Sussex spaniels are in deep trouble, but if you read propaganda from their breed clubs, they are long-lived and healthy. Sussex spaniel breeders would rather live in denial than take the steps to solve the breed's problems.
Breed clubs are notorious for inflating the average age of their breeds– especially if the breed is rare.
Most people know about the health problems in golden retrievers and boxers, so it’s really not useful to deny that these dogs have problems. In fact, it’s much more to the club’s benefit it takes health issues seriously.
Well, with rare breeds, one can sort of fudge it. Many people have bought into the notion that if a breed is less common, then it will have fewer health problems. That’s because that a breed club has more power when the dog is lower in popularity. More popular breeds have more people breeding them, and the power structure within those breeds is greatly decentralized. With rarer breeds, the club has much more power over what gets done. As a result, its very commonly stated that popularity is a curse for dog breeds, which results in all sorts of health problems. And there is some truth in it, but the corollary that comes from it is ultimately false– that rarer breeds are going to be more healthy because the breed club has more power over them.
It’s very easy to deny health problems with certain dog breeds. Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever fanciers continue to deny that their breed is the shortest-lived of all retrievers, and that it has real issues with autoimmune disorders, which are likely the result of low genetic diversity within the breed. You can do that with tollers, but you cannot deny that golden retrievers have a very high incidence of cancer. People already know that golden retrievers have cancer issues. You can’t deny it.
But you can if they are pretty rare. Most people who own pets from these rare breeds don’t talk to each other, and if one of their dogs dies, the problems really aren’t discussed widely.
So the breed clubs can get away with what are obvious lies.
Here’s a good example of a breed club lying about the longevity of a breed:
The Sussex Spaniel Association (of the UK) makes this claim on its website:
Generally the Sussex Spaniel is long lived to 14-16 years. The Health Survey of the Breed has been completed, and results are available to members from the secretary.
There is a breed health survey that the KC did on its own. The Survey had 42 deaths reported, which is a good enough sample from a breed that is both quite rare and quite inbred.
The results show that “generally” (which is such a weasel word), the breed’s median age at death was 11 years and 2 months, which is just slightly younger than the all-KC breed median of 11 years and 3 months. The most common cause of death was cancer. And the dogs tended be diagnosed with inherited diseases at very young ages.
How is 11 years and two months 14-16 years?
It’s not.
The truth is this breed has been in trouble since before there was ever an institutionalized fancy or a closed registry system.
The breed we call the Sussex spaniel today is derived from a strain of liver spaniels that was found by Augustus Fuller in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries., who owned the estate called Rosehill Park in Sussex. He’s usually referred to as just “Mr. Fuller.” The Fuller family made its fortune with Jamaican sugar plantations– meaning they were direct beneficiaries of the slave trade.
The Rosehill spaniels were heavily inbred, for at the time, it was accepted that inbreeding was the best way to establish a strain. In the eighteenth century, English agriculturalists had managed to greatly increase the productivity of livestock through intense inbreeding. The notion of breeding “in and in” for “improvement” was at the heart of English animal breeding practices at the time, for these ideas had first been promulgated by an agriculturalist named Robert Bakewell, who saw improvements in the English longhorn, the Leicester longwool sheep, and the shire horse through such extreme inbreeding.
Works for sheep, cows, and horses. Must work for dogs.
Well, it didn’t.
A supposed rabies outbreak hit the Rosehill spaniels in the 1840’s. There is some debate about whether this disorder actually was rabies or whether it affected the spaniels or the hounds. But at some point after the 1840’s, the original Rosehill strain disappeared. There were a few dogs at other estates, and it is from these dogs that the Sussex spaniel breed was developed. The two major strains that make up the Sussex spaniel were the Wolland strain, which was heavily inbred, and the other was the Newington strain, which had some liver English water spaniel crossed in.
Whatever destroyed them, it is possible that intense inbreeding may have made the Rosehill spaniels more susceptible to disease, for we know that inbreeding reduces MHC haplotype diversity and reduces the effectiveness of the immune system over the generations. The remnants of the Rosehill strain were outcrossed to liver English water spaniels and to the old short-legged field spaniel.
However, the Sussex spaniel that came up in the new institutionalized fancy was kept mostly through inbreeding. Virtually every text I find on Sussex spaniels talks about how inbred they are– and several of these are nineteenth and early twentieth century texts.
