It’s always hard for us to believe that more breeders are not testing parent dogs before making potentially dangerous matches. They are blindly putting dogs together and creating puppies with hugely increased chances of contracting fatal diseases.
Let’s take just one instance. Pug Dog Encephalitis (PDE) is also known as necrotising menigoencephalitis (NME). It is a neurological inflamation that causes brain disorder and death of young adult Pugs (well after any breeder health guarantee expires). Many Pugs, some estimates run close to 50%, have one copy of the PDE gene. Dogs with only one copy are at very low risk to ever develop the disease, and are recommended to be bred only with dogs that are clear of the gene. It is not recommended to remove dogs with one copy from breeding as this would so drastically reduce the gene pool. However, mating two dogs, both with copies of the gene, can produce puppies with one copy from each parent. These puppies have a significantly higher risk of developing PDE than their parents.
Testing is the only way to determine if a dog has a copy of the gene. So, when a breeder says their parents are all healthy, they’ve never had any problems, what they are actually doing is demonstrating that they do not understand how this all works.
We proudly take the time and expense to test all our parent dogs for the sake of the Pug breed, and especially for the sake our our buyers and their new best friends. We test for Pug Dog Encephalitis (PDE), Degenerative Myelopathy (DM), Pyruvate Kinase Deficiency (PKD), and Primary Lens Luxation (PLL). Now, go Google for more…