Podcast
Mary Peaslee, MD, MPH: Deep Dive on Hip Testing, Part 1
Feb
Jessica Hekman: Welcome to the Functional Breeding Podcast. I’m Jessica Hekman, and I’m here interviewing folks about how to breed dogs for function and for health: behavioral and physical. This podcast is brought to you by the Functional Dog Collaborative, an organization founded to support the ethical breeding of healthy, behaviorally sound dogs. FDC’s goals include providing educational, social, and technical resources to breeders of both purebred and mixed breed dogs. You can find out more at www.functionalbreeding.org, or at the Functional Breeding Facebook Group, which is a friendly and inclusive community. I hope you have fun and learn something.
Jessica Hekman: This episode, I’m talking to Mary Peaslee about hip testing. I highly value Mary’s insights about hip testing for a whole bunch of reasons. She’s a medical doctor with an additional Master’s in Public Health specializing in preventive medicine. So she has extensive training in understanding screening tests, just like the kinds of tests we do for hip health. As for her dog cred, she has been breeding English shepherds for over 20 years, with a focus on growing and sustaining a healthy breed population. She’s been very involved in the breed, earning herding trial championships and serving on the board of directors for the English Shepherd Breed Conservancy, English Shepherd Club and the American Herding Breed Association. Mary has volunteered for the Functional Dog Collaborative for several years, and we’ve had many discussions about health testing and breeding. We’ve talked a lot recently about hip testing, and I asked her to come on to the podcast to tell us her thoughts. We talked for so long that I split the episode into two parts, of which this is the first. Why such a long interview about hip testing, you ask? Well, hip dysplasia is the most common developmental orthopedic disorder in dogs. It is also the disorder with one of the longest histories of medical screening and record keeping for dogs, almost 60 years. That gives us a lot of data to work with and to talk about.
JH: Welcome to the podcast, Mary. We are, I’m especially pleased to have you here because you breed English shepherds and I have an English shepherd so that warms my heart. But I’m also really excited to talk to you about hip testing. And so I was hoping you could start off just by telling us a little bit about your breeding program and the dogs that are in your life.
Mary Peaslee: Thanks, I’m happy to be able to have this conversation with you too. I am, as you mentioned, an English shepherd breeder. I’ve had English shepherds for, coming up on 30 years now. And the dogs in my household, currently there are four. So it’s probably skirting right on the edge of whether I should introduce them all. But briefly, I have Belle, who’s 14 and a half, and then a son and daughter of her, Tali and Shire, excuse me, Shire and Howie. And then I have one of Shire’s daughters, Tali. So three generations of one family and they all go back to my original dogs.
JH: Nice. And I know probably a lot of people don’t know a lot about English shepherds. And because we’re talking about hip testing, I just realized it’s probably relevant to ask you roughly what size your dogs are and how much they weigh. Just because I think that’ll help people know what your perspective is because there’s a big difference between a twelve pound dog and a hundred pound dog. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about, sort of the breed and maybe your dogs, size-wise?
MP: Right. So English shepherds are a herding breed. They are similar in size and appearance to an Australian shepherd or a border collie. So you know, the size range tends to be from 35 pounds on the small end up to 65, on average with most of the dogs clustering in the middle between 40 and 55 pounds. There are some dogs in the breed that are on the larger end of the spectrum. But by and large, they’re your typical herding breed, sort of medium size. And also relevant I think, their body proportions are moderate and what I think of as fairly natural for a dog. They don’t have exaggerations in their confirmation in terms of leg length and overall size and muscling.
JH: Yeah, just to give some people a bit of an idea so I have a black and white English shepherd. He’s about 45, 50 pounds and he’s always mistaken for a Border collie, but he has this blocky head and one Border collie person, upon discovering that he was actually an English shepherd, said to me, “Oh, that’s why his head is like that.”, which has just always made me giggle. Sometimes I’ll say to him, “That’s why your head is like thay”. Okay, so Mary has been doing a lot of thinking about hip testing, which is why I asked her to come share her thoughts on this as an experienced breeder. So Mary, it probably makes sense for us to start out just by talking about sort of the basics. And we’ll definitely get into more details later. But what is hip testing? Why do we do it? Yeah, so why don’t you start there? So what is it? It’s not a genetic test.
