With the best will in the world Kay, hips are not an exact science.
A few years ago OFFA, the “Orthopaedic Foundation for Animals”, working I think for the American Labrador club, took a sample of 37640 Labradors with known hip status who had recently been mated and followed the progeny to find out what correlation there was between the condition of the hips of the sire and dam and the condition of the puppies hips. The results were very interesting.
As would be expected, dogs and bitches with excellent hips mated together produced puppies with the best hips, 96% of the puppies having excellent hips. Of course there is no information on the cause of the 5% of puppies with bad hips. At least some of these could have been the result of some accident or injury at or soon after birth.
Excellent Dam to good Sire came next with 94% normal puppies Good Dam to Excellent sire produced 93.4% normal puppies. As can be seen, at the better end of the hip scores the dam seems to have marginally more effect on the production of good hips!
Going to the other end of the spectrum, a displastic dam mated to an excellent sire produced 90.9 with normal hips whereas an excellent dam put to a displastic sire only produced 81.9% of puppies with normal hips. So it would appear that the sire has far more effect at this end of the scale.
One thing which did surprise me was the mating of displastic dogs to displastic bitches. Obviously this was the worst group with 25% displastic puppies. Bad I know but I was staggered to find that mating the worst to the worst and three quarters of the puppies born had normal hips!
Hip scoring was set up in 1965 by Dr Malcolm Willis and a few German Shepherd breeders including Geoff Thorpe to try to improve the state of GSD hips. It was only later that it moved on to embrace all breeds and the scoring out of 106 as we know it today only started in 1984. To a certain extent we are now suffering from decisions taken at that time. It was decided that rather than take a yearly average, taking the total of all scores for that year and dividing it by the number of dogs tested they would use the “Mean Score” Trouble with this is that for a big improvement in hips there is only a small improvement in the Breed Mean Score. Also we can only see trends, short term blips can never be seen. At least now we are getting the Median as well as the Mean which is rather better as showing shorter term trends
Of course, when the DNA markers have been found it will be easily possible to be sure what is genetic and what is accidental damage.
HI John
I must admit, I have not read about that particular survey before, makes very interesting reading.
I do believe although very slow by breeders having hips x-rayed instead of watching movement like used to happen years ago !!!!!!!! things have improved
. Also by breeders educating the buyers of puppies on how to excercise and feed etc. I think we move forward.
unfortuantely Elbow scoring by breeders,is still not as good as it should be. Many still do not seem to go down that route,
As you know OCD has been around for very many years, but still I have heard people say, oh I have the hips done, but elbows not necessary.
I also think that now the buying public are a lot more educated, when looking for a puppy, if they ask for all these certificates regarding the ancestors, then it will make a lot more breeders realise that these things MUST be done, before breeding otherwise their puppies will not sell, so easily.(Just a few thoughts) Regards Meg
____________ Through the dog we enrich our lives, and in return he asks only that we give him what he gives us----Friendship.
Barney has no signs of OCD and we don't know about the hipscore yet, we're waiting until he's just over a year old before we get that done, but he doesn't show any signs of any problems that way. We were very careful with his walks when he was young so we are hoping that all will be well.
Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2005 9:26 am Post subject: HD/OCD
Hi Guys
Trust my chocolate button, Bracken to be the difficult one! The only one I could put her down for was her most severe condition of HD (no score was given but Specialist said that only 25% of the ball of each femur was actually in the sockets), which as you know was only recently diagnosed a month or so ago at 2yrs 11 months! We were told that she had probably had this from birth but that she doesn't & has never shown any visable symptomology! However, she also has severe ED of the left Elbow which became apparent at 4months and during the check up a month ago when we were told about the HD it was found that she has mild OCD & arthritic changes of the right elbow & shoulder! Interesting survey!
i am realy happy with my labs hip scores of 3/4 as my last lab had realy bad hips and i was unable to breed her. i was told the best time to x ray was 1 year old but i didnit have them done until 2.1/2. i am realy disgusted that labs still have a number of them with hd and hopefully over the years with people getting more educated it will be a thing of the past. foxtrot and gemma
I firmly believe a year old is a bit too young for the best score. Any time before the bones have fully hardened your score will be compromised and as my dogs are still growing at that time I prefer to test at 18 months at the earliest. I would test nearer to two years but by that time she will need to be jumping fences and I would prefer to know it was not doing her any harm.
The old theory is that hips will gradually wear so the score will get worse the older the dog, but think about it. If a dogs hips deteriorate so much in just 6 or 7 years, how on earth are we able to still be walking at over 10 times that figure? They may lose a mark or so but that’s all.
Hi I have just read the hip information and have a concern about my garden the info on prevention says
Quote:
Up to at least six months of age, exercise on hard surfaces should be kept at a minimum.
I dont have any grass in my garden it is paving stone and gravel - should I not let Ruby run around out there, but play with her inside on carpet instead? Obviously when she has had her jabs we will take her to grassy area but any advice on what to do in the meantime would be appreciated. She is VERY bouncy and jumps around at every occasion and it worries me do death
You can only do the best you can Vicky. Personally I'm more worried about slippery surfaces than hard surfaces. Yes there is a certain amount of jarring but that's the reasons for the pasterns, to provide "Shock absorbers" for the joints. A large part of my lead walking is on tarmac and concrete. It toughens up the pads and keeps the claws under control.
Yes, hips are slowly improving Meg. Trouble is, it's a rolling average. As at 1/1/05 there had been 49615 Labs tested so each individual dog tested will make only 1/49615 difference. put a different way, you would need 49615 dogs to all score zero just to halve the BMS! Keep an eye on the Median, this will show trends. At present the Mean is 15 but the median is 10 so the trend is down.
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