Kennel Chervood dogs die before 5 years old on average.
Jess at the Cynoanarchist blog was looking at the kennel page of the Clumber Spaniel that was denied Best of Breed at this year’s Crufts due to ectropion and noticed that the “Rainbow Bridge” page showing the dogs from that kennel who have died had some troubling lifespans for the dogs. No cause of death is given for any of the dogs, but for many the dates of birth and death are given, so I’ve gone ahead and calculated the ages at which these dogs died.
For a few of the dogs, the date of death is not given, so I’ve assumed they died today in my “at most” calculations, but these dogs are not included in the overall average due to this uncertainty: Ringo, Mads, Matti, and Mingus.
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OLIVER 9.5 years |
| Don’s Hop On The Bus Gus | |
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RINGO At most 3.3 years |
| Chervood’s Snow Autumn | |
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BULLET 3.1 years |
| Chervood’s Snowbull | |
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EKKO 0.5 years |
| Chervood’s Snowbeach | |
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FAYETTE 7.0 years |
| Chervood’s Snowflower | |
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KASPER 8.2 years |
| Chervood’s Snowman | |
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MADS At most 5.3 years |
| Chervood’s Snowhunter | |
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MATTI At most 5.3 years |
| Chervood’s Snowsinger | |
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MINGUS At most 8.1 years |
| Chervood’s Snowmountain | |
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OSVALD 3.0 years |
| Chervood’s Snowboll | |
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RONJA 8.4 years |
| Traddles Marchioness | |
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SAMI 0.4 years |
| Chervood’s Snowhunter | |
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SELINE 5.8 years |
| Holgerssons All That Jazz | |
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TATIES 0.5 years |
| Chervood’s Snowsummer | |
| Average: 4.66 years | |
That’s right, of all the dogs listed on their Rainbow Bridge page, the average lifespan is only 4.66 years.
You might suggest that it’s a biased sample and that surely there are dogs living long and happy lives at this kennel and that their big age numbers just aren’t being counted yet.
Sadly, that’s not the case. I went though all of the dogs listed in the “Our Dogs” page and calculated their ages. Of 15 dogs, only 3 are over 6 years old, the oldest is 8.8 years.
In light of this information, does the fact that this breeder pays for lots of health checks (and even publishes some of the results) matter? Heck, does the ectropion on their big winning bitch who was just denied Best of Breed at Crufts all that important? These dogs are dying when healthy breeds of the same size are still young and vibrant.
What a shame. More here.
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You haven’t really controlled for the biased sampling. I would imagine that the majority of dogs are placed rather than kept. And maybe they place retired breeding dogs to pet home.
Right, but, you’d expect them to self report their longest lived dogs. While the breeder reporting the birth and death dates is commendable in the light of making information available, the dogs are dying by 6, and apparently have been for long enough that this is not seen as out of the ordinary, or horrific.
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The only bias in sampling is what they are putting up on their website. Why does it matter anything if these dogs are placed or not? It says nowhere if these dogs are kept or co-owned or placed. Why would that matter at all? They have dates of birth and dates of death. Are you really suggesting that the dogs this breeder keeps die horrific young deaths while the dogs they place are miraculous Methuselahs, it’s just that they don’t record any of the long lived dogs? Rubbish.
There are many dogs listed and not a single one of them made it to 10. Not ONE. Every single dog has died below the breed average and there isn’t a single case of a healthy outlier.
You’re welcome to go through every dog listed on their Offspring page, which appears to be their placed dogs, and find me a single dog that even makes the breed average. At a quick glance, I don’t see any that are 9 years old even.
I did a little surfing of dog breed info websites and I got life span numbers for Clumber Spaniels of 10 – 12 years (the most common number), 9 – 15 years, and 8 – 10 years. Note that these estimates are all significantly longer than Chris’ calculation for this kennel of 4.6 years. There appears to me more problems with this kennel than the breed in general.
