Finding a Healthy Doberman Puppy With a Long Lifespan (Puppy Corner #5)

We're back again with another episode of Puppy Corner here at Doberman Planet. This is a mini-series on this channel dedicated just to you, the new puppy buyers, where we release videos just like this one to help you live a long and healthy life with your Doberman. Today, we'll be talking about how to find a Doberman puppy with a truly long lifespan. And look, you may have heard of Dobermans living far under their expected official life expectancy numbers of 10 to 13 years, and you may have even heard of a few of those super Dobermans living to 14, 15, even 16 years of age. Well today, with the help of the Doberman Diversity Project, we're gonna do our absolute best to make sure you end up with one of those Doberman puppies with a whole lot of life left to live. Quick reminder, guys, I'm a dog trainer and not a veterinarian, but I do work closely with the veterinarians over at the Doberman Diversity Project for every episode of Puppy Corner, including this one, to help ensure the accuracy of what I present. And any research or studies that I mention will also be linked to in the description down below so you can check out those sources anytime. Look, the problem you face as a new Doberman puppy buyer out there looking for a puppy with a really long lifespan is fairly easy to describe to somebody. But what you should do about it can be a lot more complicated, but we're gonna do our best to keep it as simple as possible for you. Essentially, your main hurdle is this. The Doberman breed, just like many other purebred breeds out there, is prone to its own set of health issues and disorders and diseases, not the least of which is dilated cardiomyopathy, or DCM. Now this is where, this is a heart condition where the dog can kinda drop over seemingly out of nowhere with little or no warning. But there are other conditions besides DCM, which is a horrible one, conditions such as wobbler syndrome, which is a spinal cord and nervous system issue, von Wildebrand's disease, which is a blood clotting disease, bloat, which is where the stomach can fill with gases, it can even twist on itself, cutting off circulation, it can easily be fatal, and quite a few others. So what's happened as a result is Doberman puppy buyers like yourself have understandably demanded healthier puppies from their breeders, which includes proof of genetic testing for a lot of these health disorders. Well, breeders have responded by selecting mating pairs that don't have those genetic markers in their DNA so that they are ensured to have a passing health test when they go to test the dog down the road. Sounds great in theory, right? But unfortunately what happens is this means that the pool of potential mates is drastically lowered and a genetic bottleneck of sorts kinda happens and you now have a lot less genetic diversity in the Doberman breed, which leads to higher levels of inbreeding and higher levels of inbreeding leads to, yep, you guessed it, a shorter lifespan. And as if that wasn't bad enough, removing one specific DNA marker that one health test looks for in the genetic code might actually lead to an increase of the frequency of other health conditions that are usually recessive in nature. They might crop back up more often. So that's the big problem the Doberman breed is facing right now, guys. Shorter lifespans due to more genetic diseases and disorders or shorter lifespan due to higher levels of inbreeding, less genetic diversity, and potentially rare disorders becoming more common. Really is a bad place for this breed to be right now. Sadly, the old standard lifespan of the Doberman Pintrea of being 10 to 13 years really is proving slowly to be less and less accurate. In fact, there was a study done in 2018 where the cause of death of 5,663 different dogs were looked at. And of those, 25 different breeds were represented. And of those 25 breeds, the Doberman Pintrea had the shortest lifespan with a median age of death of just seven years and eight months. This is just a really stressful place to be for the breed as a whole, but especially for your puppy buyers out there looking for a puppy with a long lifespan. What do you do? Do you look for a puppy that scores really well on all the health tests? Or do you look for a puppy that has a high level of genetic diversity, lots of diversity in their genetic background? Because I can pretty much guarantee you you're not gonna find both. Not anymore. Well, the answer to this really, guys, is to find a balance. That's how you're gonna find a Doberman with a long lifespan. Not by putting all your eggs in just the results of one health test or even a set of health tests. Unfortunately, the genetic diversity of a Doberman, while a super insightful thing to check for and very powerful into the potential longevity of that dog and to kinda get insights into that, it's not something that's asked for very often by Doberman puppy buyers, and it's certainly not tested for very often by breeders. Therefore, most of us usually have no way of knowing how genetically diverse our dog is or isn't until we get him home and finally do that health test, that little cheek swab DNA test ourselves to find out. Now, that includes me and my Doberman, Arlo. He looked great on paper, but once I