American Water Spaniel
Health Survey

by Paul Morrison

After approximately two years the AWS community has finally gotten a health survey that is open to ALL AWS owners and not just the small number that belong to our parent club. The survey is found on the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals (OFA) website at www.offa.org. To get to the survey just go to the OFA website and page down to the bottom of the Home page. There you will see a list of health surveys for a variety of breeds with the first one listed being the one for the AWS. Click on the breed name and you will be sent to the survey page. Once there you can chose to submit information on a dog (living or dead) or read through the statistics that have been obtained so far.

Since the design of the survey is a little bit lacking, I suggest that you read through the statistics before deciding to submit information. By reading the statistics first you will get a better idea of just what sort of disorders fall into specific categories. You will want to know this ahead of time to speed and ease the time it takes you to input information. Once you hit that submit button there is no going back. The survey does not take any personal information regarding either the dog or the owner which is both a blessing and a curse. This is a blessing because it may make more people comfortable with submitting the information and a curse because we have no way of going back and updating information on a dog previously entered.

This is but one of the problems with the survey itself. Without the ability to keep the health information on a living dog updated the survey lacks a bit in its ability to really pinpoint trouble in the breed. For example, let's say you input information on a four year old dog that has follicular dysplasia but is otherwise healthy. Let's say that a year goes by and he develops epilepsy. So, you want to get this information into the survey system. What do you do? Your only choice is to input the information as a separate dog but that skews the numbers. Instead of reporting one dog with two problems you now have reported what the system will consider to be two dogs with two separate problems. If he develops yet another problem somewhere down the road it gets even words. This is not a minor problem with the survey but what we have is better than anything we have ever had before so we will just have to deal with this. It is too bad that a system could not have been enacted that would have allowed the input of the dog's AKC registration number and allowed for the owner to update the data on the dog when and if appropriate.

Using AKC registration numbers would have also kept the system a bit more relevant. As it stands now anyone that got a dog from a shelter and were told it was an AWS could input data even though the dog may not have truly been a purebred AWS. It would have been nice to avoid such problems with the survey but, as has been said, what we have now is better than what we had in the past. It is just a shame that it is not better.

I urge all of you to check out and participate in the survey. It can only be helpful to the breed in the long run. Remember, even if your dog is healthy it is important for you to submit information.

To quickly reach the survey simply click on the AWS Health Survey icon below the menu on the left of this page.

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