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I think it's worth pointing out that the lists of diseases/syndromes raised in the other thread were from a US-based web site and that several of those posting have been doing so from countries other than the UK however, it remains the case that the UK is the whippet's founding country and that...

Dear all, Thank you so much for sticking with this thread, for your honesty, your ability to keep personalities out of it and your courage and integrity in naming some of the conditions you've met. I came to it knowing very little about Whippet lines and with only a hazy, fairly generic grasp...

And, profoundly and completely, from me.... Karen gave us an entirely lucid, cogent view of why breeders prefer to line breed, and Natalie has enabled me to understand the genetic implications in a far greater depth than I have ever done before. heartfelt thanks m

OK, I'll back out now and let the experts amongst the breeders sort it out... I await with interest what happens m

Thank you so very much. I can't begin to tell you what a relief it is to have a real geneticist with real figures at her finger tips and strong science in the background. so perhaps now if we've established the need for genetic diversity, we can begin to establish how to do that? thank you...

You wouldn't like to move to the UK, I suppose? That's the most lucid, intelligent, believable response I've ever had to why people line breed... and if it's done like this, then I would entirely support it - I want beautiful, elegant whippets with neat ears as much as anyone else... I just...

Don't ever come to Newmarket.... m

not all diseases are recessive. If your mother's family produces diabetes regardless of the outcross, then that form of diabetes is dominant by definition but if your mother were a whippet, you wouldn't breed from her we're assuming responsible breeding, which means you're not breeding with...

Ok, I do know nothing at all about the politics of dog breeding, but I have been browsing happily on the Whippet Archive for the past few days... if the pedigrees are on there, are they not in the public domain? Is there a secret stash of whippet pedigrees somewhere? (Or all other breed...

there probably isn't any providing you can keep culling out the ones where there is a problem so that you only breed for health and/or if you can identify the potential auto-immune problems before they arise and weed them out This was my question in my opening post... how do you as breeders...

That's what I was asking earlier on - and perhaps it's better that we abandon my efforts to present a users guide to genetics because clearly I haven't got what it takes what matters is that breeders can create a healthy gene pool - which would mean finding out how many distinct and healthy...

Damn, I thought this was about as clear as it gets.... OK, I'll go away and think about it - the problem is that if I start getting too generic, we lose the precision, but maybe we don't need that. bottom line: line breeding is based on what you can see in a dog/bitch It's what you *can't*...

I'm not a breeder, so I don't have any particular position to defend, but from a purely genetic point of view, the problem with 'line breeding' is that you breed for phenotype, not genotype which is to say that you breed on what you can see, not the genetic structure underlying it. Every...

Carol - hi - I need to look into this further if I'm to be of any real use beyond the rather 'Noddy's guide to CoI' that I was taught and have read up on since (which, I have to say, came mostly from a fairly cynical genetics lecture who was of the opinion that 'responsible line breeding is an...

If you look at the site that lists dog diseases, what they're saying is that there's an increased incidence of any particular syndrome/disease/whatever in the named breed than the general population. So if they see 10 whippets per 100 dogs, say and 20 cases per 100 of Addison's are in whippets...

There's a forthcoming congress??? :blink: are interested amateurs allowed to attend? m

So what is needed, preumably, is a survey amongst vets and the pet-owning public to discover the true incidence of any particular condition and the breeding lines in which it's prevalent? m

Get and read - as an emergency :) - 'Don't Shoot the Dog' by Karen Pryor. It will revolutionise your understanding of dog behaviour in a sane, sorted, scientifically sound fashion (which sets it apart from virtually every other dog behaviourist out there) and will give you tools to sort this...

I would say well done to all of you for the integrity, honesty and candour of the posts - both on-list and off list. It would seem, that as various of you have said, the breed isn't anywhere near as much of a genetic catastrophe as some other pedigree breeds - - (when I was a vet I evolved a...

I have a friend who's a consultant ophthalmologist. I can ask her when we next meet if she's seen any inherited ocular diseases in whippets. I know from the orthopaedic surgeons back when I was an anaesthetist that they were becoming concerned by the inherited autoimmune arthritis, but that was...