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How To Spot Red Flags In Breeder Health Tests
“Health tested” isn’t always healthy.
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Have you ever scrolled a breeder’s website and thought, wow, they test for everything?
Listing tests is the easy part.
Knowing whether those results are any good is the hard part.
Here are 5 red flags to look out for. 👇🏼
Weekly Bite
If you’ve been here since the fall, you may remember…
That first one covered vetting a dam and sire when everything’s done by the book. Aka assigned a CHIC number by the OFA (the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals, the main US health-test registry).
Here’s Rogue from the backyard breeder guide, CHIC number and all:
A dog without a CHIC number can still be health tested and bred responsibly.
It just means you’re the one reading the results. These are the 5 red flags to catch when you do.
The 5 Red Flags
1️⃣ Passing, But Barely
OFA hips grade Excellent, Good, or Fair. All three pass.
Borderline, Mild, Moderate, and Severe don’t.
So “OFA hips!” can mean a deep-seated Excellent or a barely-cleared Fair. And a Borderline can quietly stay off the website.
Check: the actual grade word, not just “tested.”
K9 Scouter will disqualify any dam/sire the issuing registry doesn’t grade as a pass.
2️⃣ “Equivocal” Isn’t A Pass
Some results (thyroid is the common one) come back Equivocal: the lab result was questionable, so nothing was proven either way.
It proves the test was run. It doesn’t prove the dog cleared it. OFA’s own advice for an equivocal thyroid is retest in 3 to 6 months.
Check: the result word is Normal, not Equivocal.
K9 Scouter will count an Equivocal as inconclusive, never as a pass.
3️⃣ Expired Clearances
Not every clearance is forever. An eye (CAER) cert is valid for 12 months. Thyroid gets rechecked at 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8 years.
Yearly eye rechecks slip in practice. Not damning on its own. But an old cert is history, not a current clearance.
DNA results are the exception. Genes don’t change, so they never expire.
Check: the exam date against the test’s shelf life.
K9 Scouter will date-check every clearance, so you can see exactly how current each one is.
4️⃣ Preliminary, Not Final
OFA doesn’t finalize hips or elbows until the dog is 24 months old.
Anything earlier is a preliminary evaluation - a snapshot that can still change.
And a preliminary doesn’t count toward a CHIC number, no matter the grade.
Check: the dog’s age on the test date. The word “preliminary” is the tell.
K9 Scouter will disqualify any dam/sire whose hip or elbow prelim isn’t Excellent or Good.
5️⃣ The Vet Check Dodge
“The vet checked the hips and said they’re good.”
Maybe so. But a vet visit isn’t an evaluation submitted to an independent registry like OFA or PennHIP.
You can’t grade it, and you can’t look it up.
Check: a registry record you can pull up yourself on ofa.org, like Rogue’s up top, not somebody’s word for it.
K9 Scouter will only trust records it can verify with a registry. A verbal all-clear doesn’t count.
Bottom Line: A health test isn’t a checkbox. Read four things before you trust one: the grade (not just “done”), the age at test (final, not preliminary), the date (not expired), and the source (a registry, not the breeder’s vet). If those answers aren’t there when you ask, that’s your answer.
Tail End
Have you ever evaluated a breeder's health test results? |
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Until next Thursday, ✌️
Sam
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