It is common to hear people say that using OFA certified dogs hasn't helped reduce HD. This is partially true. Enough progress hasn't been made, and the reason is that many of the breeders who screen for HD are only taking the bare minimum step of following the first recommendation of the OFA- simply certifying their breeding dogs. People naively assume that because a dog has good hips it shouldn't produce HD in it's offspring. When their dog is bred and does produce HD they get angry and blame the OFA method when in fact it is their own ignorance of the importance of following ALL of the guidelines that is to blame. You must know the hip status of a dog's close relatives to have any idea what the real genetic picture is. For instance, an OFA certified dog that has several dysplastic siblings and/or dysplastic parents or grandparents is almost certain to produce a high rate of dysplasia in it's offspring. Breeders following only recommendation #1 are very unlikely to significantly lower the incidence of HD and could easily go backward. We have found that improvement can be dramatic if the other recommendations are also followed, especially #3.

In our experience, selecting breeding dogs whose siblings show little or no evidence of HD is the most important step in reducing HD. A stumbling block is the difficulty in obtaining OFA evaluations from enough of the littermates to be meaningful. Although we had some success early in our breeding program by using dogs that had at least a few normal siblings and no known HD in the background, we found that progress beyond a 10% to 15% overall dysplasia rate was difficult to achieve. Under direct guidance from the OFA we developed a program of requiring preliminary hip evaluations on the puppies we produce. Preliminary OFA's are 80% to 100% accurate in predicting whether a dog will pass a final certification at 2 years, and they give us a very good picture of the hip strength in a litter. They also make it possible to identify litters that have an unacceptable rate of HD so we don't repeat them or use any dogs out of them for breeding. By learning which litters are strong for normal hips, and picking our breeding dogs from them, we have been able to dramatically lower the level of dysplasia. Since 2002 90 pups out of our litters have been submitted to the OFA, for either preliminary evaluations or final certifications, and only 2 of them failed- a rate of 2.2% HD- which is better than we once thought possible. The bottom line is that this approach works, and it has worked for every breeder we know of who has tried a similar program.

• There is no breeding study or data which shows whether selecting for lower DI's decreases the incidence of HD in offspring. The last time we talked to PennHIP they indicated no interest in pursuing a breeding study.

• All of the published studies that fully support the PennHIP method were authored or coauthored by Gail Smith, the founder of PennHIP.

• Independent studies contradict PennHIP's claims.

• PennHIP does not allow independent access to, or review of, it's database.

• In English Setters, a breed which has a very high median DI score, simply following PennHIP's recommendation of picking breeding dogs better than the median for the breed would guarantee using a high percentage of dysplastic dogs in a breeding program. Their database also contains only a few hundred English Setters, making the median score relatively meaningless.

• Because there is no pass/fail, and because buyers do not understand how PennHIP works, using PennHIP as the ONLY hip screening method gives dishonest breeders a way to hide the fact that they are using dogs in their breeding program that would fail OFA evaluation. This does not mean we believe all breeders who use PennHIP are intentionally dishonest. In fact, a breeder who also has OFA certifications may be especially conscientious. PennHIP DOES NOT, as has sometimes been claimed, do an OFA - like evaluation for anyone, so any "certification" of this type must come from the OFA to be meaningful.

• PennHIP's database is fully closed and there is no way to verify DI's for an individual dog.

If you are considering buying a pup from a litter out of parents with PennHIP evaluations and no OFA's, here is what you need to look for: You need to see the actual PennHIP reports for both parents. The DI's of both hips of both parents need to be .3 or less. Both reports must show no DJD present. Both parents should be at least 2 years old. If all of these criteria are met it is very likely the parents of the litter have normal hips.

The extremely high incidence combined with late onset of the disease make reducing hypothyroidism a daunting challenge in English Setters. With currently available testing it is impossible to eliminate all dogs that carry the genes. Many hypothyroid dogs will be well into their breeding careers before they test positive, and normal dogs that carry the gene may even be past breeding age by the time any of their offspring test positive. Until better testing methods become available progress in English Setters is likely to be very slow.

Although hypothyroidism is not as serious as some of the other inherited diseases, and can be treated effectively and inexpensively with medication, it can cause an incredible array of problems including ear, skin, and coat problems, lethargy, weight gain, reproductive failure, and seizures. It is a good idea to test the thyroid function of all English Setters periodically. The best single screening test available for Autoimmune Thyroiditis is the thyroglobulin autoantibodies test (TgAA). We test our breeding dogs for TgAA through Michigan State University.