Becoming BY JACQUELYN FOGEL When opportunity Knocks….
I am a huge fan of people who recognize and take advan- tage of opportunities when they arise. No excuses, like the time isn’t right, I just started something else, I need to finish this first, I don’t have the money, time, energy to pursue this…. Recognizing opportunity has been one of my guiding principles as I have traveled through life, and I have never been sorry when I extended myself to meet the challenge of an unexpected opportunity.
Recently I have had opportunities extended to me that I could not resist. They came in the form of a bedlington terrier puppy bred by an unknown breeder from unknown sire and dam, and from a friend’s unex- pected retirement from breeding. I had a vague idea of the background and pedigree of the unknown pup- pies, but had not seen any of the dogs within the first three generations of the pedigree. I took the plunge and committed to buying a puppy I had never met, and bringing home a 10-year old dog I had not seen since he was a puppy. It all started with my breeding program that is heav- ily foundationed on the famous Willow Wind dogs. When I first started breeding, everybody insisted on doing the health test du jour – the DNA test for copper toxicosis the COMMD DNA test offered by VetGen. We all thought we were doing the right thing – it was the newest technology available, and it offered a rela- tively low cost, painless way out of a health problem that many breeders were facing. In hindsight, we were not as careful with this new technology as we should have been. We didn’t have an actual gene identified, we had a link to a marker that the scientific community in this country thought was causing the disease. Twenty years later we are realizing the folly of our blind adherence to this test. We always knew there was about a 30% chance the test results were inaccu- rate, but most of us counted on the 70% accuracy to at least guide us in the right direction. What we didn’t count on was that the test was probably capturing something not at all related to copper toxicosis. Only recently has research from the UK identified a different genetic link, ABCA12 – one that is similar to the DNA found in people with Wilson’s disease – also a copper storage disease. The test offered in the USA identified a marker that is not at all related to Wilson’s disease, though it is still being used, and it is still recommend- ed by the Parent Club. In this country we have been
somewhat fortunate to have very few false negative results from the COMMD DNA test, so it was never an insurmountable issue. Unfortunately there have been many cases in the UK where dogs were identified as clear, then used in breeding programs, only to find years later that they were actually affected by the dis- ease, and produced affected offspring. This has been devastating to breeding programs in Europe. That didn’t mean we did no harm in this country. As we relied upon the COMMD test, we eliminated many dogs from our breeding programs. Some of those dogs went on to live long, otherwise healthy lives, but they were spayed and neutered. It was a per- fect storm of ramped up spay/neuter mania pushed by the Animal Rights people, misguided over-protective- ness of bloodlines, and a test that wasn’t actually iden- tifying the disease we thought it was. We further lim- ited an already small gene pool to include only dogs that we thought were safe. Except they weren’t. As we shrank the gene pool, we did not see the diseases we were locking in with our breeding programs. We line- bred, and sometimes even in-bred what we thought were our healthy dogs. We didn’t see the other dis- eases. And then, fifteen years after all that testing began, we started to see an unexpected rise in the number of dogs dying of kidney disorder and auto- immune disease – not copper toxicosis. I have long suspected that the huge number of bedlington deaths credited to copper toxicosis was widely exaggerated by vets who assumed that was the disease they were seeing because that was the “bedlington disease.” Any bedlington that died was given a copper toxicosis diagnosis whether or not any bloodwork or biopsy was done to confirm the diagno- sis. But the symptoms these dogs exhibited mirrored symptoms caused by kidney disorders and auto- immune diseases. We also know that many dogs biop- sied or tested as affected with copper toxicosis did not
110 • S how S ight M agazine , F ebruary 2018
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