Health Certification Perspectives

The best breeders focus on the total dog, i.e. temperament, health, type - in that order.  I am pleased when someone quotes my statement that owners can live with and love an unsound dog or one that lacks breed type but one with a defective temperament is a joy to no one.  It means they’ve got the whole picture.  The best breeders are conscientious but not obsessive about any one thing.  They do health checks but they don’t breed paper.

Others emphasize a particular health certificate but ignore a more serious defect, breeding dogs that are seriously unsound or extremely untypical. The certificate becomes a mockery, a smoke screen for the genetic pollution that is spread through a breed by unsuspecting bitch owners or buyers who rush to acquire that “healthy” dog’s offspring.

The best breeders use health certifications as an important tool. They do not use them as a crutch or as a sales gimmick.  For example, OFA requires only one x-ray no matter how crippled a dog may later become.  Worse yet, the x-ray on which lifelong certification is based may not even be that dog.  Substitution is common.  So why hasn’t that problem been addressed amidst all the hullabaloo and lip service about health checks?

I hate questions with no answers don’t you?  Well, I have plausible answers and experienced fanciers agree although they often do so with the caveat “don’t mention my name.”  Before we look at the disturbing answer, we need to look at the history.  I’ve lobbied for microchip or tattoo prior to testing for well over a decade.  It is a minor procedure compared to an x-ray.  Why has veterinary mega-business rejected such a simple logical solution?  There is only one answer but let me help you get to it.

Positive I.D. would generate more income for the identification companies but then, who cares?  Not the Veterinary associations because for that, no veterinary license is required.  Not AKC.  I think they quietly went out of the microchip business.  It would facilitate recovery should the dog ever be lost or stolen.  But who cares?  Only the owner and the dog would profit from safe recovery.  So are you beginning to understand why certification procedures haven’t changed?

If the dog had to be identified it would dramatically reduce income to the certification associations and to the veterinarians who perform the tests.  How?  Because whatever percentage of “ringers” is being used, and in some breeds, it is astoundingly high, well, they couldn’t be used.  So the testing fees would be proportionately reduced.  Simple math.  Simple finance.  And if anyone still believes such organizations are not-for-profit, they are too naive to gain anything from this article.

Fatal flaws in certification procedures have been pointed out by other journalists, some of them are veterinarians.  I exposed the horror of palpation that caused the death of innocent healthy puppies by the thousands, and many honorable vets rejected the lucrative procedure.  They said in print that it was not at all accurate.  In fact, it was characterized by Dr. Jerry Schnelle (canine hip dysplasia pioneer) as “pinning the tail on the donkey.”  There were vets who joined me in condemning the once-popular pectiotomy, another procedure developed and promoted by Dr. Bardens, the same vet who also gave seminars on how to perform his fulcrum x-ray that everyone swore by for a few years until it was proven to be meaningless and often dangerous.

Dr. Corley is now retired from Directorship of OFA and I like to think that the festering thorn in his side named BJ hastened that retirement!  Like Ralph Nader, I have suffered recriminations but some progress has been made so I count it a worthwhile battle.  It took twenty years of badgering before OFA finally capitulated. My columns repeatedly asked why two hip sockets were so important when ten elbow, patella, and stifle joints were ignored?  OFA finally began certifying elbows and since has progressed into other health areas.  But they still require no form of unalterable identification!

So I ask again (and again) when will health registries require positive identification before performing the test?

And I ask again (and again) when will certification organizations openly admit that at best, most certifications are only temporary testaments that the dog is not currently affected?  When will re-certification be required for degenerative orthopedic conditions, heart, eyes, blood disease, and a host of other genetic problems?

Suppose a dog has sired a lot of puppies and the stud owner has several bitches booked to him, but he begins to show clinical signs of a condition for which he is certified.  How many owners will take that dog in for another examination?  I know of several owners who just give the dysplastic dog medication and admit to nothing.  The dogs are still bred from.  Even though CERF numbers are only good for a year, one has only to examine CERF records to discover that most people DO NOT repeat the eye exam yearly.  If the dog develops an eye disease, it can still be bred.  In my own breed (Mini-Bull Terriers) there is a seriously suspect dog, widely used, whose owners and handler cannot or will not produce the eye certification that they told bitch owners they had!

And when will we really know just how definitive a test is?  It would be reassuring if an objective, third-party organization “certified” that CERF exams, hip xrays, Doppler heart exams, etc are indeed accurate. I just had a bitch luxate in one eye.  She had been re-CERF’d less than five months previous.  Someone else spayed a top show bitch based on what turned out to be a false diagnosis during a CERF exam.  In Dog News, Katie Asling reported a series of fiascos and outright lies in a well-documented episode with OFA.  Breeders should be told that most such tests are dependent on the interpretive skills of the diagnostian.

When will we be given proof that testing has appreciably reduced the overall incidence of a given disease?  Dr. Corley (and others) claim all sorts of in-house statistics but other reliable research facilities and studies prove otherwise!  Until veterinary research can provide statistical data to back up rhetoric, and until we can be assured that a test is definitive and not interpretive, I am forced to regard most certifications as a professional but personal OPINION.  That opinion is duly noted and weighed as one factor in overall health, temperament, and quality when breeding decisions are made.

Breeders wait for DNA markers.  While DNA tests may not be predictive, at least they will be DEFINATIVE TESTS that owners can be reasonably sure provide accurate rather than interpretive results.

So with all our modern miracles and genetic research and expensive testing, one irrefutable fact remains.  A healthy heart in an obsessive-compulsive spinner is of little comfort.  Excellent hips on a dog with chronic debilitating gastritis is of no genetic value.  We must always look at the whole dog and the whole breed.  Make that two things.  We must be honest with ourselves and the certification organizations must be honest with us!

First Published ShowSight Magazine Jan. 2001
 

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