got him home and I did the cheek swab and sent it away, I found out that he had a very high coefficient of inbreeding or COI number. Now, he looked great on paper otherwise, and of course, my breeder did not test for genetic diversity like most breeders out there, so I really had no way of noticing this or knowing this until I tested him myself. And of course, that higher COI number means that there's potentially more inbreeding in my dog Arlo's past, which means less genetic diversity, which means potentially a shorter lifespan. Okay, so let me give you a quick scenario here. Let's say you search the world high and low looking for the perfect dog. You find a breeder who does every health test under the sun on the parents, and it looks like that they're clear of absolutely everything. Essentially, it looks like you found the perfect dogs on paper. Well, you did all this legwork just to avoid the potential of an early death for your dog. Well, in actuality, you might have actually made the situation worse and made a higher likelihood of an early death for your dog, believe it or not, because the chances are, if your dogs pass every single one of those health tests, that they're also not very genetically diverse and there's much higher levels of inbreeding in their past. And yes, this is even the case if they're clear of all those genetic markers for all those health tests that they do. Take DCM, for example. Your dog can be completely clear of all of those and it still doesn't mean that they're not gonna get DCM. These DCM tests look for markers that are risk factors for DCM. It doesn't look for the disease itself and it certainly doesn't check for all of the risk factors. So it's a very small little snippet of window and we've bred away from that so much that we're now lacking genetic diversity and you can see early deaths because of that. Sound like a lose-lose situation? Essentially it is, especially if you're just looking for a perfect dog on paper. I would suggest that while you're out there looking for a dormant puppy, guys, you'd be a little more forgiving about their health testing results and instead focus a little more on how long the ancestors of that dog lived and how the breeding pairs were selected by the breeder. Those things likely make a much bigger difference on the longevity of their puppies than just relying on simply the DNA health testing of one genetic marker that it's looking for in the DNA code that really is just looking for risk factors anyway and not the disorder itself. Luckily, there's something called estimated breeding values or EBVs and this is something that you might find dormant puppy buyers demanding to hear about in the future when they're buying a dormant puppy, not these health tests. And that might be a very good thing because EBVs in and of themselves might actually end up saving the dormant breed. So what are EBVs? Well, breeding based on EBVs is a science-based and well-tested method of selecting breeding pairs and has been proven to really enhance breeding decisions. Basically estimated breeding values measures the breeding potential of an animal for a specific trait like having or not having DCM, for example, or for having a long lifespan, for example. It can look at all these dogs in a database and judge a mating pair's potential for passing on particular traits using statistics and probabilities. It basically does what you and I try to do as humans when we're researching the history of a certain puppy's lineage, only it does it a whole lot more accurately. In fact, these EBVs are such a powerful way to improve a breed's health. It's already been used by at least one guide dog school to help reduce the effects of hip dysplasia in their breeding stock. I'll link to this information in the sources down below this video, but essentially this guide dog school set out to eliminate hip dysplasia of their German shepherds. They had hundreds of German shepherds and they decided to start selecting breeding pairs based on EBVs, not based on how good their hips looked. Sounds counterintuitive, right? You'd think they would pick the best looking hips and breed them with the best looking hips, but no, they selected the dogs that had the best EBVs chances of breeding to make good hips. Well, what was the result? They went from just 34% of their German shepherd dogs having excellent ratings on their hips to 93%, from 34% to 93% having excellent hips in just eight generations of breeding. That's absolutely an insane improvement, guys. And again, it's not based on good hips to good hips and breeding those, it's based on breeding dogs that had higher EBVs. Unfortunately, guys, this science is still relatively new and there's very few publicly available EBVs out there, but the Dormant Diversity Project is working on creating such a thing for dilated cardiomyopathy or DCM, which is the biggest killer of this breed right now. And really to solve this issue, they're relying on donations from people like you of their genetic health test results from DNA kits, such as that MBARC DNA kit that I'm always mentioning on my channel. If you send the health test results from your kit in, that will really help, especially if you accompany it with echocardiogram results or halter monitor results from your vet. With all that data, hopefully the