In my opinion no dog should be awarded a championship in the conformation ring unless it is a minimum of two years old and is certified free of the genetic defects for that breed and for which tests exist. The conformation ring is predisposed to finishing dogs ASAP. It’s all about pushing dogs through as fast as possible because that’s how you make the most money. The sensible thing to do would be to slant the awards toward the oldest sound dogs, but that will never happen.
“In my opinion no dog should be awarded a championship in the conformation ring unless it is a minimum of two years old and is certified free of the genetic defects for that breed and for which tests exist. The conformation ring is predisposed to finishing dogs ASAP. It’s all about pushing dogs through as fast as possible because that’s how you make the most money. ”
I think this is ruining golden retrievers.
An 10-month-old pup that is very well-bone and finishes before two is going to be a coarse lumbering creature by the time it’s four.
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Show them quick, finish them quick, and breed them quick. Even “The Collie: A Veterinary Reference for Professional Breeders” recommends to breed males at 10 months – one disagreement with an otherwise excellent book.
At 10 months, the dog isn’t physically or mentally mature. Disorders like PRA, DM, HD, and demodex aren’t usually evident by that age (the book was published in 1984, before the DNA test for PRA was available).
I’m always impressed by breeders who have older dogs that are still showing and breeding. This guy is nine and just sired a litter – and not by AI:
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg230/hookedoncollies/janosch-duo.jpg
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I think this is a factor in why so many breeds are overdone nowadays… in order to mimic a mature appearance in young dogs, you need to breed them more exaggerated so they have the right amount of features even when they’re underdeveloped physically. When they fully mature, though, they end up looking coarse and/or overdone.
Pai, I think that’s part of it, but also I think there is a substantial dose of “if a little bit is good a lot is better”. Perhaps for breeders it’s a way to set their lines apart from the riff-raff. What I find amusing are the dumb rationalizations that are used to justify the extreme. For example, “German Shepherds are trotting dogs and the sloping butts make them more efficient trotters.” Yeah right, a trotting dog should have a butt like a wolf. Wolves trot after caribou all day to catch and eat them. Inefficiently trotting wolves are eliminated from the gene pool because they can’t catch their dinner.
When you are looking at a long row of dogs of the same breed, the eye naturally goes to the one that stands out. It is a failing of the human brain.
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Jess, Have you seen the PBS Nova program on dogs? They do a little experiment with a litter of Chow puppies. People are randomly called over to pick their favorite puppy and they uniformly pick the different puppy, the one that is darker, or lighter, or has some characteristic that distinguishes it from the rest of the litter.
Yes, I’ve seen that. It’s one of the reasons I think all-rounder judges are detrimental.
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Yeah. It’s with Raymond Coppinger. He takes four chow pups. One is black. The rest are red.
Everyone picks the black one.
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Haven’t seen the show, but now I’ll have to try to find it. It’s an interesting study in psychology – we primates and our visual dependance!
I like the story Coppinger had in his book about the beginnings of the Golden breed – the dogs were selected because they were visually pleasing, not only because of a certain talent or temperament (paraphrasing; haven’t read the book in a long time).
Clarence Pfaffenberger had very much the same experience with a dog of his own – a singleton cocker puppy that received early, thorough training and ended up being a supreme working dog.
The odd puppy in the litter is usually the children’s favorite, even if it is uglier. I think because they can recognize it from the other puppies. Before dog shows, it was probably the children who chose which puppy to keep, “because the children know the puppies better, they spend all day playing with them” or simply, because you can’t pick which puppy will grow up to be the best herding or hunting dog by looking at a litter of 6 to 9 week old puppies.
True, I noticed this years ago with a breed I had then. I tried to explain it by saying “You know how, like mosquitoes start as an egg, then they live as an underwater creature, then later they become a flying insect? Well, this puppy looks like he hatch out of the egg as an adult flying mosquito”.
The breeder looked at me like she though that I was nuts, and said something about her puppy not hatching from an egg.
I feared she thought I was a young virgin or something. I tried again: “You know how frogs are born tadpoles then later they absorb their tail, grow lungs instead of gills, and become frogs?”
She looked at me but her eyes were far away. She said “They don’t absorb their tails”. She went on about tail docking and absorbed fetuses.