5:20
MP: Right, hip testing. The place I start when I’m thinking about hip testing and soundness in general is, you know… I think the easy thing to do here would be to jump right to the x-ray tests that we talk about a lot related to assessing hip quality. But there is a step before that that I just want to mention, because we might end up coming back to it. And that is, when I’m trying to evaluate a dog’s structure and the soundness of their structure, just looking at the dog, and assessing how comfortable the dog is in its body, and how it moves. Is it able to move around the environment, to run, to play, to do all the normal doggy things without showing obvious signs of limitation? So I start with that for evaluating hips. And then the second step is taking some x-rays to look at the hips. So there are two general tests that breeders frequently turn to. One is a hip certification program that has been offered through the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals, OFA, for decades now. It involves taking an x-ray picture of the dog’s hips, and then evaluating what the hip joint looks like in that dog. OFA will certify dog’s hips as normal or abnormal, and give them a particular rating once the dog is two years old, or above. So the normal ratings range from excellent, to good, to fair. There’s a borderline category tucked in there in the middle if the reviewers want to hold off on making a call as far as whether pathology is there. And then there are the abnormal ratings, which would indicate that there is some evidence of joint disease. So that could range from mild to moderate to severe. So that’s the OFA ratings that have been around for years and years. The other test that people have started doing more and more frequently these days is an evaluation known by the acronym of PennHIP, because it was developed by the University of Pennsylvania. And this is another x-ray test where you take your dog in to the veterinarian, who has been specially trained to do the PennHIP evaluations. And they will anesthetize the dog and take three different views of the dog’s hips under sedation. They’ll look at the dog’s hips in the same, they’ll take the same view that the OFA evaluators use. It’s called the extended hip picture, just looking at the shape of the joint, and looking to see if there’s any signs of arthritis in the joint. And then in addition to that view, the PennHIP evaluator will look at two other pictures of the hip. One where the hip, the head of the femur, which is the top of the thigh bone, is pushed firmly into the hip socket, called the compression view. And then a second view where the hip is stressed just a little bit to see how much movement or play there is in the hip joint, and that’s called the distraction view. And then from looking at those two views PennHIP will give you a score called the distraction index, for your dog’s hips. That distraction index is a measurement looking at how much play there is in the hip, how loose it is, or how tight it is, the fit into the socket. Those numbers can range from zero, which would mean that the difference between that compression view and the distraction view where they’re trying to see how much the joint moves around is basically none, that the two are identical and that that femur is really tight right there in the socket. At the other end of the scale, the dog could get a distraction index of one or even more and that basically means that when they put a little pressure on the hip, it comes all the way out of the socket. So from zero to one, and on that scale for distraction index, in general, the lower the score, meaning the tighter the hips, the lower the chances that over a lifetime that dog is going to develop any degenerative joint disease. So it’s associated with the development of arthritis in the hip. So.
JH: And specifically the reason we want to avoid arthritis in the hip is just that old dog painfulness, hard for the dog to walk, hard for the dog to stand up or jump up on the couch. Right?
MP: Right. So yeah, exactly. Arthritis in any joint is going to create some discomfort. And so we’d like to avoid that.
JH: Right. So arthritis is bad. I think most people do understand that. But hip dysplasia, and its relation to arthritis, and what hip dysplasia really is, can you talk a little bit more about that?
