Hip & Elbow Scoring

One of the health testing requirements for Bernese is hip and elbow scoring. Cody is now 18 months old, which is actually commonly agreed to be the upper 'ideal' age range to complete these; although I will add they can indeed be carried out at any time once the dog is over a year old. So we took Cody in today at the vets for both his hip and elbow x-rays, which will be sent to the BVA (British Veterinary Association) for scoring, this is done based on the degree of dysplasia of the joint - the top possible score is 53:53 so 106 - the lower the score, the better.

Every breed has an 'mean' score (whereby you mix all the results of all the dogs together), which gives you an 'average' score which isn't actually the score of the 'average' dog, if that makes any sense?! Let me explain a bit more - to create that number, you are going to have some dogs with very high scores, which is going to skew the picture, and make you think the hip status in the breed is worse than it really is. For example, the mean score for Bernese is 15. Therefore, someone might think that breeding from a dog with a score of anything under that would be perfectly acceptable - and until recently, the BVA's recommendation actually followed this. However, it has now been adjusted to 'well under' the BMS instead.

They are now also publishing the 'median' scores, which means there are an equal number of both lower and higher scores, so what the dog in the middle of the populations hip score is. Instead of using the BMS, you are actually better to use the median scores to determine your 'cut off' point for breeding dogs - they need to be under the median score (for Bernese, 10) - unless in the case of an otherwise exceptional dog (and even then it should be very carefully considered). 

Elbows are quite different in that you only have four possible results, 0-4 (or a mix of those, such as 1/0 which would make a total score of 1). Again, you are hoping for the lower score the better and advice is to only breed from dogs which score 0/0 (occasionally, like with the hips, you could consider a score of 1 but it is an exception to the rule).

Anyhow, Cody got on just fine today, I had planned carefully how I wanted things to go - we arrived, took him in for his pre-med and then waited back in the car until he was literally ready to go straight in; we left him after they had injected anaesthetic and he was totally zonked. Then afterwards when he had sorta woken up (basically only opened his eyes, although when we walked in he tried to get up to see us, bless him!) we put him in our car until he was okay to go home. He's been sleeping for the afternoon and ate his dinner with great enthusiasm! 

Naturally, I am hoping Cody will come back with amazing scores...We looked at his x-rays with the vet; the elbows look fine and the hips look okay too, although one seems to be noticeably better than the other so I would expect the scores to reflect that. Now we've just got to wait 4-6 weeks to find out!