It depends. When you have breeders who concentrate their efforts on producing extremely small dogs, rather than healthy, quality representation so the breed, many times the health of the dog takes a back seat to trying to achieve and small size. In those cases, you are often likely to have dogs produced that are riddled with health issues.
However, from time to time, you will have a pup in a litter that just doesn't get as big as the littermates, like my Kasey for example. Judging on past litters from the breeding pair and comparing him to his littermates, he should have been around 5 lbs as an adult. As it is, he is only about 2.5 pounds.
In that case, even though the dog may not have any health issues, their physical size poses a problem from time to time and puts them at a greater risk for injury than a dog than a slightly larger dog. |