Hips - Through the Orthopaedic Foundation for Animals, there are different ratings for canine hips: Excellent, Good, and Fair are all “normal” ratings. The next is a Borderline hip rating, followed by three degrees of dysplasia: Mild, Moderate, and Severe.
We x-ray the hip and elbow joints of all our breeding dogs to check for abnormalities, whether by injury or genetics. However, that does not mean we only breed the perfect dogs together. As the diseases of hip dysplasia and elbow dysplasia are influenced by a number of genes and environmental factors, it is not an exact science. It is always best to breed "perfect" quality dogs together, who have excellent hip joints, normal elbows, flawless eyes, and no health issues of any other type. But in the real world, keeping to the excellent categories would serve only to irreversibly diminish the Labrador gene pool. Furthermore, the quality of joints of the siblings, parents, aunts, and uncles of the dog in question can be as important as those of the dog itself.
The OFFA has published statistics on their database of about 500,000 dogs from all breeds. The data showed that breeding two dogs with "Good" hips together would produce 10% dysplastic offspring. Breeding two dogs with "Fair" hips produces 20% dysplastic offspring, while breeding a dog with "Excellent" hips to a dog with "Fair" hips produces 10% dysplastic pups as well. However, very few of these dogs will ever limp, or show any clinical signs of dysplasia until their senior years, if at all. Regardless, by the time any canine reaches the age 8-10 years, signs of aging joints can begin to appear.
Elbows - In comparison, while hips are rated "Excellent," "Good," "Fair," "Borderline," or different grades of dysplastic, elbows are rated only as "Normal" (Perfect), and then different grades of dysplastic. So although a few of our great quality dogs have had sub-clinical Grade 1 dysplasias (the lowest grade), no one actually shows any outward signs of dysplasia.
The sad truth is, that breeding two dogs with normal elbows can still produce 1/3 of puppies that would be considered dysplastic by X-Ray, according to an International Elbow Working Group study that was done on Rottweilers. There is no study specific to show-type Labradors or field-type Labradors to our knowledge.
Again, this is a matter of constant improvement. As a breeder, we must always know who we are breeding to whom so that the line is improved, and the pups are of equal or better quality than their parents. If we disqualified all of the dogs with the slightest elbow issue, we could lose 1/3 of the breeding population in the first generation alone, compounding a genepool problem that is historically present in purebred dogs. We believe this would be far more detrimental to the dogs than this heritable disease.
All of these statistics also reflect clinical and sub-clinical dysplasias. ‘Clinical’ defines a dog who is actually lame. ‘Subclinical’ is a diagnosis of dysplasia based on poor joint conformation from x-rays. While we are always concerned about subclinical dysplasia in breeding, we don't warranty unless there is a clinical problem, as there are many dogs with no symptoms who are happily enjoying life with their less-than-stellar joints.
Knees - The tearing of the CCL of dogs knees came as a surprise to us! Believe it or not, when we first began breeding, many breeders we were instructed by didn't even perform or encourage screening for elbow dysplasia! We did it anyway. Needless to say, no one said anything about knees...
Imagine our surprise when we first saw reports from families whose dog's KNEES were falling apart, not their hips or their elbows! We were flabbergasted, and immediately began doing research. Fortunately, we were put in touch with a veterinarian orthopaedic specialist. We were concerned that this may be a heritable condition, as hips and elbows are thought to be, and wanted to know if there were any screening tests that could be done for knees prior to breeding.
He shocked us, when in an email he told us,
I think your current program is sound. Stay the course."
Upon receiving this news (and of course doing even more research) We changed our warranty to INCLUDE bilateral CCL injuries in our dogs, but with the condition that our dogs are not spayed or neutered prior to maturity. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first Labrador Retriever breeder to include knee injuries into our warranty.
Tooting our own horn? Yes. We are very proud that we were able to figure out what was causing these terrible injuries, and even happier that since we changed our warranty and when our dogs were no longer spayed/neuter too young, our numbers for CCL injuries in young dogs dropped dramatically. Fewer dogs, and fewer families are hurting as a result.
