SV and hip rating's - Page 2

orkies, any chance you know where I can find that research? It might be that simple,that it doesn't change much

I believe that the success of the SV scheme is in its wide compliance. Because premissible grades are somewhat lenient and testing is done early it is a scheme with which breeders can reasonably comply.

I personally would not trust 100% any hip x-ray at the age of twelve (12) months regardless of the scoring agency or the score. At twelve (12) months of age there is still growth of the skeletal and connective tissues that will not be complete for up to twenty-four (24) more months. Now, if a dogs x-rays looked very good, and he received an "a" Normal then I would tend to trust that he would pass later as O.F.A. Good, maybe better. If the hips were "a" fast Normal, then I know that he might pass as O.F.A. Good, or perhaps just O.F.A. Fair. If the hips were "a" noch Zugelassen, then I know that he might pass as O.F.A. Fair, or possibly fail as Borderline. That said, some dogs have received "a" noch Zugelassen and were later determined to be O.F.A. Good. Why exactly, I cannot say for every instance this occurred. I keep a chart that compares the hip grades, registry to registry, and it is one that I formulated after much investigative reading. Even it is not 100% accurate, and it is merely a quick comparison tool that I use to explain the variance in hip ratings. I will post this link again: http://www.offa.org/enewssept2006.pdf This is the O.F.A.'s statement for the value of preliminary x-rays. Bob-O

Bob-O, as usual, you gave a really good reply. I think someone needs to vote you onto some of these big boards.lol In all seriousness, you are very much up to date on an awful lot of the questions/comments on this database and not very many times if any do I disagree with you. Don't get a swelled head now.

jdh is absolutely right. Widespread and voluntary compliance through reasonable goal-setting is far more beneficial to the breed than a hyperzealous pursuit of perfection. Setting standards TOO high may actually encourage cheating, a very destructive force against breed improvement. I OFA'd very near to 100 dogs when I was breeding, most of them over about a 25 year period, and most of those in the last 15 years. This is actually why I did like the DDR (East German) dogs, very much! They had a radically different (better) percentage of HD-free dogs, in my opinion. Nevertheless, a lot of them were OFA'd "fair". I could get into a dissertation on this, as to the reasons why. I started to ignore OFA to an extent, because of this. Over all those years, I saw a LOT of hip and elbow radiographs, both good and bad, and in both extremes. I still have a lot of my original x-ray films, and I may post them on the web eventually, so that people can see the difference. I have not seen a really bad hip x-ray (like the ones we had in the early days) for a very long time. BUT.. I was not looking at other peoples' radiographs.. only my own. I have not bred a litter in over seven years, now. But towards the end, I was getting kind of peeved at OFA. They were waxing towards "anal retentive", in my opinion. Too exacting, looking for and promoting textbook perfect hips. They can be found, but unfortuneately you cannot rely on such a dog to produce his own virtue. I would take an old-line DDR OFA Fair over a SV high-line OFA good or excellent, any day, for producing HD-free offspring. Some people may find this interesting, but I owned an import who had been rated "noch zugelassen" (still permissable, or borderline) in Germany, but this dog rated OFA "excellent" at about seven years of age, when I re-x-rayed him. And, on the converse, I owned "normal" dogs / bitches which rated disappointingly with OFA. One was severely dysplastic, and frankly, I think that there was fraud involved. He was a fairly famous dog, actually. Also it is worth mentioning that I actually developed a method of my own of detecting early onset (developmental) HD, without anaesthesia, palpation, or x-ray, which was very, very reliable. This would save a LOT of money and hassle for the small breeder or kennel, and also time resources. But, I do not tell anyone how to do it, because probably no one listens, anyway, and I cannot help but notice that sharp knife sticking out of my back after helping many people. Maybe I will put this technique on my website too, someday.

DDR-DSH, I like your commentary. The O.F.A. sets such a high standard for "Excellent" hip that fewer than 3% of O.F.A.-examined GSD's ever achieve this rating. And this rating has no predictability as far a progeny since there is no ZW scheme. Most O.F.A.-passing GSD's are divided between "Good" and "Fair". And there is nothing wrong with a "Fair" if the siblings are not worse than "Fair" with a few "Good" present, and very few dysplastic siblings. "Fair" is still a healthy hip, although it may require one to exercise a bit more caution during a puppy's first year of life than would a "Good" or much rarer "Excellent" hip. Bob-O

Thanks, Bob-O This is how the East Germans did it, in a nutshell. The dogs did not get papers until they were evaluated at around one year. They were then scored on several points, and one of them was hips. These statistics were recorded and indexed to the sire and dam. So, it was possible to know exactly which dogs were producing which faults, and percentages of normal hips, etc. All of this data was made into reports, which were published. So, the breeders had a real tool to guide their decisions by. Always, the goal was to minimize percentages of the common faults. These were six in number: (1) HD, (2) missing testes, (3) soft or faulty ear carriage, (4) longcoats, (5) temperament problems, (6) dentition problems. Of course, breeders were more interested in popular show winners, but the data built up even faster on these dogs, so that by the time a popular stud dog was four or five years old, there were usually ample offspring to judge his production by. In this manner, good guidelines were provided to breeders to improve their stock, and more rapid and consistent breed improvement could be seen, across the entire population. Yes, I have heard people say that these statistics were unreliable, but I found them to be very accurate! On average, I got an easy 85% normal hips in my pups, something I was never even able to come close to with the West German show and working lines. Considering the great investment of time and money in a young dog, and the heartbreak of discovering HD in an otherwise terrific dog, you can imagine how significant it really is to a serious breeder to make such a discovery.. a population of dogs that is largely free of crippling HD! It was an epiphany for me!

DDR-DSH, How do you feel about the Pennhip method?