Page #3 - Health

What is OFA?

The OFA stands for Orthopedic Foundation for Animals (web site www.offa.org). The procedure: After a dog reaches the age of 24 months, their hips are x-rayed by a veterinary. If the x-rays of the hips joints are good, the x-rays are sent to the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals for their examination. If the depth of the hip sockets and the head of the leg bones are fitted to their standards, the breeder will receive an OFA certification number for that dog. If their hips are good the OFA grades their hips “Excellent”,“Good”, or “Fair”. If the shepherd had a positive identification (tattoo or micro-chip) at the time they were x-rayed, their OFA information will appear on their offspring’s litter registration papers just below the parent’s name. The OFA certification numbers can be verified on the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals web site.


What causes hip problems?

There are many contributing factors to hip problems. Certain health conditions can be inherited from the parents that can cause problems. It seems no one can pen point the exact problem that causes hip problems. There are many contributing conditions that can vary from litter to litter and hinder solving hip problems. We believe it’s primarily a nutrition problem. Number of puppies in a litter, inherited digestion conditions, health conditions of the mother, the mother’s nutrition before, during, and after whelping her litter are all contributing factors that can affect the nutrition of each puppy in a litter both during pregnancy and nursing. While x-raying hips and breeding OFA certified shepherds is a step in the right direction it may not be the total answer to hip problems. We believe breeding OFA certified parents and nutrition during pregnancy have helped us to avoid hip problems here at HeartStar.

Guarantees:

In general all of us want a guarantee there’s nothing wrong with our new puppy. The honest truth is there are no 100% guarantees with any living things. There are thousands upon thousands of possible combinations when breeding one shepherd to another. There are recessive genes that do not show up until crossed with another shepherd that carries the same recessive genes. Basically we breeders can only do our best to know the history of our shepherds and breed the best to the best. A problem breeding the same two shepherds may not show up in every litter they product.  We here at HeartStar are doing all we can do to provide you a shepherd with a great personality, temperament, appearance, and good health at a reasonable price. And we thank God we can still count puppies we have produced with problems on one hand.  (Please note: these problems mentioned here did not show up until months after the puppy was purchased).  In the event a puppy develops a serious problem most breeders offer a replacement puppy.  Why? From the financial side of breeding dogs it's easy to see that breeders can't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for veterinary care for an unfixable problem.  In order to offer a health plan for puppies breeders would need to raise their prices.  Higher prices would limit the average family the pleasure of owning a good shepherd.