I would like thoughts and or opinions on the following I have a male and female pair of german
shepherds which are now six years old they both have OFA good rated hips and elbows. They produced a litter approx four years ago and after sucessfully contacting all but one owner there are no health problems or hip abnormalties. They had a second litter in May 2004 both litters consisted of seven pups, I received a phone call January 12 2005 with a suspected case of hip dysplasia I have contacted all the other owners and no problems reported. My concern is two of the females were purchased with breeding in mind I now question if these dogs are suitable for breeding. Hoping someone will be able to help thankyou

You are starting off in the right direction, but I would not put too much faith in OFA results one way or another. They really tell you very little about the chances of your dogs passing along a predisposition to HD.

But if you want to try and make the mojo work, with the limited information you have, the "rule" generally is that if 75% of all the siblings are okay then the pups are okay to breed. It sounds like you fit in that category.

If you want a little better shot then just reading the OFA results like tea leaves, try to find out the hip status of all the sire's and dam's brothers and sisters. You did mention that the other pups did not have problems, but to be sure you would have to have OFA results on them and not just someone's empirical guess about their hip status. When you make the 75% calculation, you have to assume that any dog that you do not the status of is dysplastic.

If you can't meet those criteria, or don't have enough information, then you are just stumbling in the dark and might as well not spend too much time fretting over it if the information looks negative and on the opposite side of the coin you should not waste your time gloating about it if the results look positive. Without all the info you really can't tell one way or another. Of course, science aside, if the tea leaves look bad you will get grief for breeding. If the tea leaves look good, you still won't be any better off scientifically, but at least you won't get the grief.


To sum it up, your horoscope looks good but you will have to do much more investigation before it takes on any significance beyond the horoscope level.