Try a little tenderness

It's time for the Olympics, and unfortunately there's a popular sport with no qualification required to participate or limit on who can. It's open season year round, and anybody can jump in anytime.

Sound like fun?

Well, it's Breeder Bashing.

I have no idea if cat breeders - or gerbils, or exotic reptiles, or potbellied pigs - are subject to the same near incessant barrage of hate speech, slander, public ridicule, advertising campaigns, and manipulation of public opinion as dog breeders. Part of me hopes not - way too much hate in the air - and part of me hopes so; you know, more the merrier and all that. 

We're people. We have feelings. We're human. 

We aren't perfect. We're not evil. We're not greedy. We're not thoughtless, hateful, scumsucking liars and shitbags. We don't sit around spending our time trying to figure out how to produce dogs with faults, or health problems, coming up with new and creative ways to fuck up. We really don't.

And anyone that suggests otherwise is lying.

I have a puppy buyer (doesn't own a computer, so she'll never see this) who calls roughly once a month. Usually it's all about how happy she is with her dogs, how beautiful they are, what great temperaments they have, how much their groomers love them, how good they are at the vet's office... and at some point, without fail, she'll say "You know, Fluffy is missing a tooth."

Yes, I know. You've told me once a month for the past year.

No, I don't say that out loud; I just bite my tongue. Yes, I know. So is her sister, my pick bitch. It's unfortunate, but it's not a DQ, and one premolar isn't going to affect her show career, hunting ability, or quality of life.

Here's the thing: There is no way on god's green earth I could deliberately produce a dog missing one tooth; I wouldn't know how to do it. Particularly not when I'm bending over backwards to do the exact opposite. 

Both parents had full dentition. The sire's dam is missing one tooth so we spent a LOT of time looking for a bitch strong for full mouths. The dam is from a litter of full mouths with both parents having full dentition. On the long, long, long list of things Mother Nature has a knack for being unpredictable with, dentition is a doozy. And don't get me started on bites (scissors, level, anterior and posterior crossbites, popped bites, undershot, parrot mouth...), recent data found roughly 30 separate genes control jaws/bites and dentition in dogs. It's something of a miracle perfect mouths are ever produced!

People want guarantees, even though we are dealing with living organisms. They want the impossible.

We do the best we can, we really do. We accept, grudgingly, that no matter how hard we try, we're still going to get screwed. Because that's how Mother Nature works.

Let's look at my breed, at borzoi, and what health testing is considered routine. 

There's degenerative myelopathy, and we have a great DNA test for that. What we don't have is a good understanding of penetrance - why some At Risk dogs never develop the disease and others do. (A recent break-through in corgis holds proffers answers --- but --- what is true in one breed doesn't always apply to other breeds.)

There's a great lab test for autoimmune thyroiditis, but all it can do is identify affected animals. And a dog that is Normal at 2 years may be affected at 5, or 7. So repeating the test, again and again, over an animal's lifetime is more accurate than a single test. And it's an expensive test - not the test itself, but shipping blood overnight. We assume all offspring of an affected dog are carriers, so we can identify carriers (and not breed a carrier to another carrier, thus not knowingly producing dogs that will be affected) - but we can only do this if the test results are in the public database.

Those two tests are pretty bullet-proof. They are lab tests with controlled references run on finely tuned and very expensive machines, with built-in redundancies to verify abnormal results before owners are contacted. DM is a "one and done" test because it's DNA based. Thyroid should be repeated every couple of years to detect later-onset. 

The remaining tests available to us are important, but generally not as black and white when it comes to execution.  

There's a great testing procedure for eyes, and such testing is pretty easy to get and widely available and generally very affordable -- other than it's an annual exam. Commonly known as a CERF exam (though technically it's an CAER exam), this is performed by a veterinary ophthalmologist (AVCO), it can identify congenital problems in puppies under 12 weeks of age (e.g., coloboma), separate acquired problems from genetic ones (e.g., FMAR), and track the progression of problems (macular degeneration, developmental corneal opacity, PPM - the list is long). It's another one of those tests that should be performed multiple times over the course of a dog's lifetime, because some heritable problems are detectable in young dogs (e.g., lens luxation) and others don't present until a dog is an adult or even a senior animal (e.g., catarats). As you can see (no pun actually intended), eyes are complex. Getting perfect eyes is hard, but vision is essential to both quality of life and function, so we try.

