As SM progresses, the supraoccipial bone resorbs

[MomObvious]

I do see many that are frustrated with the never ending unrelated facts that don't help breeders eliminate this disease.

While I completely agree with this statement, I am still grateful for the science fact based info. Understanding the total disease is a key to finding an end to it. However, I do believe that there are good breeders out there who WANT to breed SM/CM free dogs ( I admit this is a possibly a "idealistic") but do not know HOW to. I believe there was a dog from this forum who came from grade A scanned breed to protocol parents and still lose lost her too young life to SM......

This information is something we all need to know, if we wish to save this breed or see this breed saved (if possible) Sometimes I feel like it becomes "kill the messenger" because the science coming out of research on SM/CM is so hopeless on finding an answer to ending this terrible disease that effects more and more cavalier everyday. Its hard to hear for us who truly love our cavaliers.

[Margaret C]

I haven't seen anyone dismiss the finding that Rod posts but I do see many that are frustrated with the never ending unrelated facts that don't help breeders eliminate this disease.

Why do you think they are unrelated facts? How does anyone suppose that this disease will be eliminated unless the full extent of the problem and the processes that cause the condition are known?

I am a long time breeder and stud dog owner. I have been closely associated with efforts to provide researchers with the information that they need for many years and I know that we would be much closer to answers if some of the breeders on that forum had stopped denying a problem they already knew they had in their dogs and started doing something to find the cause.

Scanning their dogs when properly mature and sharing the results with researchers would have been a start.

Removing those that were SM affected would have prevented the rapid spread we are now seeing throughout the breed.

While Cavalier Club committee members are still breeding from unscanned underage dogs and one of the most 'dismissive of research' breeder's last litters had parents and grandparents with no eye test results, no indication of any other testing or support for voluntary health schemes and a very inbred COI of over 30% (despite a well documented history of SM in those lines) then the failure to eliminate any inherited condition in this breed cannot be blamed on researchers.

[Karlin]

Can you offer some specific examples of the "never ending unrelated facts" that some breeders (definitely not "breeders" collectively!!) find so baffling?

By contrast, what I have seen over a decade now are lots of ill-formed or deliberately obfuscating breeders stating that research results are "unrelated" (often displaying extraordinary ignorance, for people making real breeding decisions, about existing research which they clearly have not read or are unaware of at all!). As someone who has spoken directly with a wide range of the main researchers, attended all the principle seminars in the UK and followed research papers for going on a decade -- what I see is a wide range of papers from a wide range of researchers that have consistently duplicated key results from the very start and increasingly provided corroborating evidence for the basic suppositions that are now fairly widely accepted, except by... oh yeah... that same old group of breeders, many of whom don't test or test sporadically, and some of whom are known to have lied about dogs of their own breeding, even sent them abroad to get them out of sight of other breeders who know their test results. Sadly many of these dogs have gone on to be used for breeding in Canada and the US where people admire certain kennel names and don't hear about the dogs' test results or that they are known to scratch in the show ring.

I am quite serious about this -- please do list all those never ending unrelated facts! I would like to be presented with them so that people who DO follow research, can address those claims with some real research and real results, not these "neverending" attempts by far too many breeders and clubs to suggest there isn't the solid range of research that exists.

Perhaps the real problem is that, unfortunately for certain breeders, all ongoing research and all results point to the need for breeeders to try and solve this "problem" of SM by actually doing something:

* testing
* using MVD and SM protocols which actually DO show DEFINITE results (as opposed to their "we know everything so let us breed as we always have by our so-called years of experience that have utterly failed to eliminate MVD for decades...)
* removing poorly testing dogs from breeding programmes
* sharing results
* being honest with puppy buyers and other breeders
* using the schemes breeders themselves demanded but now find for this reason or that, they won't use
* considering outcrossing to other breeds
* changing their interpretation of breed conformation (see leading researcher Jacques Penderis's recent editorial noting the likelihood that head shapes chosen as "winning" shapes by show breeders are very likely resulting in the internal changes that lead to SM. This the same researcher who supplied the EFS DNA test so breeders can hardly claim this is someone who doesn't know his stuff on the breed.

So inconvenient is SM to the selling of puppies that the main clubs in the US STILL don't feel they need to give their breeder members or puppy buyers anything but the most minimal information about it on their websites.

There are many fantastic dedicated breeders out there who are absolutely exasperated by the same old crowd of breeders and the clubs trying to create confusion about research results.

Many of these breeders get dismissed by this same old crowd and have found dealing with the issue within club committees on several continents, almost impossible -- perhaps because they have had some solid results using the protocols and testing and these are inconvenient truths?

Anyway I do await a list of the conflicting facts as I know many of us would like a chance to address them all with REAL research results. While there should be a range of results from a range of researchers -- and the very nature of research is to test various hypotheses which will always produce some outlier results and some conflict (that's called the scientific method!) -- there are some very consistent results across a wide range of SM research.