Could our craving for cute dog breeds be costing them their health?
6 September 2021
A recent survey of UK vets reported that nearly 60% of flat faced dogs they see need treatment for related health issues.
Linda Rutherford, a vet at the Queen Mother Hospital wants people to think twice before getting certain types of designer dogs due to the health problems that they have to deal with.
Hayley Pearce met Linda in her new series Hayley Goes… where she was operating on Missy, an English Bulldog who was is in for an operation to help her breathe more easily.
Linda says,
“There’s hardly any room for her to breathe. We do about 4 or 5 of these (operations) a week on English Bulldogs, French Bulldogs and Pugs.”
Hayley asks why they tend to have more breathing problems than other dog breeds and Linda explains,
“It’s because of years of selective breeding or inbreeding. So people have chosen to go for the dogs with the really flat faces and their bones have got shorter and shorter but their soft tissue, so that’s like the palette and the tongue and things, have stayed bigger than the skeleton of the face.
We’ve done this to them by breeding them for looks. It’s life threatening for them. It’s like they’re breathing through a straw.”
In order to help dogs like this, Linda says:
“It’s just about educating owners so they know how to care for them. The other thing we could do for them, the other thing we could think about is cross breeding them. So cross breeding a pug with another type of dog so you still get the traits of a pug and the personality and they look quite like a pug but hopefully their airway would be a bit better.”
