Is your dog a rescue or did you buy him as a puppy? If the latter can I ask why you bought him then if the coat wasn't as it should have been? If people stopped buying dogs that have been bred for exaggerated traits there wouldn't be the market for them.

No as I said on the other thread I didn't buy him as a pup.  I got him as an adult via breed rescue because he was in desperate need of a home.

I would never have bought a pup from these particular breed lines as I know the breed in general and also their history but the 'show' dog of this breed is so over the top compared to the original working breed and has been exaggerated to the detriment of the dog.  There are still some breeders who have not bred to exaggeration but just as many who have.  But when you hear of a dog of the breed you love being classed as 'difficult' to re-home by breed rescue then what do you do?  All his siblings will be in similar pet homes as only one pup from the litter was selected to be kept and bred from to 'further the line'.  But their lives are a misery due to their long, dense, thick coat.  I find it unacceptable that breeders can do this in the name of winning in the showring but at the expense  of the dog.  I do believe that wining in the ring was at the root as there are numerous champions on both sides and his father was not only a champion at show but a champion stud dog too.

If the latter can I ask why you bought him then if the coat wasn't as it should have been?

Sorry missed a bit out of my last reply. 

But in this particular breed the coat is not 'full' until around age 3  but breeders will breed from bitches at age 2.  So if any potential purchaser sees mum with pups (as recommended) they will not have any idea of what they are letting themselves in for anyway unless they have really done their homework and researched the lines of both sire and dam.  But if they went to KC list of breeders and got a breeder's name from there they could well accept that they have sought out a responsible breeder and have nothing to worry about.  It's tricky!

> But in this particular breed the coat is not 'full' until around age 3  but breeders will breed from bitches at age 2.  So if any potential purchaser sees mum with pups (as recommended) they will not have any idea of what they are letting themselves in for

Another thing to consider is that if the parent dogs had the correct coat after 3 years of age, the dog you purchased might be a 'throw back' to an earlier dog or dogs in the pedigree. While you might have pictures of every dog going way back over many generations you probably won't have photos of every litter sibling born to the dogs in the pedigree, neither will the breeder so this is where nature can keep something going and we as breeders and purchasers can get caught out.

As I pointed out in an earlier post:

> Labradors and flatcoats originally came from the same root stock, the golden was a later offshoot. Flatcoats were well established before WWI in the UK and the Labrador was not so when they started appearing here they were crossed with flatcoats to boost their numbers, than bythe end of WWII the situation was the other way round we had more labradors than flatcoats. All retrievers for a long time after that were considered one breed with several types and frequently interbred. Dogs were registered as the type they most resembled, so from one litter you could have one registered as a labrador and another registered as a flatcoat. A dog from a flatcoat litter is behind most labradors today.<

>Early flatcoats were called wavy coated retrievers and some had colours and marking from their original breeds which made them up so you might find a brindle coloured flatcoat (a throw back to the St Johns Labrador, a breed behind labs and flatcoats) or with tan eye brows and feet like the gordon setter, and you can get white flashes on the chest from the collie or white on the tip of the tail or a paw. Even today some golden puppies are born with black hairs and flatcoats with white hairs. We have even had puppies who are silver grey at birth but turn black as they change their coats.<

>Some older breeders will tell you that the lab with a wave in it's hair down it's back get that from it's flatcoat ancestors.<

If you had been going to buy a flatcoat for example would you have bought a silver grey one? Would you think the breeder was dodgy? Or perhaps you wanted to buy a golden retriever and the puppies had black hairs? Some are even born black! About two or three years ago a labrador breeder mated his bitch to a field trial champion labrador the puppies when born were for the most part regular black or yellow puppies but two were black tan and white! Thinking the local mutt had got his bitch the owner had all the puppies, the sire and dam DNA tested and it ws proved that the puppies with the unusual colouring were full litters mates to the others.

Just to change the subject slightly Jemima... Can I ask how much you have donated to health research funding? I mean personal money not money via your company? Also when your flatcoats have died how many have died young? and were any of those dogs taken to Cambridge as many flatcoat owners do? or had an autopsy to confirm cause of death? or had tissue sent to Cambridge? I am just trying to work out if you support research in words only or are you actively funding or contributing to research yourself?

