# Lock your windows and doors in the UK...



## papoodles (Jun 27, 2011)

Maybe one wouldn’t mind so much if the well being of children was supported to the same degree..
I prefer Yadda's maxim:
"Educate, don't legislate"


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## zyrcona (Jan 9, 2011)

"Where such tests provide a score, no dog may be used for breeding if their score is worse than the average published for the breed."

This is the single part I find most disturbing. What it refers to is the hip scoring system. I'll explain this as most of the users of this board are American and won't be familiar with it. There has been recent discussion about how PennHip and OFA compare. In the UK, we use a different system, BVA (British Veterinary Association) hip scoring, and in FCI countries they use yet another different system.

Here is a paper explaining the BVA hip evaluation process http://www.bva.co.uk/public/documents/Interpretation-and-_use-of-BVA-KC_Hip-Scores.pdf

The average mean score for a poodle is 14.

Now here is a table comparing the BVA scores to the system most popular in the USA APPROXIMATE OFA CLASSES VERSUS BVA/KC SCORES

According to the table, 14 is 'fair'. A dog with a score of 18 or under does NOT have hip dysplasia.

At the moment, we have the Kennel Club, which will register a litter from anyone, provided the dogs are the same breed and the bitch is not younger or older than specified ages and has not had four litters already (ya, I think the four litter law only affects responsible breeders, whereas irresponsible breeders just go on breeding fad mutts, but that’s a discussion for elsewhere). We also have the Kennel Club’s assured breeder scheme. Assured Breeder Scheme Requirements and Recommendations - The Kennel Club To be in this scheme if you are a standard poodle breeder, you pay a yearly fee and all your breeding stock must be hip scored and eye tested. It just says they have to have these tests, it only recommends that the guideline of not breeding from dogs with a score below the breed average is followed.

Now imagine if this becomes law and a breeder has a dog from a very old line, possibly the last pure dog from its line left alive. This line has very little influence of Wycliffe and of Vulcan Golden Light (the two most common bottlenecks in pedigrees) and no reported cases of the most common diseases in poodles in its pedigree. Imagine this breeder has the dog health tested, and it tests clear on all the genetic tests and fine on all the other tests, except that it has a BVA hip score of 15. It doesn’t matter if every single relative of the dog and the dog you intended to breed to has been hip tested a perfect 0 and this dog’s score is a fluke. That’s just too bad and the law says the dog can’t be bred, and that line must go extinct and all the positive things about it be discarded simply because a test shows there is nothing wrong with a dog other than it not being quite ideal on one minor factor.

In my opinion this is absolutely wrong. A dog’s breeding suitability needs to be evaluated on the dog as a whole and the relative strengths and weaknesses of its health testing. I’m strongly in favour of hip scoring, but I believe just as strongly that it should be used to make an informed decision and reported to allow people to research and study it, not used as a straightjacket like this. Making a law like this flies in the face of breeding for the benefit of a breed.

A lot of this document is actually quite sensible. Had it been presented as a voluntary code of practice, I would probably for the most part supported it. But some of it is naïve, or patronising and insulting, and the scientific recommendations look very much to have come from the same perspective I would have come from five years ago, i.e. the opinions of an educated person with a lot of theoretical grounding, but no experience of the actual specific topic or understanding of the intimate details. After studying a lot of pedigrees and research and communicating with other poodle enthusiasts, I understand that keeping down inbreeding is not as simple as looking at a five-gen pedigree and basing a COI on that as the document is recommending, and that there is no black and white about heritable health conditions, and that doing anything to unnecessarily restrict what can be bred will put catastrophic strain on a breeding population that has already been stretched to the limit in terms of loss of diversity.


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## zyrcona (Jan 9, 2011)

papoodles said:


> Maybe one wouldn’t mind so much if the well being of children was supported to the same degree..
> I prefer Yadda's maxim:
> "Educate, don't legislate"


I think we have quite enough legislation (and misinterpretation of legislation) about the breeding and rearing of humans in this country. 

Education: people have a right not to be educated if they don't want to. I'd say, legislate for availability of information. Legislate that all breeding dogs must be hip scored -- fine. Make the information public so people can make up their own minds. Don't make laws about what people can and can't do based on hip scores. If the information is available and people choose not to use it or to educate themselves, caveat emptor.

I hope smoking never gets banned. I hate smoking and think it stinks and it's revolting, and I would like doing it in public to be banned, but not the sale and use of tobacco products themselves. Laws should not interfere with what someone is doing so long as it's not interfering with anyone else's rights. Besides, I sometimes need to buy tobacco to use as a pesticide (I have a microbusiness growing rare plants that are endangered in the wild, and everything else that's potent enough to work on the kind of pests they attract has been banned on account of being too poisonous). Make laws to stick warnings on things, but don't ban stuff.


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