your Pointer’s adding to the pet overpopulation problem that concerns animal activists and environmentalists worldwide. Altering also reduces the risk of problems including mammary cancer in the female and testicular and prostate cancer in the male.
HEALTH CONCERNS
With a little luck and grace, the well-cared-for Pointer often lives to be 12 to 14 years of age, acting hale and hearty for most of those years. Unfortunately, all breeds of domesticated dog suffer from some hereditary problems, though the Pointer’s problems are relatively few.
HIGH-ENERGY DOG
Pointers are not the best choices as companions for those who live in an apartment. Pointers don’t pretend to be city slickers. Hundreds of years have been invested in making the Pointer a wide-ranging, highly energetic dog, and confining the Pointer to close quarters for long periods of time is likely to produce a neurotic, destructive and unhappy dog.
A chief concern among Pointer breeders is hip dysplasia, commonly referred to as HD. This is a developmental disease of the hip joint. One or both hip joints of the affected dog have abnormal contours. Some dogs might show tenderness in the hip, walk with a limp or swaying gait or experience difficulty getting up. Symptoms vary from mild temporary lameness to severe crippling in extreme cases. Treatment may require surgery. Even though hip dysplasia is not very common in the Pointer, enough cases have been reported to merit breeders’ having appropriate testing done on their stock. Owners should ask to see hip clearances on the litter’s parents.
Some occasions of a relatively rare and unusual disease known as neurotropic osteopathy have been documented in the breed as well. What appear to be skeletal injuries occur somewhere in the age range of three to nine months as a result of degeneration of the spinal cord.
There are reports of some skin problems, including demodectic mange. Regular grooming procedures are important in that they prevent any of these skin problems from progressing to an advanced stage.
Eye problems such as entropion and progressive retinal atrophy (PRA) have been recorded by careful breeders, but not on an alarming basis. Here again, purchasing a Pointer from a respected breeder who has eye testing done is extremely important.
Pointers make great cycling companions, if trained to run safely beside the bike.
The Pointer of the proper shape, balance and proportion creates a picture of a lithe, elegant dog of noble carriage, able to perform in the field with speed and agility for the whole day long if necessary. The question that arises, however, is, what tells us if a Pointer does, in fact, have the right make and shape, balance and proportion?
The answers are found in the breed standard. Breed standards are very accurate descriptions of the ideal specimen of a given breed. Standards describe the dog physically, listing all of a breed’s anatomical parts and indicating how those parts should look. The standard also describes the breed’s temperament and how it should move (gait).
The standard is the blueprint that breeders use to fashion their breeding programs. The goal, of course, is to move one step closer to that ever-elusive picture of perfection with each succeeding generation. A breed standard is also what dog-show judges use to measure which of the dogs being shown compares most favorably to what is required of that breed.
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