Jaxx'sBuddy

the other thing i think we need is for councils to provide more green spaces where dogs can be walked on and off leash. this is also good for people eta where people can walk to them with their dogs not drive to them

when i had an investment property i allowed pets and i never had any issues. the tenants were so happy to have a place for their pets they looked after it really well. however that house was almost bomb proof so the type of house helps when renting to pet owners

They cant promote your business over any other which is providing the same or similar but they can refer them to trainers and give them a list of trainers in the area and their contact numbers. So given there are to be given all options and allowed to choose - how do we get them the info and promote you guys to be a necessary service rather than a luxury? yes at my local council there is a wall with pamphlets that they have referred me to which covers a lot of services. we could get a pamphlet on dog trainers/clubs in the area and they could even be posted out with the rego renewal letter the council sends

Many dog clubs are adapting their programs to cater for this. I know the Canberra ones have. that is great news. i think if this happens then more pet owners would use the club and hopefully have a stronger bond with their dogs

i took my dog to obedience classes but i think they could be changed a bit for people who simply want a well behaved dog and not a dog who trials.

i like those ideas PF

Hi Jed, what I meant was has there never been an A dog that has had all normal pups? For example has every stud dog you know produced an affected puppy? Just becasue they say that A to A litters still produce 25% affected pups, that may not mean every single last A dog on earth has produced an affected pup, at least I am hopeing it does not mean that. For example, take HD. We can find that breed x has a 10% affected rate even in breeding programs where only normal scored parents are used. So we could say that Normal 'A' parents produce 10% affected pups. That does not mean that every normal dog has produced 10% affected pups. There will be dogs that never produced any affected pups and there will be other dogs that produced 30% affected pups, but the average for the breed is 10% affected from normal parents. Sorry if I am not being clear. Very true - the way they have presented the numbers it could mean that 3 out of 4 A to A have no affected and one does rather than one pup out of 4 in any one litter has one in 4. This is a very important piece of information and could make a whole world of difference.We also need to know what comes next - the stats need to be broken down litter by litter and given for at least 3 generations. Yes shortstep the best question!!! so what if some AA breeding produced NO affected pups ever????? what would make them different? this information is vital to find out

very true. even though it is a can of worms i think we need to grasp the nettle and try to think of what could be done with the least amount of harm to all concerned. it is a tough situation for all involved.

There are already some breeders who will not use unscanned dogs, and there are others doing their best to be within the current protocol. There are quite a few "A" graded Stud Dogs around the country. No breeder I have spoken to here that I know has MRI'd dogs has "hidden" the results from others. txs dellcara, that is very good news. it would be great if everyone did the same. i was just wondering if this might be something we could really use to differentiate good registered breeders from byb. i am not sure its just an idea that came to me, ie byb dont scan registered breeders do.

steve that was what i was trying to say...what if we had the solution here? i think the scanning and keeping a record of the results would be a good start to any possible solution even if it wasn't a conclusive test at least we would have more information than we have now which can only be a good thing for the breed. eta maybe the UK breeders could look at other countries to see if SM was a problem or not elsewhere. seems to me we need data at the moment from as many places as possible

What OFA recommends is it is more important to look at the total family gentic picture than the score of the dog being bred (excluding dysplastic dogs). Another words if all the siblings had been scored and all were in the normal range, any of the siblings would have the same impact on future generations. Have both parents from the same all siblings normal litters, then add a few generations of the same all normal litters, they say you can reduce the number of affected dogs and reduce the hip scores over all. Looking at any one dog without knowing the silbings scores is not as effective. This works well in the US where dogs are not put under and xrays only cost $50.00, lots of breeders are doing this (they pay for the xrays) and they think it is helping. Here where the vets put the dogs under and change several hundrend dollars or more to take the xray and even the reading is now close to $100.00 it is just not practical. Which is a real shame, and it will affect hip health in this country over time. A good example that all players including vets (not just breeders) need be active in the process if dog health is to improve. now that is really interesting. i have often wondered why all dogs need a GA for some xrays. i can tell my dog to lay down and stay and she wont move...she could have an xray without a GA i suspect.

