UFAW website to provide advice on genetic welfare problems of companion animals

 

Background and Aims

We are planning, as a way of helping with improvements in breed-related welfare problems in companion animals, to set up a website to provide advice about this to prospective pet owners.

 

The idea is that if someone is thinking of buying a dog, cat, rabbit or any other companion animal of a particular strain or breed, they would be able to consult the website to see what inherited welfare problems may occur, and what checks they may need to make with breeders or suppliers in order to avoid buying affected or carrier animals and, in so doing, unintentionally perpetuating the problem.

 

Many genetic diseases occur in companion animals. For example, in a paper recently published in Nature (2005), Lindblad-Toh and others, commenting on the diversity among dog breeds produced through selection for various traits during their family history, noted ‘As a consequence of these stringent breeding programmes and periodic population bottlenecks…, many of the ~400 modern dog breeds also show a high prevalence of specific diseases, including cancers, blindness, heart disease, cataracts, epilepsy, hip dysplasia and deafness.’ Some such diseases arose as unforeseeable corollaries in the development of breeds, but in other cases, adverse welfare impacts have arisen as direct consequences of the features being selected for. So, respiratory difficulties occur in some breeds because of selection for shortened noses, and others are predisposed to bacterial skin infections as a result of breeding for excess, deeply folded skin. Although efforts by responsible breeders, veterinarians and geneticists to try to tackle some of these diseases are gathering momentum, it is surprising that there is not more widespread concern about these matters in view of their very significant welfare impact. 

 

The pet buying public has a very important role to play in helping to eradicate genetic diseases and poor welfare traits. If no one bought animals of breeds or lines affected by such problems the disease-prone lines would be replaced by their healthier cousins.

 

UFAW thinks that part of the difficulty is that the pet buying public are often not aware of the welfare problems that can occur (CAWC Working Group, 2008). Even where information on hereditary diseases and poor welfare traits is available, the welfare consequences may not be explicit. For example, cursory ‘Googling’ may reveal that Cavalier King Charles Spaniels are among the several toy breeds that can be affected by syringomyelia, but what matters when it comes to choosing pets is not the name of the disease, or the description of its pathology, but how it feels to the animal. Syringomyelia is the presence of fluid-filled spaces in the spinal cord. These arise as a consequence of a hereditary mismatch between the size of brain and the skull in which the hind-brain is compressed into the canal through which the spinal cord passes, so affecting the pressure around the cord. Affected dogs show signs of neck and head pain that can be extremely severe and which can begin when the animal is young and persist throughout its life.

 

It seems likely that if this was widely known, people would be very careful about buying, and thus perpetuating the breeding of, potentially affected animals. The Companion Animal Welfare Council’s (2006) Report on Welfare Aspects of Modifications, through Selective Breeding or Biotechnological Methods, to the Form, Function, or Behaviour of Companion Animals (details below) includes examples of the many hereditary problems arising from selective breeding in companion animals (from goldfish to cats and dogs) that can severely affect quality of life.

 

For 10,000 years the selective breeding of dogs has been focused on aspects of performance, behaviour or appearance. This approach also characterises the breeding of many other species of companion animals. It is time now to emphasise the need for priority to be given to welfare. UFAW thinks that making available clear information on the welfare consequences of hereditary diseases and poor welfare traits is key to this. The charity now wishes to collect information on the physical effects of genetic problems and on their impact, for example through causing pain or discomfort, on the animal’s quality of life, as part of developing a website to provide pet owners with the information they need to inform their choice of breed and of responsible breeder. 

References

On

CAWC Working Group (2008) Fixing ancestral problems: genetics and welfare in companion animals focusing on syringomyelia in Cavalier King Charles Spaniels as an example. Report of the Companion Animal Welfare Council Workshop, Tuesday 29th April 2008, House of Lords. Available from CAWC  www.cawc.org.uk. 

