard only.

The breed standards need changing to encourage healthier dogs too.


How anyone can try to argue that the way the GSD or English bulldog has evolved in a way which benefits the animal is beyond me. You only have to take one look at show dogs passing for GSDs to see they are no longer fit for the purpose and have been deformed by idiotic breeding.

As for the bulldog...... well many insurance companies wont touch them with a 20ft barge pole which really sums up the general health status of the breed. I mean many of them cannot even reproduce without assistance...... do you think they needed veterinary intervention to deliver pups back in the 1850s?

No, of course not, take your head out of the sand!

Sorry but you are wrong, back in the 50's I had GSDs who looked like the first GSDs her hips were poor. I can't say how poor because back in the day you only got a pass a breeders letter, the wording of which was enough to put off potential buyers of any puppies or a fail & the cut off point was very low about 5 on the scale we now use. My current bitch who looks like the dogs you are condemming lhas very good hips. In Germany where many of the dogs you are condemming come from they have from very early on had to pass very stringent health checks before being shown or bred from. Also to be shown as adults they have to pass an endurance test ok its only just over 12 miles but its there. Here the kennel club lay down no rules for showing.
Some of the arguements about quality of hips in the article can not be proven. It is argued that because only 33% of registered dogs in Germany are scored those not scored will probably have poorer hips as they are not goiing to be shown or bred from but this is not neccessarily true. The reasons for not showing or breeding from dogscould well be faults but faults such as a long coat or weakear carriage faults which in no way affect the health of the dog & some are not xrayed purely because their owners only want a pet. Their hips may be worse than those xrayed or may be better but I suspect they would follow the same trend as the xrayed dogs. Whether this is the case in this country where dogs do not have to be tested before being shown or bred from & where only 8% of dogs registered are scored is another matter, but even here we do not know. In my last litter 4 of the puppies were shown & xrayed 3 dogs & a bitch. To my delight all of them were an improvement on their mother's score & she was below the breed average. I wanted to know if this was true of the litter as a whole but in spite of offering to pay, none of the other owners would agree to have their dogs xrayed because of having to have a GA, so I'll never know.

this is a difficult one as i know how varied jack russells can be. you only have to look at lily to see that!





and my straight legged lily.

I understand your problem. You seem to think that roach backed GSDs were the solution to reducing the incidence of hip dysplasia. You are also falsely linking the original proper structure with bad hips and there is no reason to make this connection.

The point is that these roach backed sheps are half cripples when compared to the original phenotype. This is an inescapable, mathematical, physical inevitability of their anatomy. Why would breeders reduce the power and force generating abilities of a working dog.

My belgians and dutchies can make 6 meter long jumps and climb a 2.7 wall without breaking a sweat. In the french ring competetions we do, I've seen only a few GSDs capable of making the relatively easy 4.5m long jump or the 2.3 meter scaling wall. The ones that have the least problems look like they did in the 1900s.

As this topic has come up I think I'll point out this interesting paper that has compiled some information about GSDs and hip dysplasia. Lots of reading on GSDs here.

I am unilingual and can't read a lot of it, but came across this bit in my language.

from page 122

"CONCLUSION

It is a painful conclusion indeed, to see that these absolute show champions, as I have listed them in the charts, have abominable overall results when it comes to proving their heredity and their progeny free of canine hip dysplasia. Although elected “Sieger” and thus coming as close as possible to the ideal image of the German Shepherd Dog, they do not exemplify in the breeding. On average the former Siegers can document no more than 43,3% of HD1-hip scores in their offspring. The difference with the working dogs in particular is astounding, they reach an average of 63,5% of perfect hip scores with their progeny! Now imagine this huge difference: 20%!! That is indeed very impressive and should be taken into account by the breed warden(s)."

http://jantie.demeyere.googlepages.c...sdysplasie.pdf

Fabulous fur babies xxxxx I love the old pic too xxxx

i love the jrt one- jelly isn't that far off.

it's interesting you should post the bit about the horse and gsd anatomy. this is a video of tennesse walking horses whose movement has been exaggarated by the use of platforms on the front and chains arounds the pastern (called soring) which causes the horse to become effectively unsound and to avoid the pain they develop this unnatural gait.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbr-r...eature=related
it worrys me that the video of the gsd is not actually so far off of the one of the horses. it worries me that the more exaggarated the movements become, the more what is considered the 'natural' gait becomes distorted.




