All I can say is, I had a litter in 1995 and there were three pups, one went as a pet one to show and I kept the other,
Dog pup never had any problems as far as Im aware but the bitch pup that went for show literally dropped dead at 13mths old, I was absolutely devastated for the pup and the owners, we were good friends, anyway they had a post mortem and pup had a heart defect, I had mum and sister checked and they were fine but couldn't ever breed from them as I would of hated for this to happen again to anyone, so both mum and daughter (which was Millie who passed away in May)were speyed and I may add both lived to nearly 15.

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RIP all my babies.
Monty LabxGSD 1972-1982
Jody Black Lab1982-1999
KizzyLabx Goldie 1983-1994
Larry Yellow Lab 1985-1993
Charlie Black Lab 1986 -1997
Ben Yellow Lab 1985-1999
Pud Choc Lab 1989-2003
Bridgit Black Lab 1991-2004
Floss Yellow Lab1992-2006
Millie Yellow Lab1994-2010
My boy Ted, my first my last my everything.Golden Retriever 1/8/98-28/6/2011

Geez that must have been heart breaking?? Do you know what caused the problem? I know if pups contract parvo that they can develop amongst other things an enlarged heart later in life, and they don't have to appear too ill as pups, so it's not something you might normally 'consider' had been through your dogs/kennels.

One of the things that worries me with the elbow grading and hip scoring systems that we currently have in place, is that there is no distinction between a joint where a dog has poorly developed joints and/or arthritis and obviously has a problem showing symptoms, to a dog that has no signs of these problems, or any outward symptoms, and yet can receive quite a poor score or grade. Without trying to gain sympathy, because my own girl is spayed, Indie's elbow grade of 2:1 I feel isn't a good reflection of her overall elbow joints, I've got a couple of reasons for thinking this, poor set of plates, and an incident where she was hit at slow speed by a car as a fairly young pup, BUT, not an excuse, I do stand by and would stand by the results, and in fact, this was a contributing factor in having her spayed. The problem is, there is no current way of distinguishing between contributing factors, so a lot of possibly good dogs with higher than wanted scores/grades, would be left by the wayside.

My current plans are to clone Indie, as she's such a fab character EVERYONE who meets her wants a Lab just like her, so anyone would have to join a very long queue

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Countryside Alliance



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Established breeders will know their own lines inside out and backwards - few would want to gain a reputation for being unreliable or selling unsound dogs - it wouldn't do them any favours at all.

My point is - even if you did manage to compile this information - it would be from some / all of the breeders who already do as much as realistically possible in their power to produce happy healthy pups.

The idiots who breed blithely without thought for temperament, health, soundness and conformation will not contribute and continue to do what they are doing - unfortunately, these people still account for the larger proportion of puppies in most breeds - so you wouldn't really be informing the 'informed' world of anything they didn't know before - the breeding world is very small.

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Your idea like many might be nice - but we do have to take a step back and see that there are far bigger problems around than some of the issues that might be covered in such a resource.

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I suspect a lot of pet breeding focusses solely on health and temperament - but outside that, people rarely decide on a whim to just use a dog on their bitch - the thinking usually goes much deeper than that - I know I study at least the 5 generations of a pedigree and often further back if possible - history might be sketchy in some areas - but often you can look sideways at siblings, half siblings etc to build a reasonable picture of the lines - couple this with the growing availability of DNA testing and the history for these conditions nearly always becomes superfluous.

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What you need to know before buying a Labrador puppy

many breeds already have such a datatbase and very useful it is when planning matings and checking on the health of certain lines

My priority list is :

temperament
health
construction
entire if male
expression
ears
eye colour
bone
teeth
pigmentation
coat
tail set
stop
feet

Does anyone know just how it was discovered and recorded that the Flatcoat Retriever has an unusually high incidence of cancer?