11:07
MP: Yeah, so this is where things really get interesting, I think, you know, as a breeder, and where it can sometimes get confusing. So hip dysplasia, you know, we sort of use the term to refer to arthritis in the hip. But the reality is, you know, that arthritis in the hip is not… While you may have a single outcome, there are various roads by which different dogs get to that end of having arthritis in their hip. So hip dysplasia itself is probably not a single disorder, but a whole group of heritable and environmentally induced degenerative disorders that result in dogs having arthritis in their hips. There are some well known well traveled paths that dogs go down to get arthritis in their hip. And those are the things that the tests that we just talked about are looking at. So in general terms, looking at the process by which dogs develop hip dysplasia, you have dogs that start out with some laxity in their hips, some looseness in their hips. And that combined with a variety of other genetic traits, such as the dog size, the dog’s conformation, how much muscling they have, their growth rate, and then environmental things, that package of things that we look at and refer to as risk factors come together. And in a certain percentage of dogs, they will develop degenerative joint disease in their hips. They’ll have x-ray changes, if you look at an x-ray of their hips. And then a subset of those dogs that have changes on their x-rays will show some clinical signs, they’ll have some lameness, some evidence of pain when they move the joint. But it’s not… If you define hip dysplasia as dogs that have a painful disability that affects their hips, that’s one group of dogs. If you define hip dysplasia as dogs who have evidence of degenerative changes in their hips on x-ray, that’s a bigger group of dogs. And then one more step back, if you define hip dysplasia as dogs who have evidence of some looseness in their hips, that’s the very biggest group of dogs. So sort of the process of loose hips causing degeneration causing pain. At each step there, the group gets slightly smaller. Hope that makes sense. The tests that we talked about, PennHIP specifically looks at laxity and will tell you how much looseness there is in the hip. That is the… that’s going to be the… you’re going to capture the biggest pool of dogs if you look at all the dogs who have loose hips. And if you look at all of the dogs that PennHIP has ever tested, and we haven’t gotten into talking about their specific thresholds that PennHIP uses, but according to PennHIP the prevalence of hip dysplasia, defined as a distraction index greater than 0.3, would be over 75% of dogs. Have laxity that is greater than the PennHIP threshold for defining hip dysplasia. So that’s an extremely sensitive test that will capture a very big group of dogs, if you look just at PennHIP scores. Take a step forward from looking at laxity, the risk factor, to looking at actual evidence of osteoarthritis in the hip, which is what OFA looks like, that’s a smaller group of dogs. Not all of those dogs with loose hips develop signs of arthritis. And if you look at all breeds ever tested by OFA, you know, the range and the prevalence of hip dysplasia, according to OFA, is very large. Some breeds, it’s virtually non-existent, you know, like 1% incidence of hip dysplasia, other breeds at the other extreme, it’s all the way up to 80% prevalence of hip dysplasia. So it’s a very big range. Overall, most breeds, though, have substantially fewer dogs affected by osteoarthritis than they do dogs that have signs of loose hips. And then if you go take it to the next step, hip dysplasia as clinically observable signs that the dog has impairments in their mobility, that they’re showing signs of pain, that is the least sensitive. And that’s the least sensitive way to determine if a dog has any hip dysplasia. But if you’re defining pain and disability as the problem that you’re trying to solve, then that in turn will just be a subset of the dogs that actually show some signs on their OFA view that they have arthritis. Because most owners who have dogs that show some signs of arthritis on x-ray rate their dog’s mobility as normal. So, hope that’s clear. But there’s, you know…
JH: Let me pick that apart.
MP: Okay.
JH: Let me just pick that apart a little bit from… because that was fabulous. I want to just pull out a couple of take-home messages from it. So there’s a couple of different tests, they tell us slightly different things, they both can be useful. And I think we should talk about how to use them as we move forward. But for now, there’s these two tests, neither of them tell you whether your dog is in pain, or definitely whether your dog will be in pain, or even, which is very important for a lot of the listeners of this podcast, whether your dog will create puppies who will be in pain, but they do give you some idea of the risks. The tests are one, they give you some idea of what’s going on inside the dog’s body. But that is not the whole picture. And we’ll talk about the other parts of the picture, too. So basically, the tests are useful to do and we’ll talk a lot more about that. But they do not give you the 100% of the picture, they only tell you something about risk. Does that sound like a good overview of what you were saying, Mary?
18:30
MP: Yeah, that sounds very accurate. The other thing to keep in mind about hip dysplasia that I think becomes relevant when we’re talking about what to do with the results that you get from OFA or PennHIP, is to keep in mind that it is a complicated disorder and there are multiple factors that contribute to the development of pain and disability and arthritis in the hips. There’s also, it appears, two sort of general groups of dogs. There are dogs who develop hip dysplasia early in life and they tend to have looser hips, they have more severe degenerative changes on their x-ray. They have sort of an early acute form of hip dysplasia. And that’s really what people started out, I believe, you know, several generations back looking at and defining as hip dysplasia. There is a second group of dogs though that sometimes… Sometimes the distinction between these two presentations of hip dysplasia gets a little muddied and I think that creates confusion. But there’s a second group where hip dysplasia, it’s not an acute severe process that shows up in a one year old dog, it’s a chronic degenerative process that maybe doesn’t show any signs until much later in life or maybe not at all, clinically. You might check an x-ray of this dog at age nine and notice that there are some mild arthritic changes and that dog gets labeled as having canine hip dysplasia. But that’s likely a very different dog and a somewhat different path for getting there than that dog that presented at age one with, you know, horribly arthritic joints and obvious disability. So there’s sort of two different groups and sometimes understanding that difference helps people think about how to interpret their dog scores and what they mean in terms of likely outcome for this dog and for puppies.