Clearly I had left her behind, not communicated well. I pointed to her stud dog and said “The puppy looks EXACTLY like him, but smaller.”
She said the puppy should look like him, that was his father. The puppy was smaller because he was only 4 months old.She sat the two side by side, and agreed that, except for size, they looked exactly the same.
She seemed confused about my point. I tried again. “My puppies look like puppies when they are born, they slowly grow into the look of a 2 month old puppy, a 3 month old puppy….
She caught on that I was talking about photos, but that was it.
I tried again. “I can look at photos of my puppies and tell how old the puppy must have been, when the photo was taken, by the stage of development the puppy was in. Except for size, your 4 month old puppy looks just like an adult.
The breeder asked someone who had walked over, if she knew what I was talking about. The person said that the puppy had a big head, then she began an oral show evaluation of the puppy which had nothing to do with what I said.
I walked away. But soon, this was the look of the breed, big head puppies who grew into coarse drooly dogs.
I agree with the age requirement but not the “free of genetic defects”–eliminating all carriers would decimate the gene pool in many cases.
Certainly, you can’t eliminate all genetic defects from the gene pool. For example, dogs can be carriers of some of the eye problems without showing the disease or affecting the dog’s overall health. I have no problem with breeding those dogs as long as the condition in known and understood. The Schaeferhund Verein (Shepherd’s Dog Club in Germany) has gone to a hip scoring system to reduce dysplasia. When you breed the dogs, the breeder is supposed to use the hip scores to make progress in reducing HD. You don’t eliminate the heritability, but you attempt to move away from undesirable conditions. The approach requires honesty from the breeders and more information on the pedigree than is currently available. It also requires a long term commitment, not the short term approach seen in the conformation ring today.
Yes carriers can be used but we should look towards them not needing to be used & thats why genetic testing & test matings are so important to me. We can’t test for everything & sometimes the only way to be sure is mating a dog you think could be a carrier to 1 you know is to see the outcome but it can be heart braking.
My old gold TM Bubba had entropian & I searched far & wide for a suitable bitch because he had too many good points to just throw his genetic imput out the window.So at 8 yrs of age I thought I finally had the right bitch but I was wrong out of 7 pups 3 where affected. Only 1 needed an op & the other 2 where resolved with tacs but thats beside the point. Now I have an extremely nice type & temperment that has to been seen to be believed in his son but again am scared stiff to use him. I just bought a new bitch with similar lines in the hope I can keep what I love about those bloodlines minus the entropian. but thast a long way off as I wont mate her untill she is 3 yrs old as I think it’s not until then we can really be sure of a dogs full potental or downfalls. You have to be aware of both the good & the bad to make the right mating decisions I think. Now we are faced with a new genetic problem being vWD, facts are still hard to pin down on whether we have a huge issue with this or not. I have started testing on all my dogs & not just the TM’s.
Some days(today being 1 of those) I wonder whether I should just give up & only take on the problem TM’s or those just needing re homing as although there has not been many in the past I can see this may be set to change. Puppies being sold to people that have no idea of what a TM can really be all about & I think in many ways some of the newer breeders do not even realize themselves as some bloodlines for the most part can be a lot less driven. But even in those lines they will get pups that are very aloof, not driven to please humans & very raw if not primial in temperment. I like these dogs & given the correct up bringing find thm to be a more honest & pure form of the TM temperment but in no way are they a beginners dog or suitable for everyone. Some breeders don’t want to tell their puppy buyers the cold hard facts & rather soften the edges somewhat but I feel you are doing the breed no favours taking this approach. But then you run the risk of making them a target for dog fighters & the dip shits who wont a tuff mean dog too when you do tell it too bluntly too. I feel many days like I am stuck between a rock & a hard place as i never want to be without these wonderful loyal unquic ancient dogs but then i think are they really a breed that should be breed & just handed over to anyone with 3 grand in their pocket. You can test your puppy buyers all you want but you will still end up being conned somewhere along the way.
