Leonberger Health : Our Goals

Our main goals concerning Leo Health are:

• Healthy dogs to start with: We make sure our dogs have OFA-rated hips, elbows, eyes, thyroid, as well as an OFA cardiac evaluation, prior to breeding.
• Selecting for health: We do not stop our selection process with the sire and dam of a litter. We try to research all littermates of each parent, and littermates of each generation, as far back as we can get reliable information prior to making our breeding decisions. Every dog and each line has at least a few health-related issues present. We would much rather breed to a dog whose family history we know about, than to a dog we have no background information on. Despite exercising the utmost care, however, health issues can and do crop up in well-bred Leonbergers. As breeders, we do as much research as we can, but unfortunately, we do not have a crystal ball yet!
• Longevity: We look at causes and ages of death of dogs in the pedigrees of our own breeding dogs, as well as those we breed to. We would like to breed Leonbergers that have a longer lifespan and can live beyond the age of 9, but there are numerous environmental factors at play as well such as diet, chemical exposure, and pollution.
• Open sharing of data: We strongly support the Leonberger Open Health Registry and the Leonberger Database. Both are exciting tools with which we can improve Leonbergers in the future. By pinpointing the incidence of problems in our breed, we can make all make better educated breeding decisions.