JH: Yeah, I think that’s a great way to differentiate. So the dog who’s going to actually be painful at one or two years of age, that’s a really big tragedy. Especially for a high energy dog, right? It can be hard to manage them. And that’s the thing that we really, really want to avoid. But it’s also important to… I mean, dogs will, you know, many dogs will become arthritic as they age. It’s also important to think about putting that off as long as possible, maybe even having, you know, ideally, have a dog live a long, healthy life and really not become arthritic. But it’s really a different picture than the two year old who is really having trouble enjoying his life.
MP: Yeah, exactly. And I want to be clear, this isn’t to dismiss, you know, arthritis in an older dog as inevitable and “Well, that’s just the way it is.”. The reason I think it’s important to understand the two separate groups is that as breeders, I think we have a whole lot more opportunity to influence outcomes in the first group and the dogs that have an acute severe problem. I think that absolutely should be a priority among breeders when they’re selecting breeding stock, is thinking about avoiding that outcome. To try to, if you wanted to set criteria for selection that would remove the possibility of a dog ever having any arthritic changes over the course of their life, and you were going to use x-ray tests to set those selection criteria, you are probably setting an unrealistic goal. And I mean, we can talk some more about why I think it’s unrealistic, but I just, that’s the difference. It’s not that I don’t want dogs to live long, healthy lives and be able to run until they’re 15. I do. But I just think as a breeder, you need to understand, especially given the variety of environmental factors that influence the development of arthritis, that you have control over those early acute presentations, much more than you have control over what happens later in life. And that trying to control the later in life things through your selection is likely to result in such a tight filter on how you select potential breeding stock, that you’re going to probably end up in trouble for other reasons. You know, they may have beautiful hips, but you know, all the other things that you have to be taking into consideration when you’re trying to breed dogs is probably going to get skewed if you have such a tight focus.
JH: Such a balancing act.
MP: Yeah.
JH: Yeah, it’s such a balancing act.
MP: Yeah. And I’m also, I think, as we’re probably going to get to, I am absolutely of the opinion that there is a whole lot we can do to influence the development of osteoarthritis in the hips beyond just how we select our breeding stock. That there is a whole lot of how that dog lives its life that we have control over, or the owners have control over, that can absolutely give the dogs the best chance for, you know, never having any kind of clinically significant problem.
JH: And that’s good news.
MP: Yeah, I think so.
24:42
JH: Okay, so well, before we start talking about all the other stuff that people can do and all the environmental management, let’s talk a little bit more about those two tests. So we’ve talked about OFA and PennHIP. So why would you do one or the other one, what do most people use? What do you recommend? What do you use? Sort of, what’s the landscape of that?
MP: Right. So, I guess I would just start out by saying, ideally, and this probably goes to my background as a health researcher, but ideally, I like data. So if I can, I will get both PennHIP and OFA ratings on my breeding dogs, because it’s just the more you know what you’re working with, I think the better positioned you are to make good decisions. That being said, the reality that I have faced, you know, just using my own breeding program as an example, I have had the same breeding line now for five generations. But I don’t own my own stud dogs for my females, I look to stud dogs owned by other people. And frequently, given the sorts of things that I’m looking for in addition to hips being sound, frequently I’ll find that those dogs don’t have hip ratings when I first approached them, their owner doesn’t live somewhere where there’s a PennHIP certified vet easily available, the dog isn’t a career stud dog, and they’re not likely to be able, they’re not necessarily in a position to be able to afford the PennHIP evaluation because it is much more expensive. On the other hand, they’re frequently willing to take their dogs in and have just a simple hip x-ray, which can be sent to OFA. So often in the real world I will end up getting an OFA rating and not having the luxury of being able to also get the PennHIP scores. And that’s okay. The thing to keep in mind with OFA ratings is they are looking at the actual presence of arthritis in the hip. And more than laxity, which is a risk factor, arthritis is a concrete pathology in the hip. And OFA will tell you if that is present. In addition, since arthritis is something that develops over time, the older the dog is when you get that OFA rating, the more valuable that rating is to you as a breeder. So if I’m looking for a stud dog, and I’m prioritizing hips, and I’m finding that I don’t have PennHIP numbers readily available in a number of dogs, but I have a stud dog that is 10 years old and they send in the x-rays to OFA and that dog has OFA Good hips, that’s gold as information because that tells me that the outcome I’m interested in, the disease, is not present in this dog. So regardless of what their hip laxity is, as much as I like to know it, I know that dog has the whole package of traits that go together to make for a sound hip over the life of the dog, and that’s great. So, OFA ratings –
JH: And just to be clear here, you’re talking here about a dog who had x-rays, radiographs, done around age 10. So you’re not talking about a 10 year old dog who had OFA testing at 2, you’re talking about actually doing OFA testing when the dog is 10.
