Health testing - Hip scoring

First things first, not much point in investing time and effort in to looking for a stud dog if your own is not suitable to breed from. The UK Kennel Club (KC) lists the health test requirements for a labrador as Hip scoring and Eye testing. Recommended testing is Elbow grading and DNA testing for PRA (Progressive Retinal Atrophy)

So hip scoring and eye tests an absolute minimum. No responsible stud dog owner would even let the mating take place until these had been done and had come back satisfactory.  I'll cover eyes, elbows and PRA in a later post but for now ..

Hip Scoring :

Hip dysplasia (HD) is a common inherited orthopedic problem of dogs (and a wide number of other mammals). Dysplasia means "abnormal growth" which can lead to excessive wear and tear of the hip, leading to osteoarthritis (OA), osteoarthrosis or degenerative joint disease (DJD). The current scheme of hip scoring was developed 40 years ago by the KC and the BVA (British Veterinary Association http://www.bva.co.uk/default.aspx) to assess the degree of hip deformity using x-rays. The x-rays are taken of your dogs hips, either under sedative or general anesthetic, and are then submitted to the BVA where they are "scored". The hip score is the sum of the points accrued for each of nine radiographic features in each hip joint. The lower the score the less the degree of HD present. The minimum (best) score for each hip is zero and the maximum (worst) is 53, giving a range for the total score of 0 to 106.

The labrador retriever "breed mean score" as of 1 Nov 2009 was 15, with a total of nearly 70,000 tested.  So, for breeding purposes you ideally want both dogs to have a lower hip score than 15, with the lowest the better !

You can get the x-rays taken at any vets, who will then submit them to the BVA on your behalf. Based on the recommendation from a number of people and the fact that by now I did not have a lot of time to wait until I started looking for a stud dog, I decided to make a 400 mile round trip down to see Mark Lingard at Moy Vets (http://www.moyfarmvets.co.uk/, 10 miles from Blackpool). Mark used to be on the panel and has a diploma in veterinary radiology so he definitely knows his stuff !  He will go over the x-rays with you, explaining the whole scoring process and go through each of the nine points and tell you at the end what he believes the score will be (so you've got a good idea of the outcome before waiting 3-4 weeks for the official results) and he's rarely wrong :)

Once the hip scores have been done, the results are recorded on the Kennel Club database and will be shown on the pups registration certificates.

As Mark predicted, Jess came back with perfect 0/0 hips :D  Still lots more to go though....