OFA Opinions - Page 6

Nadeem, have you thought about sending the xrays to the SV for their opinion of the elbows?

Blitzen i was thinking of just re-doing them in a couple months at a diffferent place, but i will keep that as an option.  Do they require the actual film, cause i think these were digital but not positive?

They want film, but you can do that at a place in TX- send them the disc and they convert it to film. There is probably someone else doing it by now, but that was the option several years ago when I looked into it.

Breeding is and has always been about "big pictures," hence the questions I asked Mirasmom. I want to know if her experience was like the experience in the article about the RRs.
People trying to do "good" breedings will take anything any official body says as gospel, and there are potential pitfalls in that. If only breeding dogs were as simple as pairing two physically and temperamentally perfect specimens together and getting the same. My old OFA vet told me of his exasperation in people choosing to breed to neurotic, OFA excellent Labradors because the really good dog had good hips and grade 1 elbows, so he was "no good for breeding." He joked about how backwards that thinking was, as the OFA excellent dog, in his opinion, should never be bred due to temperament, but hey, his xrays are pretty!  The super solid, well-bred other stud in consideration was a way better dog in every way but radiographs. It boggled his mind that people continually chose radiographic perfection over a sound working dog with phenomenal temperament and perfectly "fine" xrays.

I just think if we weren't going about this whole OFA thing backwards, we'd have solved dysplasia by now. There has to be more to it than breeding perfect to perfect.

I think we can find something to question in just about everything regarding dogs. Genetics is never 100%.  As I said here before, I had 2 littermates fail their hip xrays rated by OFA as mild. Did them a again a month later, both got goods. I understand that OFA makes mistakes as well as the next guy, but I think they are correct most of the time. I still certified my dogs with OFA, maybe 25 over the  years and the rest of the ratings were pretty much what my vet and I expected.  The link I posted above goes to another article about that very thing.

Nadeem if you feel that the OFA misdiagnosed  your dog you should have them take another look or better yet IMO, use another registry or a radiologist at a vet school. That way you can get 2 opinions from 2 different sources.  Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

 

Has the SV solved the HD problem yet?

Blitzen, SV is largely the same. How would SV have "solved" it? I didn't realize I needed to specify that I meant any and all certifying bodies.  In case I'm the only one who's noticed (and I know I'm not!), we're still breeding GSDs with bad joints out of GSDs with good joints. Perhaps genetics isn't the whole picture. Perhaps all this narrowing of the gene pool we've done hasn't helped us.

I don't see it as a  question of "misdiagnosis" so much as a question of how meaningful is the diagnosis and in what way? Just food for thought.

That's too bad Nadeem6, my female had both elbows affected.


My female with Grade one elbows  has been spayed and lives with her son in a pet/companion home.

I usually breed my dogs to hold back a pup for myself, I look at how a dog is line bred, and when
things like ED or HD turn up I look at the relatives and try to figure out who could have contributed 
to the problem.
    All my pups are sold to pet/companion homes as I believe pups are a crap shoot.
I certify my dogs hips at two years, why prelim with ofa when they don't actually certify till 2 years old.
Like Blitzen said, if they are good at two then they should also be good at ten...
   Looking at the OFA web-site helps but most people never have their dogs x-rayed unless there is a problem.
I sell all my dogs with limited reg. if the people x-ray and certify hips & elbows and temperament test the dog then I reverse
the limited to full, that may sound like too much control to some, but like I tell them, my name is on the reg. and I can make good if a
problem should arise if I have bred the wrong combination of dogs together, but I can't be responsible to police other
people that want to breed their dogs, that's why I would never co-own with anyone.
  The GSD has tons of health problems and hips & elbows are only the tip of the ice berg, never breed two dogs with the same faults together.
I am finding that different bloodlines have different health problems, so many bloodlines out there, so much to research......