MP: Right, right. And I think you know on a common sense level, we all understand that if you had x-rays done when you were 15 years old, and then you had them done again when you were 70, you would see some changes, likely, in the picture of how healthy that skeleton is and it’s the same thing with a dog. If you get x-rays at age two, that is a very valuable screening test for that early severe debilitating hip dysplasia that we talked about. However, you know, it’s going to be less helpful in telling you how the dog is going to hold up over time. And that’s the other piece of the puzzle. And so, that being the case, yes, if you get x-rays on a dog when they’re older, those x-rays as far as hip changes are going to be more valuable to you than the information that you might have gotten when the dog was younger. Because the younger dogs, you’re looking at potential for developing a problem. If you actually see a problem, then that’s absolutely something you want to take into account but, you know, otherwise you’re looking at the potential versus the actual performance when you look at the same dog 10 years later.
JH: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I think something that is valuable to think about is the value of having an older stud where you can actually see how he’s matured, right? You need a younger dam, often, so that she can handle going through parturition and raising the puppies. But those older studs can be valuable for exactly that reason.
MP: Yeah, I mean, and of course, this isn’t restricted to just hip dysplasia. I mean, for a whole range of health outcomes, the longer the dog has lived, the longer you can wait, before making your decision about breeding, the more you will know about a whole range of health outcomes and hip dysplasia, that’s absolutely the case. With females, you don’t have quite that same luxury, since depending on your breed you’re probably going to want to be using them for breeding somewhere in the range between ages three and six. And so you can’t wait as long. You can still go take a look at those hips later in life and then factor in that with your next generation. So I might get an OFA evaluation on… I have done this with several of my dogs – get an OFA evaluation and the PennHIP done when they’re young, and then go back and check an OFA when they’re old dogs and see how things have held up. And I don’t have that to use when I made the breeding choices for that dog when they were younger, but now I’m looking at breeding their granddaughter, and I can take into consideration that information from those older dogs a generation down the road.
32:00
JH: Yeah, I didn’t realize breeders did that, but that’s very cool. Okay, so then PennHIP… I think OFA in some ways is a lot easier for people to understand, because they have these clear words, you know, “Good”, “Excellent”. PennHIP has these numbers. So what do the numbers mean?
