Our goal is to breed healthy dogs so these results are the most important of all. It is very challenging analysing the results because every breeder wants to believe that their dogs don’t have any health problems – and every problem is painful to read about. I would love to be able to say we have no health problems but the only way to be able to say that is to never ask the question.
We have carried out 4 surveys of our owners now – the first in 1999 by snail mail. In 1999 all our dogs were all first cross miniature labradoodles and the oldest was only 5 years old. The survey and mostly focussed on size, shedding, coat management and allergenicity but we did confirm our suspicion that we had a problem with atopy ( allergies) , to our dismay nearly 20% of our dogs were showing some signs of being affected. The results helped us to identify the dogs responsible and breed away from the problem.
In the first online survey in 2014 we asked people whether their dog had been to a vet for “acute” health problems (conditions that occurred once or as a single episode) and “chronic” health problems which were recurrent through the dog’s life. If the survey shows one thing it is the importance of health insurance!
We found that, as one would expect, all health problems increased with age, but even young dogs get into trouble. 42% of dogs under 5 had never had any health problems but the remaining 58% had been to the vet for a range of acute health problems which included a range of accidents and injuries and a smaller number of recurrent problems like ear infections. With advancing age problems increase as can be seen in this chart and chronic problems rise steadily:
In the 2016 longevity survey we looked at specific chronic conditions and related these to age of onset. This graph explains why we saw what the raw data seemed to suggest to be an alarming level of arthritis in our dogs in this survey. Arthritis is very common in dogs over 14 years of age and half of our dogs live to over 14 years( see Longevity)
In 2014 a large study of the health of purebred and crossbred dogs in the UK and Australia looked at the incidence of different problems presenting to veterinary surgeries.
I compared our dog in the 2016 survey with their figures on the prevalence of particular conditions in all dogs in the study (my apologies to the authors as I’ve lumped a few things together – fortunately my analysis isn’t peer reviewed).
The graph below is very busy but I hope it will make sense! The blue column is the results from the 2014 health survey, the red is the prevalence in all of the dog reported in our survey and the green column is the proportion of these conditions in our dogs who went to the vet for any reason.
What this comparison shows is that for a whole range of problems our dogs perform well.
Over 30% of our dogs presented to the vet for conditions I have lumped as “miscellaneous accidents” which include dog bites, lacerations, choking, obstructions, tick and snake bites, bee stings, fractures and other injuries. These are the problems normal healthy dogs go to the vet for and can’t be attributed to breeding (except maybe they’re accident prone?). This is three times higher than the figures from the UK study.
They have very few problems with dental problems, anal glands, nails or heart disease, lipomas (fatty skin lumps) or conjunctivitis. These are all common problems afflicting pet dogs in the UK study. Dental problems are the second most common reason for dogs in the 2014 study but we saw very few dental problems in our survey. What they did have however is a much higher than expected prevalence of ear problems. We also identified an issue with glaucoma and were able to trace the parents of the dogs causing this problem and remove them from our breeding program.
In early 2025 we carried out another survey looking at health, longevity and temperament and had 1104 respondents. In this survey we were particularly interested in the health issues that have been identified as being more likely to occur in dogs desexed as babies as there has been growing concern about the health effects related to routine desexing of dogs and in particular desexing prior to 6 months of age. (See https://katesfamilypets.com/early-desexing-why-i-still-do-it/ for more discussion of this) in the survey.
The chart below summarises the health problems encountered in 1014 dogs.
As you can see the one serious health problem we have is ear infections. The next graph shows the incidence in our O’Connell Retrievers and Minigroodles. The O’Connell Retrievers are much less prone to ear infections but they are still a problem in them.
These dogs are all under 8 years of age. In most categories the O’Connell Retrievers perform better than the Minigroodles, except for a higher than desirable incidence of patella luxation in our O’Connells. Now that we have identified that problem we hope to eliminate or reduce it by identifying which dogs are causing this issue. Fortunately most of the luxations identified have been grade 1 and have not required surgery.
The health conditions identified in the literature as being higher in early desexed dogs are joint problems, urinary incontinence, and cancer
We found the following incidence of urinary incontinence (urinary sphincter mechanism incompetence or USMI)
Three studies looking at the incidence of USMI in early (less than 6 months) vs late spey have found that late spey incidence ranges from 3.7% to 10.7% and early spey from 4.6% to as much as 22% in large breed dogs. Our results have shown that the larger Groodles are showing signs of increased USMI but that the smaller dogs report fewer cases of USMI than in the literature and the incidence is comparable to that reported in the late speyed females.
The incidence of arthritis and cancer in the Minigroodles and O’Connell Retrievers is very low because they are a young cohort. However the Groodles contributed significantly to the higher incidence of arthritis in the larger population. They had an incidence of arthritis rising from 2.1% in under 4 year olds to 29.4% in dogs over 12 years old. This is reasonably comparable with reports in the literature, but it does lend support to the view that our groodles should not be desexed as babies and has contributed to our decision to stop breeding the larger groodles and focus on our Minigroodles.
In conclusion we believe that our dogs perform well. They have a major health problems with their ears, but otherwise are long lived and not significantly prone to identifiable genetic issues. With regards to the effect of early desexing our results are consistent with Hart et al (2020). They studied the health outcomes of mixed breed dogs for 11 years – dividing them by weight and their age at desexing from prepubertal, 6-11 months, 12-23 months, 2-8 years or not desexed and came up with guidelines for the appropriate desexing age for different sized dogs. Medium dogs weighing 19 kg or less were found to have no significant health problems when desexed prior to puberty.
Benjamin L. Hart 1*, Lynette A. Hart 2, Abigail P. Thigpen2 and Neil H. Willits 3
Assisting Decision-Making on Age of Neutering for Mixed Breed Dogs of Five Weight Categories: Associated Joint Disorders and Cancers
Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 1 July 2020, Volume 7, Article 472
www.frontiersin.org
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