This breed had periods of popularity in Britain as a sporting spaniel, but it almost always collapsed.
The dogs were often described as “delicate,” which is not at all what one would want in a gun dog.
Now, the breed may be capable of doing gun dog work, but that’s not the issue.
The issue is whether it is fit for it.
And if you actually look at the Sussex spaniel objectively, its structure actually drives much of its lowered popularity.
Sussex spaniels have a lot of health problems, not all of them the result of intense inbreeding.
Inbreeding has likely increased the incidence of severe heart problems in the breed, but inbreeding likely didn’t increase the likelihood of the dogs getting hip or elbow dysplasia (over 40 percent have hip dysplasia and at least 20 percent have elbow dysplasia) or suffering periods of paralysis from Intervertebral Disc Disease.
These are all derived from the dog’s structure, which is based upon a heavily-built dog with dwarfism. Dwarf dogs have relatively short legs and longer backs, and this puts stress on the spine. If a disc ruptures or bulges from these stresses, pressure is put on the spinal cord, and the dog is paralyzed. It’s usually temporary, but it can be permanent.
This means that Sussex spaniels have a very high likelihood of being put out of commission for weeks at a time– and a lot of these dogs are going to have both hip and elbow dysplasia.
These structural problems mean that very few people want them as gun dogs– and it’s been that way for a long time.
But that means that the population will stay very low, and very few people will be engaged in trying to breed these dogs, which means fewer and fewer dogs and more and more inbreeding.
Now, as if that weren’t bad enough. The breed very nearly died off during the Second World War, when British dog fanciers were not breeding dogs.
A woman named Joy Freer managed to re-establish the breed’s number from the five dogs that survived World War II, and she very proudly inbred from them.
So this breed has essentially been screwed since the middle to late nineteenth century.
It’s literally holding on by only a thread.
It has spent the decades since World War II circling the drain. Its popularity continues to decline, and there is no evidence that this trend is changing.
But its breeders continue to make up facts about how long the breed lives.
If they actually were into saving the Sussex spaniel, they would change some of its conformation– and they would allow outcrossing with other spaniels.
Both of these are heresies in Sussex spaniels.
No one wants to admit that the conformation of the dog is destroying it from a functional perspective, and because it is largely structurally unsound, very few people actually want it.
Which just makes its problems that much worse.
I will get some negative comments on this post. I guarantee that most of them will come in the form of people with anecdotes about how good their Sussex spaniels are at hunting or how long one or two of their dogs lived.
Those are nice stories.
But those stories are not scientific data. If you can’t understand this, please do not comment on this blog post, for you simply don’t get what I’m talking about.
Anecdotal evidence is nice, but nothing can be generalized from it.
So until someone shows me a study with at least 40 dogs in it that shows Sussex spaniels live to be 14 to 16 years old on average, I am going to call the Sussex Spaniel Association’s claim a lie.
It is a lie.
It may be a delusion, but delusions are the lies which the liar refuses to admit are untrue.
Which makes them much more dangerous.
The Sussex spaniel is a very good example of a breed that has been ruined the dual forces of extreme conformation and extremely low genetic diversity.
The dog may have had a future had it been bred for greater structural soundness and with some concern for its genetic diversity.
But unless someone begins an outcross program in the breed, it is doomed.
The extinction will be slow, but it will come.
It’s been a long time coming.
***
“It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
–George Costanza
That math just can’t work here. If your breed averages 15 years like they are claiming, you’d expect to see just as many of these dogs dead at 10 as at 20. I doubt we’re seeing that here.
“The average oldest date of death” as would be the general answer to “how long do these dogs live” might be 14, but it’s not the average. It’s the top fringe. For every “I had a Sussex that died at 15.5!” person who will show up, mention that for every dog like that, one puppy that dies in the first month averages that dog out to 7 years!
Math is killer, isn’t it?
Statistics isn’t the strong suit of these people.
14-16 is inflated even for old age deaths. If you look at the KC survey, those that die of old age (19% of deaths) had an average lifespan of only around 13-14.5.
One of the methods use to rebuild the Sussex breed after WWII was outcrossing to the liver Field Spaniel — the long-legged sort, as the short-legged Field was no longer extant by that time. Long-legged Sussex still pop up occasionally, according to an acquaintance in that breed. Certainly, if “new blood” was needed again, the Field would be a logical outcross.
Just incidentally, “Stump”, the Sussex that went Best in Show at Westminster was ten years old.