MP: Right. So I mentioned earlier that, you know, in theory the score is going to range from 0 to 1. And what the PennHIP research indicates is, you know, big picture, the lower the number is, the closer it is to 0, the tighter the hips. The tighter the hips, the lower the risk that the dog will have hip dysplasia. PennHIP also identified what are threshold values, basically, where they designate the dog’s risk level as being, you know, either very low, moderate, or high. So while they don’t have the “Excellent”, “Good”, “Fair”, they do have low risk, moderate risk, high risk levels. And that low risk range would be dogs whose hips score between 0 and 0.3, then the moderate risk range, they identify as being 0.3 up to 0.7. And then the high risk range is 0.7 and above. So 0.7, up to 1.0 or more. So those are the risk ranges with PennHIP. The thing that I think breeders are always tempted to do is to look at that and go, “Well, we all want low risk, we don’t want to have to deal with problems and you want to minimize risk wherever you can. So great, now I’ve gotten a number of 0.3 or less, I’m going to grab onto that and go out and look for dogs that would be good breeding candidates whose hips test in that range.” The problem with that is that, while that may be that those dogs are very low risk for developing hip dysplasia, that doesn’t mean… that’s not the same thing as saying that those are the normal dogs and all the other dogs are abnormal or problematic in some way. In fact, if you look at hip laxity and you score thousands of dogs, as PennHIP has done over the last couple of decades, what you find out if you look at it, the distribution of hip scores in a group of dogs, the distribution looks pretty much like a bell curve where there’s, you know, a tail at the low end, and then a big group in the middle and then a tail at the high end. And if you look to see where is that big group of dogs, what’s literally normal in dogs, it is that range between 0.3 and 0.7 basically, is where most dogs fall in their hips scores. Specifically PennHIP will issue, will publish their statistics periodically looking at, you know, for different breeds the distribution of hip scores, and give you percentiles. So you can look to see, you know, like, what’s the middle? What’s the 50th percentile? If you take all the dogs that PennHIP has ever tested, all breeds, put them into one big group, and you look to see, what is that middle range? What is the median, the 50th percentile? It turns out to be 0.46 for all dogs. If you look at mixed breed dogs, it turns out to be 0.48. This is getting a little fringe, but if you look at wolf hybrids, it’s 0.48. And then if you look down the list of breeds that PennHIP has tested, what you see is just that most breeds, most of the dogs, fall in that middle zone, and that that is literally what’s normal for dogs. So when breeders, if they choose to look at PennHIP scores as one of their criteria in breeding, just a little caution is that yes, tighter is lower risk and lower risk is good. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that that’s what’s normal for dogs. Because what’s normal is actually that middle zone. The high end is high risk, the other tail is very low risk, but that middle zone is where you’re going to find most dogs fall. So that’s where you’re likely to find yourself having to make decisions.
JH: And remembering as well that, again, these tests are about risk. They’re not 100% telling you anything. And as the dog goes through their life, and again, we’ll talk about environmental influences. But those are all going to play in, too.
MP: Right, right. Exactly. There are a few other things I guess I would say about PennHIP specifically, and this probably sounds like I’m throwing shade on PennHIP, and that is not the case. I think PennHIP started testing dogs in the mid-1990s, and I had my first dog PennHIP-ed in 1996, and I’ve had every dog that I’ve owned PennHIP-ed since then. So obviously, I think this is valuable information and I always want to have it if I can. That said, what I see happen a lot is, as mentioned, I think sometimes breeders will put a little bit too much emphasis on the exact PennHIP score, instead of thinking in a little more general terms about what this means for the general level of risk that the dogs face, and then looking, you know, at the whole dog, and the other factors that are at play that could influence their risk for hip dysplasia in that particular dog. So, for instance… All right, I’m gonna probably get into the weeds a little bit, so I’ll pause there.
[laughter]39:23
JH: Well actually, before we get into the weeds, I would love you to say again, what was it you said when we were chatting before? It ended with the test results, like take them but hold them gently. How did you say it?
MP: Yeah, I mean, I take the numbers very seriously but I hold them gently because they’re not perfect. And they certainly do not give you all you need to know either about hip dysplasia, certainly not about whether this dog is a good candidate for breeding. So you have to be a little bit humble, and aware of that when you’re looking at the numbers and not get too black and white about those numbers themselves. And just, so anecdotally, maybe… I don’t know if this is helpful, but… would you, I mean, is it helpful? To mention dogs-
JH: Yes, keep going!
MP: Okay, dogs that I know. And this is kind of when, Jessica, when you and I first started talking about hips, it was as an illustration of gray areas in breeding. And gray just because you know, the decisions that you have to make, they’re not black and white, they’re not completely clear cut. There is a degree of uncertainty around the choices, the data that you have to make the choice with are never perfect. The things that you can control are fairly minimal. So there’s just a lot of gray. But you know, as an example of hips as a gray area, when I started out, this was back in the 90s, with a dog, the first English shepherd that I considered breeding. I knew that there was some hip dysplasia in dogs in the breed. But we had really very little evidence to show us how common it was, just knew enough anecdotally to know that there was hip dysplasia in the breed so that checking hips would be a good idea. So I had my dog and I took her in, and I heard about PennHIP and I decided to get PennHIP scores. And at the time, and to this day really, PennHIP offered the advice to breeders that if you wanted to be breeding for better hips within your breed that the thing to do would be to look at what the median, the 50th percentile, is for your breed. And then try to choose dogs for breeding stock who were on the tighter half of that 50th percentile. So that was their advice at the time. And I took that and went in and got my dog PennHIP-ed and I got her scores, and her scores were 0.42, 0.48. So knowing what I know now-
JH: Just to make it clear to people, you get two scores because it’s one for each hip.
