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Date Posted: 00:15:50 03/21/10 Sun
Author: Jenny W
Subject: Re: Fixing Poor Physical Structure
In reply to: BKA 's message, "Re: Fixing Poor Physical Structure" on 20:32:41 03/20/10 Sat

Whilst I agree that what's in their heads is of the utmost importance, being the owner of a dog with excellent working ability (for my purposes), great hips and perfect elbows that has broken down due to physical conformation faults being shown up in accidents, I disagree that conformation and general health are not AS important. If I could put my dog's brain into a better conformed body I'd be getting close to having a dog that does what it should for longer, at least more than the 6 or 7 years that seems to be the current trend. It's heartbreaking to see a willing dog fail because his body lets him down at 6 years old. Ignoring conformation faults and proneness to accidents or illness under physically stressful conditions won't get us where we want to be either, we've got to take the WHOLE dog into consideration EVERY time we breed and try to move it on in small steps in the right direction, not aim for one hit wonders. What's inside their heads has to be supported by their physical attributes and ignoring either won't get you a good, long lasting working dog.
There are some conformation faults that do make dogs more prone to injury, straight stifles for example appear to be more prone to cruciate ligament rupture and are exacerabated by increases in size. Straight shoulders appear to predispose to elbow problems and although a good, hard working, mentally tough dog, will overcome these things for quite some time, do we really want them to have to on an ongoing basis? Wouldn't they be better served by a physique that would allow them to do their job with reduced risks? Shouldn't we take these things into consideration and try to minimise them by careful breeding? I'm a great advocate of health testing using X-rays of all joints, not just hips and elbows as I think it does show us if our dogs are more prone to some (but not all) orthopedic health problems in the future, when perhaps strenuous exercise might not show them up for years, maybe too late if we are intent on breeding from the dog for it's other attributes.
In a breed where the majority of dogs are far from perfect in any respect, we have to sometimes make choices and having as much information as possible through strenuous physical exercise/work, some form of temperament or ability testing AND health testing will give us more of the information we need to make the sensible choices. Let's do it all and see where it takes us but always keeping in mind what we want to achieve which is a good all round dog, sound in mind and body over a longer period of time. By the way, we might even get a decent appraisal score with such animals too!

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