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My family trains and breeds hunting retrievers as a hobby. Hip displaysia, heart disease and eye disorders run rampant in the breed, particularly in show lines
by snerbles 10y ago
My family trains and breeds hunting retrievers as a hobby. Hip displaysia, heart disease and eye disorders run rampant in the breed, particularly in show lines where the dogs are expected to be pretty and not be particularly athletic. Organizations like the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals (http://ofa.org/ http://ofa.org/) maintain public databases of genetic clearances for dogs in the effort to combat these problems.
If you want a purebred, adopt a rescue or buy one from a breeder that properly runs genetic clearances.
- krastanov 10y agoHow do you "run genetic clearance"? It sounds quite ominous - do you kill the offspring that does not pass the clearance?
- statusgraph 10y agoMost likely you can only breed sufficiently healthy animals.
- maxerickson 10y agoOne way to do it would be to test each candidate parent dog for the problematic genetics and simply not breed the ones that do have the problems. That isn't any more ominous than breeding in general. Where it is possible it will also be more effective than culling; it should lead to a population of animals that are free of the problem altogether.
- snerbles 10y agoClearances are run on the parent animals. In the case of hip displaysia, we have adult x-rays sent to OFA for grading - signs of the condition don't usually manifest until the dog is fully grown. For pups, we have a refund/buyback policy for animals that do manifest such conditions. We have on occasion "adopted back" dogs that the owner could no longer care for, and we've never had a problem finding them a new home. We did acquire one dog that received an OFA "Fair" hip rating (as opposed to "Good" or "Excellent"), and she simply didn't breed. She lived a long and happy life among the rest of the pack.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]