MP: Right, sorry, I should have mentioned that. Yeah, each hip gets its own score. So those were the scores of her hips. And because my breed is English shepherds, and we at the time had hardly had any dogs OFA-ed much less PennHIP-ed, so there was no breed median. They didn’t have enough dogs tested yet for me to be able to compare her to other dogs in my breed. But I figured that comparing her to the breed medians for two related breeds would be a reasonable thing to do. So I looked up the breed medians for border collies and Australian shepherds. And lo and behold the median, I don’t recall the time which was which, but the median for one was 0.42 and the median for the other was 0.48. So she was spot on the median. Which, you know, if you step back and think about it, yeah, you know, if I think about it now, in terms of what I know about what’s normal in dogs, so yeah, she is exactly where you would probably just randomly picked a dog and checked them, she was right where you would expect them to be. But in any event, having this news didn’t really tell me whether she would be a good dog, you know, for improving the hips in the breed. So I got that PennHIP when she was about a year old, because one of the advantages of PennHIP as opposed to OFA, you can get ratings on dogs when they’re younger, you don’t have to wait until the dog is two years old. PennHIP will say you can get the scores anytime from four months on. I think the longer you can wait to get closer to a year of age, probably, there is some marginal improvement in the accuracy of the score. But in any event, you can get a PennHIP score on a one year old dog and it will be very helpful for you. So I got those PennHIP scores on my one year old and it just told me that she was like right on the 50th percentile. So I thought I would wait. And then when she was three years old, I would check an OFA rating. The reason being, at the time, I had been told that if you wait until the dog is three, that at that point, the odds of a dog is normal at age three, the odds of them developing hip dysplasia were extremely low later in life. So I checked her at age three, and her hips were Fair. Which is normal, but it’s not what you really, you know, if you’re a breeder and you’re taking your dog you’d really like to see 0.3 and excellent hips, and I got the median and fair. So it was good to know her hips were normal. But it didn’t really tell me, I mean, it wasn’t like a ringing “Yes, this dog is zero risk”. So I went ahead and I bred her and I bred her to older stud dogs and I bred her to stud dogs that had hips that were better than hers. And that worked out well for me. So that was one dog. A couple generations later, I had-
JH: Tell us what you mean? Tell us what you mean by it working out well for you.
MP: So she had three litters over the course of her life. Of those, I didn’t, all of the puppies were not hip x-rayed, but I was in touch with the vast majority of the puppy owners for the life of their dogs. And none of the dogs ever developed any limitations or any problems related to their hips. All of the ones who were x-rayed, and it was about two or three pups in each litter, I think one there were four, they all had normal hips. They were OFA Good or better. And the ones that were PennHIP-ed had PennHIP scores that were equivalent to their mother or better. So.
47:07
JH: Yeah, so I want to take a second to talk about that. And so that’s, again, that’s anecdotal data. So this is, you know, one litter. Well, it’s multiple litters, but one dog. And it could have gone another way, potentially. But I also, I think that if today you had gone out on Facebook and said, I’m gonna breed this dog who has, you know, what was it? 0.42, 0.48 and Fair. I’m gonna breed her, I think you would have gotten some anger from people saying “That’s not appropriate.”
MP: Yeah.
JH: “She’s going to produce puppies that are going to be painful.”, and I think it’s really worthwhile to look into what you’re saying, is that, first of all… again, we’ll talk about the other risk factors, but it’s not 100% predictive of pain.
MP: Right. Right. And I would say that I followed my own advice, as far, in terms of dogs that she was bred to. One, the first dog she was bred to, had PennHIP scores that were 0.3 or less, and I just lucked out on that one, you know. Because it’s, just in terms of hip scores, it’s not likely, I mean, it’s a minority of stud dogs that you’re going to run across that have those good scores. In most breeds, I would say it’s a minority. But that was one, that was the first dog. The other two just, you know and I put “just” in quotes, had OFA ratings, they did not have PennHIP scores. They were both OFA Good. But they were both OFA Good at advanced ages. I mean, I, I want to say, eight plus years of age, one of them may have been older than that. In any event, they were older dogs who had good hips. But you know, I think one of the things, you know, you’re absolutely right in terms of decisions, whether or not I should breed that dog, if all we looked at were hips, it’s like, oh, I don’t know. She’s certainly not exceptional. She’s fair and maybe median. However, you know, now I have the advantage of being able to look back, you know, in hindsight, and there was some other information too, there was some other information at the time that is relevant. In hindsight, what I can say about that dog is that she lived to be basically 16 years old, she never had any physical limitations whatsoever. She in fact, never had any health problems whatsoever. The only vet expenses I ever had for her were for her routine checkups and shots, and she broke a tooth once when she was playing golf, and that’s a whole nother story. She shouldn’t have been playing golf with my son.
