[Jan Fisher]

I get it, they are cute. Dogs and cats with flat faces are adorable, but they are almost always beset by health problems. I heard some advice once: buy a British bull dog and hand over $5000 to your vet, it will be quicker that way.

There are some breeders attempting to reverse the damage we have done to these animals, but given all the French bulldogs and pugs you see around city streets, nothing is happening soon.

A work colleague once brought her pug into work one day and the sound it made as it struggled to breathe was distressing. When questioned, she simply said that’s how the pet sounded when she got too ‘worked up’. The dog was sitting on a dog bed, hardly moving at all. It was an older animal, but if it was struggling to breathe doing no more than resting, I shudder to think how it coped with everyday activities.

If we truly love our pets, we need to stop thinking how cute these animals are start putting their health first.

Should rules be put in place about breeding flat-faced pets?

[Jaspersmum]

I can’t comment on the flat faced dogs apart from saying that a breed that can’t deliver its puppies naturally should not be bred.
I breed Persians and am breeding to the show standard that is ” sweet open expression with big round eyes, wide nasal apertures and big nose leather”.
We were warned by our breed council 4 to 5 years ago that the nostrils in our cats were too small so we started to reverse the American trend of the extreme “peke faced” persians. My girls deliver naturally, that is unless something goes wrong, then we are off to the vets. I can also in a litter of 2 show cats have a long nosed kitten and in some cases they have breathing issues themselves as well as the normal eye “snots”.
Yet come to my place at around 7pm any day and watch my herd of all ages with all sizes of noses do zoomies around the house. Yes, they stop if they get short of breath, but that’s generally the older ones, cause they can’t keep up with the young ones or when some of them are close to or at the end of the charging around the house at a gazillion miles an hour.
I do understand the problems with the bracenphilic breeds, have read widely about it and in my own way am trying to not breed so extreme cats but l have also seen persians with nostrils so tiny they can barely breath out of and that needs to be stopped and even if what l say is unpopular then so be it, but the back yard breeders in both the cat fancy and dog world need to be stopped as they aren’t governed by any code of ethics or government legislation. They also don’t follow the Animal Welfare Code of Practice that registered breeders do – and by registered breeders l mean those that are registered with a proper breed council/applicable organisation, not the ones that allow back yard breeders to join so they can sell their animals for more.
Just my 10 cents worth

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