Missing links

I recently looked at the pedigree on a website for some pedigree puppies for sale. Only the good hip scores of ancestors had been listed; the breeder left out the recent ancestors with scores of 42 etc. Is this just 'naughty' or is it some form of misrepresentation/misinformation? The breeder knows full well about the high scoring maternal grandsire as he belongs to her!
Angela Boyd, by email

Carol Price, trainer and behaviourist, advises:
Oh dear—welcome to the world of pedigree dog breeding, where so many potential pitfalls await the more naive or ill-informed! You do not say what breed of dog you are talking about, which tends to be relevant, in terms of what represents an exceptionally high hip score for a particular breed—see below. But I sense you must either know this particular breeder fairly well to be acquainted with the history of her dogs, or have been admirably zealous in rooting out any of her ‘unmentioned’ hip scores via Kennel Club records.
On the face of it, if you have a dog with a high hip score you should not breed from it, due to the risk of this fault afflicting later generations with hip dysplasia—which, at its worst, can be an appalling condition to both suffer and manage. However, what can cloud the issue for so many breeders is that the dog with the higher hip score may either have, or carry, other genetic attributes they highly cherish or desire—particularly in terms of show or working potential. And this is what prompts them to take the risk of breeding from them, hoping that in the process the hip fault will somehow be magically eradicated or not passed on. It is much like genetic Russian roulette.
Sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose, but when they lose it can have dire consequences for the dogs they produce and their owners alike. Alternatively, of course, the breeder you mention may have used her own dog with the higher hip score simply to save herself the expense of a stud fee, or the hassle of researching/visiting a more preferable sire elsewhere.
At the end of the day it is not yet—sadly!—compulsory for breeders to hip score any dog they breed from, in order to register their progeny with the KC. And at least the breeder you refer to took the trouble to both test and register the scores of her ‘less good’ dogs. Other breeders, once they see how bad their dogs’ hips look on a vet’s initial X-ray, won’t even send them up to the British Veterinary Association to be officially scored, with the result thereafter kept on record by the Kennel Club. In so doing they leave nobody any the wiser about this fault.
Essentially—as I totally agree with you—the issue here is about honesty. It is simply not honest to have potentially pretty serious faults in a dog, or its breeding line, that you know about but do not openly declare. Breeders may often think they are doing the best thing in keeping such problems quiet but, as you prove yourself, it can too often lead to mistrust instead, on behalf of people who might otherwise buy your dogs.
There are an awful lot of would-be puppy owners out there who may still know nothing about hip scoring, or how vital this health screening process is, particularly in bigger breeds or breeds known to suffer from hip dysplasia. So I urge them to read below.

All you need to know about hip scoring
- Hip scoring is a scheme set up jointly by the Kennel Club and British Veterinary Association to test, and record, the quality of hip construction in pedigree dogs and minimize the chance of any breeding stock passing on hip dysplasia (HD); a progressively more painful/arthritic condition caused by poor basic hip structure.
- In healthy dogs the head of the thigh bone (or femur) fits snuggly into a sufficiently deep/smooth socket (or acetabulum) in the pelvis, allowing for optimum ease and fluidity of movement. Dogs with HD, on the other hand, have very poor hip construction—e.g. a distorted femoral head moves unstably with a very shallow hip socket, causing pain and disability. Some dogs can be so badly affected that by just five months of age they can hardly walk or rise from a sitting position.
- Dogs can be hip scored from a year old onwards. A vet takes a high quality X-ray of a dog’s hips, and then submits this to a special British Veterinary Association scoring panel. Each hip is graded, in terms of quality, from 0 to 54, with 0 being absolutely perfect construction, and 54 being extremely poor. The scores are then put together, with 0 (0 : 0) being the best possible score and 108 (54 : 54) being the worst. Thus, the lower the score, the better the dog’s hips.
- Bigger dogs—e.g. Rottweilers, German Shepherds, Labradors, Golden retrievers—tend to be more prone to HD, though it can now affect many other breeds, such as Clumber spaniels. The most important thing to do, when looking for a pup, is to find out whether it is from a breed known to suffer from HD, plus what the ‘average’ hip score is for its breed. You should be able to get this information from the KC or other breed reference books/websites. The parents of any pup you consider should then not only have been hip scored, but also have a score around this breed average or, even better, somewhat below it.
- Be aware, however, that HD is not always considered to be a purely inherited condition and that other factors—e.g. inappropriate diet and overweight/over-exercise as a puppy, or a traumatic birth—are thought to play their part in its development.
- ‘Average’ scores among breeds can also be misleading, as these only derive from dogs who have actually been submitted for testing, as opposed to the breed as a whole. HD can also sometimes appear to have a less than straightforward mode of inheritance, with high scoring parents producing low scoring offspring, and vice versa. All in all, however, getting puppies from parents with excellent hip scores, however, still remains the best bet. And if the parents aren’t hip scored at all—particularly in a seriously affected breed—steer clear!