I find it funny how she has gone quiet since you have asked this question,, i would be interested to have a answer for this.



Well i think by the silence we are safe to assume the answer to this question is "not a sausage"

I still don't understand what the objective of this person is.

It would seem it is to get rid of pedigree dogs altogether, or only have rough types of dogs, something Retrieverish, Collieish spanielish, Terrierish, toyish (though once you got rid of the purebreds you would find even this hard to do).

Yet the vast majority of causally bred dog, which make up the bulk of the canine population are the result of irresponsible or ill informed breeding, mostly for the money the breeders can or thinks they can get.

Where I live I see about 30% of dogs that are recognisably of a breed, another 30% that are Staffy cross something (legal or illegal who knows) and the rest are mongrels or crosses of something.

I don't think even one in 10 is a Kennel club registered pedigree dog (I do live in a major city), and probably only a handful of those are of the kind of responsible breeding we are talking about here, which for JH is still not enough.

Last year the KC registered 257,000 puppies.  Lets assume that all registered pups survive for 10 years that gives a KC registered population of 2.6 million dogs, out of the estimated 7 million.  That is just one in 4 dogs that technically the KC have some involvement in. 

We all know that many of these are also not bred as the majority of us here do.  I'd be curious to know what proportion were bred by Accredited breeders, which most would agree is the minimum benchmark of quality breeding.

Must ask them.

So even if everyone that uses the KC system (the numbers would be hugely reduced) had some means of creating perfection (nature doesn't manage) it would still have little effect on the health and welfare of all dogs or even all pedigree dogs.

As soon as any of these well bred dogs are removed from the hands of responsible breeders the future stock quite quickly can deteriorate due to lack of proper selection.

Would she like all puppies born to be chance bred, that we let our bitches wander off and find a mate (who could well be her brother, father uncle, as after all the local population re unlikely to travel far). 

Do we then let them dig a den in the garden and whelp the pups unaided, to prove they can,a dn then let most of the pups die, leaving some fit or lucky ones.  Oh yes Puppy farmers pretty much do this, yet often the pups they rear have lots of issues, primarily social and temperament but health too.

I would like to see this lady start breeding her own line of super health disease free dogs (oh wait a minute she would have to start with the dogs available) and see how she got on in 20 years time.

She along with many of the academics are great with the theory, few are cognisant with the practicalities.  This is why most of us have respect regarding breeding matters for vets an geneticists who are themselves dog breeders.

She along with many of the academics are great with the theory, few are cognisant with the practicalities.  This is why most of us have respect regarding breeding matters for vets an geneticists who are themselves dog breeders.

Hit the nail right on the head, we can all spout guff till our little hearts are content but untill we can actually back it up with "proven" results we should really leave it to the people who know what they are talking about not just thoerizing.

She along with many of the academics are great with the theory, few are cognisant with the practicalities.  This is why most of us have respect regarding breeding matters for vets an geneticists who are themselves dog breeders.
Too right! 
About 25 years ago I bred 2 litters under the guidance of Veterinary experts working on a hereditary eye problem.  I was forfeiting some breed quality in an attempt to improve the eye status.  The matings that I did should have produced 25% clear carriers - a step in the right direction at the time.  All 17 pups were affected! 
Now luckily this is not a progressive disease and is also not painful and so the pups could live a long doggy life, but if things were that simple to sort, like reading a book, those trying so hard would have produced a perfect dog long ago! :(

> The matings that I did should have produced 25% clear carriers - a step in the right direction at the time.  All 17 pups were affected!

I'm probably being 'academic' or 'theorising' here, but I think the 25% clear is a probability not a definitive result ie a 1 in 4 chance of each pup being unaffected.  Just like rolling dice, or any form of gambling, you could come out a complete winner [no carriers/affected] through to complete 'loser' [all carriers/affected] and any combination between.  I can understand your distress in this situation and that you may have heard what what was said by the vet in a different manner.
I do think that the really good breeders take these possibilities into account when breeding for the breed.