I think Woogie's examples a few pages back on how certain health problems were eliminated with judicious cross breeding make a lot of sense.
Dog breeds are essentially artificial. Part of the reason there are appearance standards at all is because there really isn't another way to determine what breed a dog belongs to. When the registries started, it seems pretty clear it was, "if it looks like a [duck] and quacks like a [duck], then it's registered as a [duck]." And that point when the registeries started is also arbitrary. Fifty years earlier or fifty years later, a somewhat different set of dogs would have qualified.
It seems to me that that judicious use of all tools available should be used to perpetuate strong, healthy breeds. This may not apply to yorkies, but maybe it applies to some other breed types.
Quote:
|
The way you eliminate health issues is weed out those dogs with said issues or those that produce those issues out of a breeding program. Spay/nueter and pet them out. Simple as that.
|
Mardelin, I know you are extremely experienced in this area. So you know that getting health issues out of the gene pool is generally not that simple. Otherwise, liver shunt wouldn't exist.