Then there's hearts. There are three different cardiac exams, and breeds have varying expectations about testing based on the type and frequency of problems known to exist. Auscultation (listening) can be done by a regular clinician, specialist, or a cardiologist. Depending on the quality of the stethoscope and the expertise of the vet, this is generally viewed as being of limited value; there are just too many variables. Holter exams are useful for finding chronic arrhythmias, but unreliable for intermittent ones and useless for an acute arrhythmia (which can kill a dog with no warning - ruefully referred to as Dead Dog Syndrome because the first symptom is, well, the dog is dead). Holter exams are standard in some breeds (Boxers and Dobermans, among others) and require shaving off the coat so the leads can be attached to the skin. Results can be interpreted by a specialist or a cardiologist, and the accuracy of that interpretation depends on the skill, experience, and training of the person reading the data. Echocardiograms are generally considered the gold standard for a heart exam, and can be performed by either a specialist or a cardiologist. Sometimes the hair has to be shaved off a large area of the chest to get really accurate views, and (like auscultations) the quality of the equipment and skill of the user are factors in the accuracy of the information gathered. A standard echo may only get three chambers of the heart; all four chambers and all four valves are desired, but sometimes the weight of the dog or the temperament or the equipment or the skill of the technician limit the views. Sometimes color dopper is used, and it may reveal additional information which has no known clinical significance. One of the most frustrating things about hearts is the range of findings can go from "perfect" to "OMG awful" -- but most of the time it's somewhere in the middle - normal but not perfect; not normal but acquired not congenital or heritable; not normal and genetic in some way; and on and on.

I have first hand knowledge of a bitch that was diagnosed (dx) with a heart murmur at age 6. Because it was found by auscultation, an echo was recommended. The echo found the heart murmur was acquired (age related) and not heritable. Had the owner not done the echo, they would have had incomplete information. I have first hand knowledge of a dog with a similar finding at age 4; echo found evidence of infection had damaged a valve in the heart. A finding on auscultation is incomplete at best, and misleading at worst.

Then there's osteosarcoma and GDV; neither of which has any test but time and plagues every line in some way. We do the best we can to identify problems, and breed away from them (either by not breeding affected animals, or breeding to lines that don't also have the same problem). 

Dogs aren't perfect. People aren't perfect. We don't have perfect tests for everything. We're doing the best we can, we really are.

Yes, your bitch is missing a tooth. I'm really sorry about that, I'm doing the best I can.

And the breeder bashers are on constant standby, ready to blame. The peanut gallery is always primed to say oh you shoulda, you coulda. And somebody who's never bred a litter, much less several, who's never agonized over what to do, or not do, or how to make something right, has never cried a million tears when it all goes to hell despite every effort to do everything right... Well the peanut gallery is just wrong. And mean. And hurtful. Anybody can stand on the sidelines and run their mouth in judgment or pretend they have 20/20 hindsight. They all need to fuck off because they do not know what they are talking about. 

So, why spend all this money and effort and heartache on testing? Why indeed.

Because we believe it's the right thing to do. Because not testing, or not sharing results, is a type of lie. Because doing everything we know how to do to prevent problems makes it easier to sleep at night. And when we, inevitably, get screwed by Mother Nature anyway, we have our friends with the same values and ethics to share the tears.

Yes, your bitch is missing a tooth. I'm really sorry about that, I'm doing the best I can.

People want guarantees, I get that. Uncertainty is hard. But we are dealing with living organisms. We all want the impossible, we all want perfection. The ethical among us won't talk in absolutes, but will tell the ugly, messy, and unhappy truth. And when honest breeders won't lie or give guarantees of the impossible, some people will go and buy a lie from someone else. 

So, let's be kind to one another, and supportive of best efforts, and be a shoulder to cry on for each other, and not be party to the whispering or finger pointing. Let's ask tough questions, and give honest answers, and be understanding of the inherently imperfect nature of Mother Nature. Let's try a little tenderness.