i agree the oz breeders have the experience and not being disrespectful to any of them i would want to know they can be brutally honest about what is happening which can be hard if you are very close to a situation. we don't want to lose dogs from the gene pool or have breeders walk away, enough are doing this already over other reasons if the cav breed is going to stay around then i believe we do need to take this sort of issue seriously but gosh it is a complex problem

ahhh!!!! i get it, ty would it make sense to scan all breeding dogs here to prove there is limited or no issue in australia? if that was the case wouldn't it mean the cavs here could be used overseas as part of a breeding program to reduce the incidence? although we still wouldn't know what is causing the issue.

but wouldn't it be prudent to only breed from dogs where it was absent? sorry if i am asking dumb questions. No not dume at all. It works is like this. I will just make up numbers and be very dramatic to make it easy to see. You have a disease and it has multi genes and likely also to have what is called risk factors (which are genes that in themselves are not the disease but create a increased risk for the disease), and in the case of these we could be talking 3-20 genes directly in play. There will also be an level of dispersion of the genes/disease in the breed. In something like this, it is likely that all dogs carry at least some of the genes, maybe many carry most of the genes and to me it also sounds very possible that there are also have risk factor genes in play. Might be genes that turn on or off, maybe hormones, nutrition, shape of skull and so on that will cause the disease to be expressed with more or less symptoms in each dog. So in effect there are no dogs to breed that are not at risk of producing the disease. So yes breeding only the A dogs means that 3 out 4 will be normal, but more importantly it also shows that all normal dogs are still producing the disease (the 1 in 4 that is affected). This is important. So now you need to look at the total number of dogs that are A vs the number that are B or C and so on in the population. Lets be dramatic and say only 10% are A and we remove the other 90% of the population. We had 1000 dogs to choose from, now we have 100. And we know that these 100 will still produce 25% affected pups and there is no reason not to believe that their normal pups will also produce 25% affected pups. Now say all the above again, but this time for a second disease, MVD. But now you only have the remaining 100 dogs left in the population to apply it to. After screening the 100 dogs you find you have 10% perfect hearts at 5 years of age, so you remove the other 90% of dogs from breeding. You now have 10 dogs left in the population, and those 10 dogs will still produce 25% SM and some % of MVD. You just wiped out the breed and did not solve the problem. Even if the reduction numbers were not as dramatic as I made them, say in the 50% range that needed to be removed, the end result would be the same. I know one breed a 25% carrier rate in a simple recessive gene disease with DNA testing, no dogs are removed, even affected can be bred but they must be bred to normal. thisis done to keep as many dogs as possible in the gene pool. Also population genetics tells us that when ever you reduce the population # you will also increase the chance of disease and you will also will bring out other hidden diseases that were not a problem when you started. The best thing to do in any population, but especially in these situations where several complex diseases are present, is to attempt to keep the population as big as possible without increasing the problems. So yes, screening for both disease, but also looking at other heath problems that are at lower dispersion rates in the breed to try to prevent them from increasing and also looking at general health and vitality. You would need to be looking at inbreeding rates. Everything has to be weighted out, and you will have to allow some give and take to make the best selection of dogs for each breeding. Just a personal opinion, I would also add that even if they find a DNA tests (which is very unlikely at this time) if you had wiped out the population prior to finding the test, the test would then have little impact in saving the breed. You would have several other disease problems in large numbers to face down again. So you simply jumped out of the pan and directly into a blazing fire. Please remember I made up these numbers to be dramatic to show the process. They are not reflective of what the numbers are in this breed, which I am sure are not even close to being as dramatic in Australia. Sorry for being long winded, that must have taken 15 mins for me to type! LOL thank you for taking the time to educate me shortstep ;). making the numbers dramatic helped show me the effects and your post was very informative. i am a problem solver so when i see topics like this i start thinking "what can we do to make this situation better" because i never think anything is hopeless. it does seem that this is a very complex issue but i go by the saying that you eat an elephant one bite at a time so it seems to me we need to look at were to take the first bite. it is important to remember that even 2 A's have a 25% chance of producing an affected pup. how would we go about making it better for this breed and the people who want cavs as pets?

