Reflections on Owning a Stud Dog
in the Age of BCM
Virginia Zurflieh, Scarborough Boxers
Once upon a time in the olden days (say, 1973), if you bred or bought and finished a nice male boxer with an outstanding (lots of red ink), linebred pedigree, the logical next step on his career path was to try to make him a Sire of Merit. If you had lots of money, that goal was relatively easy to achieve. You simply gave your dog to a top handler to be specialed for a year or two, won the requisite number of Groups, BIS and BISS with him, advertised him a bit, and his SOM almost automatically followed. Actually, the same is true in 2003: I would be hard pressed to think of a single top male special in the last 20 years that did not reach SOM status sooner or later.
If you didn’t have lots of money, making him a SOM wasn’t nearly as easy, but you still felt obliged to try. Why? Well, for one thing, because – like the mountain – he was there; and for another, you not only had a lot of emotion wrapped up in that dog you had bred and/or raised, but it was plain to see that some of those top specials were no better than your dog (at least to your loving eyes), and a few of them were really pretty bad, even by the most objective standards.
So what was a poor, but aspiring, would-be SOM owner to do? Simple: you took a small, regular ad in The Boxer Review, and you advertised till the cows came home. You advertised your dog’s illustrious wins (S______ finishes with a 5-pt. major on the Colorado Centennial Circuit!); you advertised his illustrious pedigree (Bred to Produce!); you advertised his new litters (Watch for S______’s kids x the beautiful Fashion Hint dau, Can Ch _____ ______!); you advertised his winning offspring (S______ congratulates his winning kids on their GREAT showing at the 1982 ABC!); you bred him to every bitch you owned, no matter how suitable (or not); and you did it again and again and again and again. Persistence and determination were the keys to achieving your goal, although it helped if your dog sired a notable winner or two early on.
What does all this have to do with Boxer Cardiomyopathy? Well, not much in 1973… but everything today. Because while everyone was line- and inbreeding to the top winners and the nice dogs whose owners were determined to keep up with the Joneses – i.e. to make their own dog a SOM on the cheap – BCM got loose in the gene pool, gobbled up most of the clear genes, and was soon a very big frog in a very small pond. And it really wasn’t anybody’s “fault,” despite what people with 20-20 hindsight claim.
According to an article by Wendy Wallner, DVM, “This condition was identified and defined by Dr. Neil Harpster back in the late 60s and early 70s. The first paper was published in 1983 and was the result of examination of 64 boxers over a 15 year period with varying presentations of the condition.”
(http://hometown.aol.com/drboxer/bcm1.html) So, other than one or two cardiologists who just happened to be practicing in the right place at the right time and were smart enough to put two and two together, there was no one who knew why their young (4-6 years) boxer was having “fainting spells” (syncope) (my vet diagnosed epilepsy in one young bitch of mine and prescribed dilantin and phenobarbitol), or why a seemingly healthy 6-year-old ran out into the yard one morning and just dropped dead. Even the most ethical breeders couldn’t test their dogs for a condition that virtually no one knew existed, and most breeders didn’t test for even well-documented conditions like hip dysplasia.
Of course there was plenty of gossip when a notable 4 or 5-year-old died suddenly, and numerous raised eyebrows when it was reported that the dog had died of a bee sting, or had walked through ant poison at a rest stop, or had been hit by a car crossing a narrow country road off-lead. It seems to be human nature for dog people to take pleasure in the misfortunes of other dog people, but the thing that didn’t seem to occur to the pleasure-takers was that the early death of a prominent line-/inbred sire was everyone’s misfortune, considering that almost everyone’s dogs were closely related to the one that had died a sudden, mysterious death.
By the late 1980’s, that thought had occurred to most boxer fanciers (remember – Neil Harpster’s first paper on BCM was published in 1983), and the finger-pointing and witch-hunting began in earnest. By the time the American Boxer Charitable Foundation was established in 1995 and the ABC conducted a survey of its membership as to what kind of medical research the members wanted the ABCF to fund, heart disease won hands down. Unfortunately, even after breeders had acknowledged the problem and set out to do something about it, it was still four or five years before individual breeders were able to take practical, affordable steps to test for and try to eliminate Boxer Cardiomyopathy from their own breeding programs.
I didn’t test my own dog till March 2000, when I rented a Holter monitor from TeleLab (now LifeWatch) and sent the tape back to them to be read. At that point, Max was over five years old, his first champion had already finished, and several others were pointed. But the day I mailed that first Holter tape back to TeleLab was the day owning a
champion- producing stud dog became more a reason for apprehension than a source of pride; and zero (or very few) VPCs on his annual Holter test became a more important goal than the coveted ABC SOM designation.
And I’m not alone. The other boxer fanciers who have acknowledged the presence, the insidiousness, and the hereditary nature of Boxer Cardiomyopathy are in the same boat. The typical late onset of the North American version of the disease makes owning a boxer stud dog like owning a ticking time bomb, with no idea whether, or (worse) when, it will go off. The owner of the world’s “most health-tested” male boxer – one who’s been cleared of SAS, HD, von Willebrand’s disease, hypothyroidism AND has had 0 to 5 VPCs on three previous Holters – is just as subject to a nasty and potentially tragic surprise when he Holters his dog for the fourth time as is the owner of a promising youngster who was just tested for the first time. And the most ironic aspect of that situation is that the older dog whose fourth Holter test results in 0 VPCs is no more “clear” of the disease than that promising youngster whose first test resulted in 0.
Even though I can’t agree with them, it’s easy for me to understand why some stud owners refuse to test at all, insisting that “the numbers don’t mean anything”; or test their dog only once, when he’s three, and advertise him as “Holter – Normal” for the rest of his life. It’s tough to live with your heart in your mouth for the 2-6 weeks it takes for a cardiology lab to process your dog’s annual Holter tape, and to know that even if the results are “good” this time, there will always be a next time. I used to take great pride in having bred and owned two ABC Sires of Merit and tremendous pleasure in the wins of my current dog’s beautiful offspring. But I’m beginning to wonder if – when Max is gone – I will ever have the courage to own another stud dog in this Age of BCM.
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