hi does any one know how old a dog needs to be before you can get them hip scored, ujust i am dying to get my pup checked.

12 months. :)

thanks. is that the youngest they can be. just 5 months to go.

They can be x-rayed before then, if a problem is suspected, but they can't get a score until new x-rays are taken after 12 months of age.

Unless it's a PenHipp scoring system, but I wouldn't do it until they are at the very least 12 months old.

Do they do Penhipp in the UK and if so who?

Sorry whats Penhipp scoring?

I thought in the US they don't score before age 2 anyway?

That's what I thought too, Marianne.

PenHipp can be done I think as early as 6 months!  Not something that I'd go for actually.  There are a couple in our breed PenHipping over here but dependant on the breed I don't think the scoring system is that helpful especialy if it's a rarer breed as it's based on the breed only and not all dogs like the BVA score from what I can tell.

http://www.pennhip.org/PennHIPFAQ.html#HowOld

Seems a bit pointless to me, because a dog x-rayed at just 16 weeks of age would NOT have an official hip score in the UK. Unfortunately I have learnt not to trust people. In Persian (and Exotic and Selkirk) cats, we have a genetic kidney disease which can now be DNA tested for. For the results to be official, it has to be done under the FAB scheme, which for instance means that a VET must take the DNA sample to send off. Some breeders save money by doing the testing themselves (after all, to get DNA all you need is a cheek swab) and send it off to US or Australian labs. That way the results are not official as no vet took the sample, and more importantly no vet checked the cat's microchip. Hence no official certificate can be gained. That has had the result that a few unscrupulous breeders have tested cats under false names, and have ended up breeding and selling positive cats, claiming they were negative. So in my view, nothing that isn't official is worth anything as its accuracy cannot be proved.

This is an interesting report about PennHIP scoring. They say that GSDs shouldn't be x-rayed before 4 months, but that "the OFA score at 4 months was not capable of predicting later hip score meaning that in this study there was no scientific support for using preliminary OFA score at 4 months as an early screening tool."

Well I am glad that in UK we only get one go at Hip scoring, as in the USA dogs are having prelims Deon and if bad aren't being scored later when the results would count.

Unfortunately a number of people are trying to ge the PenHipp way, they believe it is better than the BVA way of scoring.