Murreydobe

Well..I doubt I'd ever use an affected dog for breeding. But I don't believe it's unethical to do so. Bred to a clear partner, all puppies would be carriers.
Thus, the breeding combination satisfies the goal of producing no affected puppies.

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CH. Birchrun Who's On First, aka Razzle
Foxfire N KO Simply Madness WAC, aka Connor

ProMod

Is there anyway this info could be shared with Vets in Arkansas who rely solely on the assay test to condemn a non-clinically affected dog?

dobebug

Hi ProMod,

Since I have a lot of knowledge about one breed (Dobermans) and I've been involved in the breed for close to 50 years I figure that in this one breed I have more knowledge of breed specific problems than most of the vets I see.

And I have had vets tell me that their best sources of information on specific breeds are show breeders who have been breeding one breed for many years and when they have questions that are breed specific that's where they go for information and then do research from there. I'm not a show breeder but that is where my dogs come from and I've done research on them from the very first Dobe.

Quite a few years ago I started keeping a file of Doberman specific issues--it got easier with the advent of the internet but I often take information to a vet that I'm seeing for the first time.

The vWD that affects the Doberman is different from the one that they seem to teach vets about in school. Most of them know about the Type 3 Scottish Terrier version which is fatal for most affected dogs. Type 2 (German Shorthair and German Wirehair Pointers) is the other one that most vets know about as well. But there seems to be a general lack of information about Type 1 and a lot of vets don't realize that there is a gene test for Type 1 vWD for Dobes. Many of them assume that Affected is the same sort of disaster that it would be in Scottish Terriers. I make it a point to inform them. I also make sure that they understand the difference between an Elisa Assay and the VetGen vWD test. And I have, on file the vWD VetGen test results so that there isn't any question about the vWD status being a problem. We do clotting test just before surgery to make sure that they are clotting well on that day, at that time. There's far more than vWD that will cause uncontrollable bleeding.

I'm sure the vets I work with at the clinic where I work all know more than they ever expected to about vWD, cardio, and that not everything that affects movement in a Doberman is going to be CVI (intervertebral disc disease will produce some of the same effects)--and they surely know about doing full panel thyroid testing when it comes to Dobes. But I do realize that not all clinics have Dobes as patients nor owners as employees.

Try a little vet education--it works really well.