Ayla After All van de Loveboat
‘Ayla’
Time to write something about Ayla again now that she has grown up. At this moment, she’s two years old and she weighs about 11 kilos. She’s one of the smaller French Bulldogs and is just about as big as her mother Dixie.
Ayla has a slightly longer back, short legs and a little bit of a snout. In spite of this, she can’t stand the heat as well as her ‘sister’ Roxy, who has a flatter face. A lot of it has to do with the nature of the animal. When we take Ayla out for a walk, she hangs in her harness and almost pulls you off your socks, out of enthusiasm. She’s already heated up, even before we start walking. Roxy always is her relaxed self. At most she will throw out the anchor if we go in a direction she doesn’t like.
Ayla is exceptionally muscular and can jump onto the back of the couch and with great ease down on the floor again, just like a cat. If roxy would do that, she would crash.
Ayla is one size larger than Roxy, in weight. she’s one kilo heavier. When it comes to temperament, they are totally different. Ayla is always sharp, watchful and wary. She’s a ringleader and very intelligent. For her own people, she’s very sweet and gentle. As for strangers: she’ll have to get to know them a bit first.
She has recently had some DNA tests. Not the capture of the DNA profile which is done by our Kennel Club (to see if the parents a really the parents), but this concerns DNA tests for hereditary defects and genetic diversity. This diversity is very important for when it comes to getting cancer, for example. Many purebred dogs seem to be getting cancer at younger ages lately, which, in many cases, is due to the lack of genetic diversity. A logical conclusion, because there’s a lot of inbreeding in all breeds. Something we as FCI breeders can’t help, because we’re stuck with a closed system of pedigree registration and we can’t just crossbreed with any other dog we like. The gene pool is relatively small and you have to take a lot of effort to find unrelated dogs.
Her MyDogDNA profile is here. Of all our dogs, Ayla has the biggest genetic diversity and together with Marley, she’d give puppies with a bigger genetic diversity than average. Sadly, the DNA test showed that she carries two genes for Cord-1 PRA, I’ve written more about that in my blog. Luckily, Marley is free of PRA and all other genetic disorders that we could test, so puppies out of Marley and Ayla will be carriers of PRA at the most. They will not actually suffer from it.Of course, if you would like to breed the puppies in the future, you should preferably use a non-carrier, so you can get rid of it eventually. If you don’t test, you don’t know what you’re doing! In the mean time I have found out that the French Bulldog probably needs another, undiscovered gene next to the Cord1 PRA gene in order to develop the eye illness PRA. I talked with eye specialist Annemarie Verbruggen and the researcher from the laboratory where Ayla’s DNA was tested and theyçe told me that there are no cases of PRA in the French Bulldog.
Ayla’s medical screening took place in October 2016. Even though she’s not perfect, I still decided to use her for my breeding program. Her sire and dam both have a better spine and actually, I expected that from Ayla as well, especially since she has such a powerful jump and does all kinds of crazy things. Now you can see that two parents with good spines don’t guarantee puppies with good spines. Of course, Ayla doesn’t have any problems. Her spine isn’t bad, Roxy’s has a lot more deviations (and she doesn’t have any problems either). I just expected a better spine and this isn’t the case which shows that it isn’t just about two parents; there’s a lot more behind it and of course, you need a bit of luck.
I have the perfect partner for Ayla: our own Marley. He has a great spine, nice hips and is clear from everything you can imagine, so he matches almost any bitch. French Bulldogs do not have normal spines and normal hips. Most of them just don’t have any problems with that, but you can imagine what will happen if we’d only choose bad backs and bad hips as ‘breeding material’. If you never have your dogs checked and only pick a dog for your bitch because he looks so nice…
For Ayla you’d be inclined to pick a dog with a short back, because her back is a little bit too long according to the breeding standard. This is being done excessively which causes the spines to get worse and worse. I could exclude just about everything, but we’ll end up having nothing left, Frenchies aren’t without problems. Neither are other purebred dogs.
Ayla’s results are also available for anyone who’d like to see them. I’ll put them on her page soon. People who’d like a puppy from the combination Marley X Ayla get all health results in their folder, complete with explanation. Everyone is free to decide from which combination they’d like to get a puppy or not. With us, there’s alway openness. About everything.
Ayla also had an ECVO eye examination at the eye specialist in Amsterdam. The results were all fine.