Companion Animal Welfare Council (2006)Welfare Aspects of Modifications, through Selective Breeding or Biotechnological Methods, to the Form, Function, or Behaviour of Companion Animals. CAWC.  www.cawc.org.uk.

Lindblad-Toh, K., Wade, C.M., Mikkelsen, T.S. et al (2005) Genome sequence, comparative analysis and haplotype structure of the domestic dog. Nature 438, 803- 819.

 

How you can help

We are seeking the assistance of others interested in helping to tackle this problem (might this double as an undergraduate project or assignment?). A large amount of work needs to be done to collect and collate information for presentation at the website and we are seeking volunteers who can help with this. If you do not a have access to a library but have access to the world wide web, we think it may be possible for quite a lot of relevant information to be harvested from the internet.

What we would like volunteers to do is, for a breed and specific genetic welfare problem identified in discussion with us, to collect information under the following headings:

 

  • Breed     - name of the breed
  • Condition – name of the condition
  • Clinical and pathological effects – list and briefly outline

  • Diagnosis – brief outline of how the condition is diagnosed.

  • Welfare impact – outline how the condition impacts the individual’s welfare eg through causing fear or pain.

  • Duration of welfare impact – how long do the adverse welfare impacts last? Seconds, days, weeks, years?

  • Assessment of severity of welfare impact – what inferences can be made about the intensity of the adverse feelings caused? Eg mild, moderate or severe pain or fear.

  • Number of animals affected – it is often possible to make an, at least first, estimate of the number of animals likely to be affected based on knowledge of proportion of population affected and total population size (ideally at both national and global levels). The basis of estimates should be made clear and comment made as to their reliability.

  • Genetics – brief outline of information on the genetics of the problem, if known  (eg associated with a widely prevalent recessive allele).  
  • Detection of affected and carrier animals – Can clinically unaffected animals carry the harmful genes? Can carriers be detected? If so, how?
  • References to the sources of information used

 

Data submitted to the project will be scrutinised by UFAW staff and UFAW will have editorial and quality control responsibility for material posted at the website.

 

We wish, initially, to focus on conditions that have a clear adverse impact on the welfare – the quality of life – of the animal. We are keen to try to cover, from the outset, a wide spread of taxa (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals). 

 

The website will acknowledge all those who have helped with the project and contributed to the information featured on it.

 

Some sources of information

The following may be some of the sites that you may wish to visit when beginning your search for information. However, even if these are relevant, you will need to expand your search beyond these. You may also find breed society websites such as The Kennel Club – www.thekennelclub.org.uk good sources of information.

 

  • www.cawc.org.uk  The Companion Animal Welfare Council’s (2006) Report on ‘Welfare Aspects of Modifications, through Selective Breeding or Biotechnological Methods, to the Form, Function, or Behaviour of Companion Animals’ is available at this site. 
  • www.vetsci.usyd.edu.au/lida LIDA - Listings of inherited disorders in animals - is an on-line database managed by Dr Paul McGreevy of the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Veterinary Science which is designed to gather, collate and disseminate data on the prevalence of inherited disorders among Australian dogs.
  • www.upei.ca/cidd. The homepage of the Canine Inherited Disorders Database This database seeks to reduce the incidence of inherited disorders in dogs by providing information to owners and breeders, and to facilitate the best management possible of these conditions by providing current information to veterinarians. It is a joint initiative of the Sir James Dunn Animal Welfare Centre at the Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island, and the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association.
  • www.vet.cam.ac.uk/idid The inherited diseases dogs database, run by the University of Cambridge Veterinary School. This web site contains a guide to diseases/conditions of pure bred dogs which are likely to be transmitted wholly or partly through a genetic mechanism.

 

How to start

If you are interested in contributing to this project by collecting data for UFAW to edit, assimilate and include on this new website, please contact James Kirkwood at UFAW (01582-831818) to discuss selection of a suitable genetic welfare problem on which to start.

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