Anyways sorry that was meant to be about breeding using carriers & i got carried away it’s been a shit of a morning. Teddy the lastest hard case i toke on & should most likely have PTS weeks ago got out whilst I was in town & made 1 hell of a mess.
Sam, Everything you said is the reason I chose not to breed Anatolian shepherds (my other favorite breed) and went with collies instead. It seems like it would be almost impossible to find ten REALLY GOOD, knowledgeable, appropriate homes for a litter of Anatolian, or TM, puppies. It’s a huge responsibility!!
You have to give Chervood credit for listing birth and death dates for many dogs, including a few who died young and greatly dropped the expected lifespan. I’ve never seen a breeder do this before. Most just list deceased Ch/Gr Ch’s/dual Ch’s on their rainbow bridge page.
Transparency about age and cause of death is sadly lacking in the pedigree dog world.
There is currently news on another forum about the three year old Dogue De Bordeaux that suffered laryngeal paralysis and collapsed on the way out of Crufts yesterday. Vets were right there but she had to be put down.
http://www.dogsey.com/showthread.php?p=2480786#post2480786
Another young girl to go. Very sad. RIP Marley
I did a “dog in motion production” for a talk I presented to the Clumber Spaniel Club of America over 15 years ago. When I do these things I go to the club event and shoot some slow motion footage of the dog breed in question and then add it to my general dog locomotion video footage when giving the talk to the club.
Usually the talk generates a lot of controversy because I am not a proponent
of the “great reach and drive dog at a trot” point of view that is current among those who evaluate dogs only within the show ring.
The Clumbers I filmed were very loose of connective tissue and when they trotted there was a unique aspect to their body action. As the feet pushed the do off the ground during the going into suspended phase of the trot the body would bow downwards – like a cartoon dog. I have seen something depicted of this sort in Disney cartoons of “Pluto” trotting. In all the locomotion footage I collected for dogs I never saw this in another breed. I was told that there were lots of problems with severe spinal disk disease in middle aged Clumbers.
That is one of the things that could lead to early demise. In addition, in my experience, dogs with very loose connective tissue that are large dogs (over 50 lbs) seem to me to be more prone to bloat and torsion than dogs of similar weight that are tight skinned and tight jointed. Despite being a spaniel Clumbers are 50 to 80 lbs dogs which puts them into the weight danger zone.
The skin on these dogs is almost as lax as on a Neapolitan Mastiff. They are the heaviest spaniel and have mastiff type massive bone as well as loose skin contributing to ectropion, heavy dewlaps, lots of drool and heavy thick hanging ears that close off the external ear canal. The explanation for breeding for such a slow clumbersome dog as a hunting companion that was given to me was that the Clumber was a dog bred for the “gentleman hunter” so that the hunter walking on foot could easily keep up with the dog.
A Clumber shouldn’t have a noticeable period of suspension. They are a working dog used in thick underbrush, and should be slow and methodical. So many dogs are being bred with a huge suspended sidegait and it’s not correct in all breeds.. People need to concentrate on breeding healthy correct dogs, and stop worrying about generic sidegait. Good for you for filming that. How was your presentation recieved?
“They are a working dog”
You say that like the mere uttering of the words makes it so. They are not a working dog if they are not bred to a working standard and actually worked.
You will find many photos of many dogs on that kennel website, but not one of them has a bird in its mouth or anyone holding a gun.
There are, however, numerous photos of trophies, ribbons, and judges at dog shows.
That’s not a working dog, it’s a show dog.
A-freaking-men. I show my dogs occasionally, 2 or 3 times a year, & it makes me laugh when other guardian breed exhibitors complain about how exhausting it is for their poor dogs to have to trot around the ring half a dozen times, while at the same time are proclaiming that they were working dogs. I’m bad, I say stuff like “Oh really? How many acres do they cover?” or “What sort of livestock to they protect?” in a fake innocent voice, while remarking that my dogs travel several miles per day with me, either on the farm doing chores or off the farm backpacking with me, etc. My dogs are of a guardian breed AND my dogs are actual guardians. Calling a non-working dog a working dog just because the *breed* was developed for work is like calling yourself English because your ancestors come from England. I’m not English, I’m American. I’m just descended from English people.If you aren’t working your dog, it’s not a working dog. Breed what you want, but please don’t pretend like what you are breeding is anything like what an actual hunter or farmer or sportman is breeding.