Dormant Diversity Project can accomplish the goal of creating EBVs for DCM. If that happens, that's just gonna be groundbreaking for saving this breed, guys, and increasing, not decreasing, the longevity of this dog. This is just a huge reason, guys, why I'm so passionate of donating your dog's MBARC DNA results to the Dormant Diversity Project. Okay, so what is one method you can use right now to potentially get a dormant puppy with a long lifespan? Well, one of the most powerful things, honestly, that you can do is to look into the ancestral longevity of whatever litter you're considering. Get the pedigrees for the mother and the father that go back as many generations as you can and find the answer to two questions. Find the answer to that, what age did their ancestors generally die and what did their ancestors generally die of? If you can find the answer to those two questions as far back as you can on their pedigree, that could give you a good idea of what to expect with a puppy from the litter of those two dogs. Now, you're looking for patterns and trends, and those trends can tell you if the dogs in this line tend to die at a young age, do they tend to die from dilated cardiomyopathy, from other things, or do they have a really long lifespan? This is essentially what EBVs do, but you're gonna be doing it yourself, and sure, you can't run the advanced statistical calculations in your head, but you can look for those trends and patterns and feel a bit more comfortable and confident about the longevity of whatever puppy you're getting. So how do you go about getting this information? Well, really, you treat it kind of like any other family tree investigation, like you might do into your own family tree. I would start with just talking to the breeder first to find out what they know about the parents of this litter and then of the parents' parents of this litter. Go back as far as you can and see what kind of answers you can get. Now, there are some problems with this, right? Because the breeders may not be super forthcoming with the information, and also they might have some large gaps in their knowledge of the history of this line of Dobermans, but you can use that as a starting point. Then from there, you can go on to some of maybe the online databases that have some of this information out there, such as dobequest.org or doberbase.ru or dobermans, with two N, .cz. Now, these are databases that hold some of this information, but keep in mind that this information is based on owners inputting it, so it's not always put in. It's certainly not complete information, but those are great places to start filling in the answers to those two questions for as many ancestors as you can on your dog's pedigree. And as you go, guys, definitely use a little logic, especially when you're getting information from the breeder to kind of determine if what they're saying makes sense. For example, if they tell you every one of the dog's ancestors had a lifespan of over 10 years of age, and we know that the average lifespan is closer to seven and a half years of age, well, then they're either maybe not being super truthful or maybe there's just big gaps in their knowledge. They don't know some of the other examples in that line, but there's something, to me personally anyway, that would be a little bit of a red flag. Essentially, guys, it all comes down to this. As a puppy buyer, just look for a healthy balance between health test results, how the mating pairs were selected, and the longevity of that dog's ancestors. Avoid the urge of relying solely on health test results, guys, I know it's hard, but just be okay with less than perfect health test results if some of these other factors are looking really good, and this is your best chance to ending up with a puppy with a long lifespan. Trying to pick a puppy that'll have a really long lifespan really is more of an art than it is an exact science, and there's some luck mixed in there as well. Just remember to not rely on the perfect dog on paper in terms of health test results, because that can be very dangerous, especially with the Doberman breed. Guys, if you haven't already, I'd really urge you to get your Doberman DNA health tested. There's just no replacement for it. Despite what you've heard from your breeder about your dog's history, there may be a lot more lurking under the surface that you just don't know about it. Things like the coefficient of inbreeding that shows your dog's genetic diversity, that's a hugely insightful number into your dog's potential longevity, and there's just no replacement for getting that number. So get your dog DNA health tested. I'll put a link in the description down below to my video about how to do that right at home easily. I'll also link to another video that will show you how to donate those test results to the Doberman Diversity Project that will really help them further their research into eliminating some of these scary disorders from the Doberman breed. Thank you so much for watching another episode of Puppy Corner here on Doberman Planet. This is a miniseries dedicated to the new puppy buyer and brought to you with the help of the good people over there at the Doberman Diversity Project. Keep taking care of your dogs, guys. Good luck on your puppy search, and I'll see you next time.