HD x-rays - opinions wanted - Page 8

scanner broke had to use camera  

hips at 1 year old

I've been out of town and am just catching up with the hip discussions. No conclusion to this one yet - maybe D.H. has been busy?

I bred 2 puppies from one litter with hips that were worse than any shown here. The balls were nowhere near the sockets. The owners opted to put them both down at 6 months and I didn't give them an arguement.  This litter was sired by an OFA good out of an OFA good dam, three generations of OFA dogs in the pedigree. However, I later found out that the paternal g-sire had a number of severely dysplastic litters mates as did his sire.  The sire of this litter had at least one dysplastic brother. When I bred this bitch to another male, this time her half brother - gasp, yes inbreeding is accepted in other breeds  - there were 11 puppies. I kept and xrayed 8 of them at 6 months, no obvious HD. The bitch I retained got an OFA excellent; none of the others were xrayed for OFA, they were sold as pets to be neutered. She produced only one litter of 7 , 6  with OFA numbers, the 7th was cleared by a vet but never submitted  to OFA. This experience made me a big believer in in-depth pedigree study and paying very close attention to the hip status of siblings and what they produced.

I owned a male with hips as bad as the worst ones pictured in this thread. He was lame at 7, 8 months, jumping 6  foot fences a year later and lived along healthy life. The degree of HD on an xray doesn't always coorelate to the symptoms of the dog.  I would never sentence a dog to death based  only  on xrays or junvenile-expressed lameness. Most dogs will outgrow this stage if managed correctly and they may never take another lame step the rest of their lives.

Blitzen glad you brought this up again. I have been watching and waiting to find out "the end of the story" as Paul Harvey would say! LOL!

Hmm, yes. I almost forgot about this thread. Iwonder where D.H. is?