The flat face and gorgeous skin folds of the English bulldog are just some of its typical traits. The head structure of dogs makes it tougher for the animal to pant, causing the dog to overheat easily in summers and dog also face difficulty in doing exercise.
Advertisement
The researchers sought to identify whether there is enough genetic diversity still existing within the breed to undertake significant improvements from within the existing gene pool.
Study co-author Niels Pedersen, from the University of California, Davis, said, “We tried not to be judgemental in our paper. Trying to manipulate diversity from within a breed if it doesn’t have much anyway is really very hard”, Pedersen said. However, “We found that little genetic “wiggle room’ still exists in the breed to make additional genetic changes”, he added”.
Pedersen added: “These changes have occurred over hundreds of years but have become particularly rapid over the last few decades”.
Perhaps the time has come for these “purist” breeders to start paying more attention to the health of these dogs instead of their appearance. This “outcrossing” of breeds could improve the health of bulldogs, though Pederson is sceptical. Some argue that any deviation from the breed’s standards would no longer make it an English Bulldog.
In the first broad-based assessment of the breed’s genetic diversity using DNA rather than pedigrees, the researchers confirmed earlier assumptions and provided a new glimpse of how many large regions of the genome had been altered over more than five centuries of breeding that focused primarily on changing the dog’s appearance. These could also have greatly diminished genetic diversity.
To measure this diversity, the team analysed the DNA of 102 bulldogs from the US, Finland, Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Argentina to identify common genes.
Groups in The Netherlands have called for a ban on English bulldogs based on a belief that the breed can no longer be returned to a health.
“This study highlights that there may be difficulties in adequately addressing the health problems of English bulldogs without out-crossing to other breeds, and all approaches should now be fully considered to ensure the quality of life of dogs is prioritised over appearance, popularity or profit”.
“We would also question whether further modifications, such as rapidly introducing new rare coat colours, making the body smaller and more compact and adding more wrinkles in the coat, could improve the bulldog’s already fragile genetic diversity”.
But, despite all the problems, the English bulldog remains one of the most popular dog breeds, particularly in the United States, where it was the fourth most popular pure breed in 2015.
One of the suggestions is to pair the dogs with the Olde English Bulldogge, a similar American breed. These were genetically compared with 37 English bulldogs presented to the US Davis Veterinary Clinical Services, to determine that the genetic problems of the English bulldogs were not the fault of commercial breeders or puppy mills.
Advertisement
The study appears in the July issue of Canine Genetics and Epidemiology.