JH: Nooo!
[laughter]MP: Other than that this was a dog that lived 16 healthy years with no limitations. And yeah, her hip x-rays were okay, they were fine. There was everything else about the dog, however, big picture. Turned out that I’m, you know, I’m very grateful that that’s the dog that I started with for breeding. The other information that I also had at the time which was relevant was, yes, so if I’m comparing this dog to all dogs, her hips are okay. Within my breed, however, the issues that we were looking at breed-wide, and this is, I think, really important, it was a breed where the population had dropped, the population numbers had dropped quite a lot. In fact, I’ve just recently been going through a bunch of statistics and such. At the time that I got this dog, the breed club listed exactly two breeders in the entire western half of the country. You know, everything from Texas west, there were two, they both each had like a pair of dogs, and occasionally had a litter. So there were very, very few dogs, there were few breeders. And we were the breed club at the time, we were coming to the recognition that we were dealing with a pretty severe bottleneck, just the small population numbers. And coming out of the bottleneck that population information is going to shape your selection criteria for future generations while the priority is on building up the numbers of dogs in the breed that you have, rather than being really stringent in your selection within the breed. When I say that, that’s not to say that you just throw everything, all your criteria, out the window, and you use the fact that there’s not very many dogs in your breed where hips are a problem to breed dogs that are having an obvious problem. That’s not the case. You know, I don’t think you ever want to breed a dog who’s got any kind of signs that they have pain or disability, and you want to be very careful with dogs, even where there’s x-ray changes. But if you have a dog that some people might look at, and go, “Eh, you know, nothing special when it comes to hips.”, that doesn’t need to be an automatic disqualifier for breeding. And that you gotta look at other things, you’re going to be looking at the whole dog and their health and their temperament. And you’re going to be looking at the breeding population that you’re working with, and does this dog have something positive to contribute? It might not be that they have the very best hips of all the dogs around. However, they may have other things that are going to be really valuable to the group. And you don’t want to lose sight of that, because you’ve gotten so focused on this one thing.
JH: Yeah, I think that’s a really important part of breeding, is to remember the dog is not the test, the dog is not just the hips. Both when you’re making your own decisions, and when you’re talking to someone else, perhaps on social media, about their decisions. But to remember, that sometimes you have a dog who’s exceptional in many other ways, or as you say, sometimes you just have not a lot of diversity. And as everybody knows, I am a big proponent of outcrossing in that case. But another part of that is not excluding from the breeding pool dogs who are, you know, managing pretty well. And not, you know, we’re not talking about breeding unhealthy dogs, as you said, but we are talking about not having really, really strict criteria of they have to have the best possible hips. That’s not the appropriate time to worry about that.
MP: Right. Right. I mean, like I say, as you just said, it’s not a matter of brushing over actual problems. But I think you need to be really clear on how you’re defining what is the problem that you’re trying to address. And, you know, you’re making decisions for this one dog, but it’s also not just this one dog. I mean, at least for myself, it’s always been a matter of looking at the breed as well and what will make a positive contribution to the breed as a whole. And it’s never just one factor that’s going to tip you one way or another when you’re evaluating a dog. It’s not well, yeah.
JH: Yeah, breeding is a lot of balancing, a lot of balancing.
JH: So I decided to cut here for part one. The rest of this juicy and detailed conversation will be coming at you in the next episode of Functional Breeding.
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JH: Thanks so much for listening. The Functional Breeding Podcast is a product of the Functional Dog Collaborative and was produced by Attila Martin. Come join us at the Functional Breeding Facebook group to talk about this episode, or about responsible breeding practices in general. To learn more about the FDC, check out the functionalbreeding.org website. Enjoy your dogs!
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