The Bulldog Club of America strongly encourages health testing, and offers special recognition to BCA members who do so through their Ambassadors for Health (AFH) and Pioneers for Health (PFH) programs. There are a number of recommended tests, as listed on the BCA website at www.bulldogclubofamerica.org.
As BCA members, we support this program and have tested our breeding stock with results submitted to the Orthopedic Foundation For Animals (OFA, www.offa.org). We believe the AFH program has great value in promoting good health in our breed.
Although we test our dogs, Gunslinger Bulldogs cannot and does not offer any specific guarantee that the dogs we produce through our breeding program will not exhibit or produce any conditions for which we’ve conducted OFA health testing. To date, the majority of our breeding stock are dogs that we have purchased from other breeders, born of dogs that have NOT been health tested, so we have little or no knowledge of their ancestors' individual health histories or propensities to pass on certain hereditary traits.
In addition, health testing in Bulldogs is in its infancy, having only recently begun to gain a stronghold within the Bulldog community. It is completely voluntary and left up to the discretion of the individual breeder whether to test or not. Though there are some individual breeders who have health tested their breeding stock for a number of years, they are in the minority, and in general there simply is not enough testing completed to date to claim there has been any broad impact on our breed.
We are a small hobby breeder and do not breed very often, maybe once or twice a year. We are in the beginning stages of building our own breeding program. We have been fortunate to have purchased good dogs for our foundation stock that have passed many of the BCA recommended tests. However, testing cannot preclude them from developing conditions themselves as they mature and age, or have the ability to pass on undesirable genetic traits.
Since our breeding program is mainly to produce dogs for our own show purposes, and we regard good health as important, we feel health testing offers us valuable information to make better breeding choices. It is our intent to breed the healthiest animals possible, but one must realize that we are not geneticists, we are subject to the whims of Mother Nature and very complicated genetics, and despite our best efforts, problems with a congenital condition may arise. If so, we will make every effort to abide by our puppy sales contract health guarantee.
The Official Statement from the Bulldog Club of America concerning black, black and white, black and tan, and dilute
colors, as approved by the BCA Executive Committee on February 26, 2014:
"The Bulldog Club of America, in keeping with its stated goal of protecting and preserving the official standard, does
not condone the breeding of or promotion of colors that are not mentioned in the standard, and/ or that are described
therein as “undesirable”. "