As for Clumbers, if fat, slow gentlemen still frequently hunted on foot with spaniels, maybe Clumbers would still be bred to work. But most hunters don’t hunt that way, so Clumbers are definitely not the typical spaniel of choice in the field. That honor goes to field-bred English Cockers, Boykins, Springers, & Brittanies, with a smattering of other breeds. So maybe a good choice of words would be “Clumber Spaniels are the descendants of slow, steady, heavy hunting spaniels & are rarely used for hunting today.” But I doubt Clumber fanciers will ever phrase it that way. They prefer to cling to their fantasy that somehow their fluffy, heavy, clumsy, unsound dogs with bad eyes are some romantic remnant of a by-gone age that could step effortlessly into the field at any time.
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I was making a general statement about the breed’s original purpose. I wasn’t talking about the website’s dogs, sorry for the confusion.
So many breeds are moving into generic show dog territory, oversized, fluffy and unable to do the tasks they were bred for. A breed like the Clumber that is supposed to be able to hunt all day at a slow, steady pace shouldn’t fly around the ring {Or anywhere} like it is a Doberman.
Breed a male at 10 months? Are people insane? I won’t even *consider* a dog for breeding until 3 years of age, *minimum*, in my large breed (Central Asian Shepherd Dogs) & it would be 2 years minimum for something small (such as if I were to breed my American Hairless Terrier). How can you tell if a dog is worth breeding before it’s fully mature & adult in mind & body? Now I know small breeds mature more quickly than large breeds, but no dog is fully mature at 10 months old. A 10 month old Central Asian Shepherd is a *puppy*, probably still outgoing & friendly, not yet suspicious & independent, & not even remotely close to the working dog she will (hopefully) become. My current pup, Patty, is 10 months old & I lovingly refer to her as “my derpy pony” because she’s such a dork right now. She looks to me & to the adult working dogs for guidance. She doesn’t make her own decisions yet about what constitutes a threat, & she hangs back & observes (while barking & making little advances) when the adult dogs have a predator at bay. She has a lot of potential & *so far* is developing nicely, but it will be a good 2 years before I really know for sure what, if anything, she has to offer my breeding program. Her mother, Willow, was a couple of months shy of her 4th birthday when we bred her & I will be breeding my other adult bitch, Astrid, next summer, right around her 5th birthday. The sire we used on Willow was 3 years old at the time (younger than I like, but I know his lines well). The stud I will be using next summer for Astrid is 6 years old. This is/will be the first breeding for both bitches. They’re healthy, sound, robust girls who have PROVEN themselves as working livestock guardians & personal protection dogs. You can’t say that about a 10 month old puppy, no matter how nicely you guess (& it’s always a guess, if an educated one) that puppy will turn out to be.
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You can start to remove affecteds and carriers from breeding. Choosing to breed only “show quality” dogs removes 90+% of puppies from most gene pools, without them ever producing ANY puppies of their own. If you give up breeding for the show ring, and breed for health and temperament instead, you could exclude 75% of puppies and still have less inbreeding.
When you say that breeding for a healthier gene pool in your breed would cause too much inbreeding, are you quoting from people who assume that healthful breeding would be in addition to show breeding, rather than “instead of”?
I feel that, since people put so much mis-guided faith in winning in the ring equaling any positive attribute in real life, that the system behind dog show ought to put better thought and energy into making dog shows at least somewhat more useful ( I might be able to offer some of the though part, if they use their energy).
First: stop showing puppies in conformation, instead, have them choose either field tests, obedience, rally, advanced tracking, something older puppies can safely do. Only after the puppy gets to the required level in its chosen event, and is a year old, then he can go into conformation.
To insist on 2 or 4 year old dogs as a minimum for conformation might be better, but the sudden change might be too much for older dog-breeders. Really, conformation should be for dogs past useful field age, like shuffle board for retirees.