TY Rev JO , there is lots to think about in your post and it seems it would need to be a long term study as well as complicated.

thanks Steve and Rev Jo for your patience Steve that is what i was thinking, cav breeders would need to breed more dogs so they could have a bigger selection when choosing their dogs to breed from. i also agree that cav breeders would have to be very careful if they weren't going to test for SM although i also see Rev Jo's point that testing may not hold the answer but a comparative study may revel something which we didn't know. how difficult would it be to do a comparative study it seems to me it makes sense to undertake one?

oh thank you i understand. so if the theory is that syrinx causes SM is to be proven what we need is a breeder that is prepared to only breed dogs that are absent of syrinx to see if any of the progeny get SM. if they do then the syrinx isn't the problem but if they don't then syrinx is the culprit. the sad part about all of this is there are puppy buyers out there buying dogs that have SM and the heart murmur and they don't know it. seems to me if we are trying to promote pet buyers buying registered pedigreed dogs (because they are a better standard than BYB dogs) we need to make sure (as far as we can) they they are buying dogs without any problems that we can test for. i suppose i put myself in their position, if i bought a cav that then became symptomatic for sm or heart murmur and i knew there was a test for it and i knew the breeder didn't test for it, i would be really annoyed. then imagine if i had watched that pedigree documentary, i might start to believe it. i think we are in a very precarious place when we don't test dogs when there is a test available.

but wouldn't it be prudent to only breed from dogs where it was absent? sorry if i am asking dumb questions.

an MRI will confirm whether a syrinx is present or not ... the presence of a syrinx does NOT necessarily mean the dog will ever be "symptomatic". That is why current protocol allows the breeding of dogs with SM that are not symptomatic (to 'A' graded dogs). thank you for the information. so would it be better for the breed to confirm the absence of syrinx and only breed with those dogs where it is absent to reduce the likelihood of this occurring in puppies?

i have read this thread with interest and i am a bit confused by it all so please bear with me if i don't understand all the ins and outs. if seems to me that if the heart murmur issue and the SM issue aren't dealt with properly that eventually there will be no healthy cavs around. i don't understand why breeders wouldn't test all their breeding dogs (regardless of the cost) and then breed according to what's best for the breed (and gene pool) to ensure that they were producing the best puppies possible. then breeding dogs would only be A's and all other dogs de-sexed. this would reduce the likelihood of heartache for puppy buyers that i think is behind bet's posts. have is missed the point? is it too difficult to manage this over a few generations to reduce the likelihood of those diseases appearing?

breeders often don't let people visit to protect the pups from diseases like parvo.

i wet towels and leave them on the floor for jaxx to lie on if she wants. i also wet towels and hang them over her crate. if it is really hot i leave the aircon on for her but she's a brachy breed and the heat can be deadly for her

I agree with that, however there is already a shortage of well bred pedigree dogs. We can't keep up with the demand as it is in most breeds this i think is an issue, especially the more unusual breeds like mine, the boston terrier. not a lot of registered breeders out there breeding them. we do need to look at this issue when promoting pedigreed dogs or are we promoting pure bred dogs?

no signature from me.

What's the difference between someone taking a photo of your dog in your property and your dog in the dog park? Not having a go but just really interested. And laughing - in what way? Was he laughing that the sight of your dog was making him happy or laughing in some other manner? eg if I laugh at a stranger's dog doing zoomies, how do you know I'm not laughing at crappy movement or just laughing because I'm having a moment of joy? I hope you see what I mean. i think you are talking about the crux of this discussion .... intent...what is the intent of the photographer, it seems to me that is one very big part of the equation.