(i am in no way suggesting that people will do this to their dogs just that the more dogs walk in this way the more we consider it to be natural)

My breed has been virtually unchanged since Egyptian times! They were of course perfect already!

This is a good explanation of why dogs are less healthy today, than before the KC notion of 'breeds' was developed. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there haven't been comprehensive health surveys of breeds from their inception to the preset day. Also, you can't trust people to answer health questionnaires with regard to their dogs truthfully or reliably. I read one the other day (can't remember which breed) that stated the dog had died of 'old age' at nine years old. In my view, 360+ inherited disorders in today's domestic dog speaks for itself.

Unleashing the Canine Genome

1. Elaine A. Ostrander1,2 and
2. Leonid Kruglyak1,3

http://171.66.122.45/content/10/9/1271.full#ref-17


The Unique History of Dogs

The domestic dog has a population history that makes it a particularly attractive model for LD mapping. The purebred dog population consists of >300 partially inbred genetic isolates called breeds. Over one million purebred dogs are newly registered in the United States each year. Gene flow between breeds is restricted by the pedigree barrier—registering a dog as a member of a particular breed requires that both of the dog's parents be registered members of that same breed. Most modern dog breeds are relatively young, with the majority having been developed within the last 300 yr (Wilcox and Walkowicz 1995; Wayne and Ostrander 1999). Many of these were derived from a small number of founders—as few as six in the case of the modern Irish Wolfhound—that best represented the physical or behavioral traits breeders wished to feature in a given breed.

The natural history of some breeds has further restricted their genetic diversity over what is expected from breeding strategies alone. Catastrophic events in the last 100 yr, such as the two world wars and the American depression, have produced severe bottlenecks in many breeds, at times reducing the effective breeding stock to only a few dogs. At the end of World War I, for instance, only five dogs of the Leonburger breed remained alive in Europe (Wilcox and Walkowicz 1995). All Leonburgers alive today are believed to be descendents of those five. Diversity in some breeds is further reduced by the presence of popular sires. These dogs have physical features that make them particularly successful in the show ring and hunting or performance events, and as a result, they may produce >100 litters in their lifetime. For many breeds, therefore, the purebred dogs of today represent a limited genetic pool, with disease predispositions that derive from one or a small number of recent genetic founders (see below). Thus, the structure of dog breeds has the potential to dramatically reduce the problems associated with heterogeneity and genetic complexity of common disease inheritance and makes dog disease genes good targets for LD mapping. Dog breeds offer all the advantages of geographically isolated human populations but with a higher degree of isolation, narrower bottlenecks, and much better genealogical records.

Canine Inherited Diseases

Over 360 genetic disorders in dogs have been described to date (Patterson 1980, 2000). This constitutes the largest set of naturally occurring genetic disorders in any nonhuman species (Patterson 2000). At least half of all described canine diseases resemble specific human disorders. Among those for which the mode of inheritance is known, over 70% are inherited as autosomal recessive, X-linked, or genetically complex traits. The high susceptibility to specific diseases in particular breeds, together with its much lower incidence or complete absence in other breeds, strongly suggests that some breeds are enriched for the presence of risk alleles. Such enrichment, caused by small founding populations, bottlenecks, and popular-sire effects, will only occur when the number of risk alleles is small, and they are relatively rare in the overall dog population (although possibly common within particular breeds). If many common alleles were involved in susceptibility to any disease, we would expect all breeds to show similar incidence patterns. They clearly do not. Indeed, 46% of genetic diseases reported in dogs are believed to occur predominantly or exclusively in one or a few breeds (Patterson 2000). Therefore, in any given breed we are likely to be dealing with a small number of (or even one) disease alleles of strong effect. Such alleles can be readily identified in samples of modest size.

No, not much change in 1000 Years