When I read in the April 2017 Saber Tails that the PBGVCA
Board of Directors had voted to withdraw from participa-
tion in CHIC, I was dismayed. CHIC is the Canine Health
Information Center, which is administered by the Ortho-
pedic Foundation for Animals (OFA). CHIC maintains a
centralized canine open health database of health issues
that are relevant to participating breeds. I think that the
Board acted in good faith when they voted to withdraw
from CHIC, but I disagree with their decision and want to
explain why.
To become a CHIC breed, a breed club determines the
major health concerns within the breed, and which tests
are currently available and being used by the member-
ship. When the PBGVCA joined CHIC in 2007, they chose
OFA hip dysplasia evaluation and CERF eye exams as the
two health tests that the Club felt should be performed
as pre-breeding screens for PBGVs. Dogs that had those
screens were designated as CHIC dogs, no matter what
result the evaluation showed. Last year, the Club added
the test for primary open angle glaucoma to the list of
required tests. Other health tests, e.g. cardiac, elbow and
patellas, could also be conducted and added to the data-
base, but were not required for a dog to be designated a
CHIC dog. Having this information in the CHIC database
meant that a breeder looking for a stud dog for his/her
bitch (or vice versa) could easily view the health results
of the prospective mate’s parents, grandparents, siblings,
and offspring (if any).
The rationale for withdrawing from CHIC is that the Board
no longer feels that the hip dysplasia evaluation is neces-
sary for PBGVs. They asked OFA for permission to elimi-
nate the hip test requirement, or make it optional, and
the request was denied. Their choices were for the Club to
stay in the CHIC program and keep the hip dysplasia as a
recommended test or withdraw from the program.
Why was the PBGVCA request to eliminate the hip test re-
quirement denied? I was not privy to the communications
between the Club and CHIC, so I can only speculate. This
issue was discussed during the 2016 National Specialty in
Indianapolis. Our health speaker that year was Dr. Jerold
Bell, a preeminent veterinary clinical geneticist and mem-
ber of the OFA Board of Directors. Knowing that the Club’s
Board was discussing the need for hip evaluations in our
breed, Dr. Bell specifically discussed PBGV hip dysplasia in
his presentation. Unfortunately, only two PBGVCA Board
members attended his talk (to my recollection); this was
a missed opportunity for the rest of the Board. In his talk,
Dr. Bell predicted that the OFA would turn down a request
Response to Article ‘Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen Club
of America Withdraws From CHIC’
By Laura Liscum, PBGVCA Health Committee
by the Club request to eliminate hip dysplasia from their
testing unless they had a compelling reason. He said that
for a test to be added to the list of CHIC tests, there must
be a scientific basis for the request. Similarly, to remove a
previously requested CHIC test there must also be a sci-
entific basis for the test to be no longer needed. To his
knowledge, nothing had changed in the breed to make
this test no longer important to the breed club.
First, let us consider whether or not PBGVs exhibit hip dys-
plasia. The OFA data show that PBGVs are about average
in their prevalence of hip dysplasia, ranking #93 out of
183 breeds. Since becoming a CHIC breed, the results of
786 PBGVs have been submitted to OFA (http://www.ofa.
org/stats_hip.html). Of those, the hips of 4.2% were rated
excellent and 12.1% dysplastic. We are not in the same
league as Bulldogs or Pugs, with 70% dysplastic dogs, but
we’re also not Collies or Huskys, with 35% excellent and
only 2-3% dysplastic dogs. So PBGVs do have hip dyspla-
sia but it is not a paramount health problem in the breed.
More troubling is the fact that only 9% of PBGVs born
through 1995 were dysplastic, whereas 13.5 % of PBGVs
born between 2011 and 2015 show hip dysplasia. Ninety-
eight of the 183 breeds improved their hip dysplasia sta-
tistics over the past 20 years, but PBGVs were sadly one of
the 24 breeds for which hip dysplasia has increased. Cer-
tainly, the Club could not ask for hip dysplasia evaluation
to be removed as a CHIC test because we have done so
well to reduce the prevalence in our breed.
Second, let us consider whether dysplastic PBGVs suf-
fer from their hip dysplasia? That is, does the dysplasia
revealed by x-rays make a difference to our dogs’ lives?
This issue is probably most important to people who are
active in agility and the hunt. When they are planning a
breeding or selecting a breeder from whom to acquire a
puppy, the owners of athletic PBGVs need to examine the
available data on multiple generations. This is because
hip dysplasia is not a simple monogenic disorder; instead,
it exhibits complex inheritance. Keller, Dziuk, and Bell
(2011) analyzed hip data of over 490,000 progeny in the
OFA hip registry with known sire and dam hip ratings and
showed that hip dysplasia is inherited in an additive and
quantitative manner. Keller et al. (2011) stated that to im-
prove a breed, one must select breeding partners based
on the depth (ancestors) and breadth (siblings) of pedi-
gree health test results. Similarly, Wilson et al. (2011) con-
cluded that selection schemes should be based on test
scores of all known relatives, not just the one individual
dog. Thus, in order to consider hips alongside all of the
Cont’d next page