He was also dead within two years of the show.
In fairness, 11-12 years is a good age for any medium-sized dog. 14-16 is exceptional for the species in general. That is not to say that the breed is in good shape.
11-12 would be good for a golden retriever. I would expect a spaniel to live more in the 13 year range.
Mmm..I don’t think so…. Last I heard, Stump, bonr December 1998, was still alive and well at age 13 (see article on DogChannel.com, Jan. 2012). He and “JR” the Bichon were featured in a “Happy Birthday” ad in one of the dog magazines not long ago. .
Yes, Stump is still very much alive at 13 years old. Where in the world did you hear differently? I do agree that the KC greatly exaggerates the longevity of this breed, but I do think that 11-13 years is a good age for this medium sized, but heavily boned breed.
From what I’ve been able to glean, the actual Sussex spaniel, as in the type of spaniel you’d find in Sussex, was not actually created by Mr. Fuller. There is a great painting by Stubbs of a Sussex spaniel, and it’s just a big liver spaniel. It had normal length of legs, too. Sussex was just known for having liver spaniels. Fuller and others just made them short-legged, and then this became an exaggerated fad when this dog became a show dog.
This breed has a ton of structural problems that will only be fixed when the structure is changed.
That painting by George Stubbs shows a dog rather more retriever-like than spaniel, except for the lovely feathered spaniel ears. It could be debated whether the dog is simply a spaniel from the oounty of Sussex, or of the breed later dubbed Sussex Spaniel.
The large clan of spaniels is even more intricately interwoven than that of the retrievers.
It is a liver spaniel of Sussex, from which the Rosehill line descended.
I’ve noticed how many of the breeders of dogs with dwarfism play down the seriousness of disc disease/injury. I’ve only worked at a vet clinic for a year and a half, and I’ve already lost count of the number of daschunds we’ve seen with disc problems. Even the “mildest” form is very serious and heart-wrenching for an owner to deal with. And it never really gets “better”. The owners constantly having to watch them and restrict their lives – they can’t play normally (or sometimes at all) or run normally or be allowed to jump.
Is every dwarfed breed equally susceptible to disc injury? Is, say, a Vallhund better off than a Corgi? A long legged Basset better off than a short legged one?
Is disc disease/injury a side effect of genetic dwarfism, or is it a side effect of a high body length:leg length ratio?
Well, yes, but “equally” is hard to quantify. Dwarfism itself effects the integrity of the discs, and having a long back adds to the problem. So, I suppose a shorter back would help, relatively speaking.
More info: http://vetspecialistsofrochester.com/pdf/UnderstandingIntervertebralDiscDiseaseInDogs.pdf
My dad had a dachshund when he was a teenager that was a great hunting dog.
He was not from specialized teckel lines from Germany. He was also a smooth– most the hunting teckel are wire-haired.
But he could hunt.
And unlike his breed’s reputation, he was obedient.
Great dog.
Except he’d have disc issues and he’d be out for a week or two.
my 18 week old sussex puppy had to be put to sleep due to horendous genetic problems and no compensation from the breeder and the sussex spaniel association were totally in denial of the problems the sire and dam through out
I have a Sussex spaniel who will be 15 years come August. I do know from great experience that the breed is very much interbred and leads to a number of aggressive nature in the dog, I had to have a very aggressive sussex male put tosleep which in itself is heartbreaking, there are also a lot of this breed in rescue centres and still certain breeders persist in trying to get the perfect dog, quite shameful.
I didn’t know about aggression in this breed.
Hi
As an avid Sussex spaniel owner for over 14 years , and on my fourth rescue now ,
I find your story both harsh a inaccurate towards the breed and the ssa.
You bang on about the ssa blatantly lieing about the breed and its statistics ?.
But it is infact you who is the liar ,
As you have got a lot of your facts clearly inaccurate .
If you had taken the time to contacted the ssa or even done your homework properly before writing your post it may of saved you from looking like an ass.
Regards pete tubb
First off, you’re barely literate enough to comment on this blog.
Secondly, you have no refutation of any of the points I’ve made. You’ve just come on here to call names because you don’t like what I’ve written, and all the evidence points to the fact that the Sussex spaniel is a museum piece. It was a dog created in its present form by the British show fancy of circa 1870, when there was bizarre fad for short-legged spaniels. The short legs and the attendant health problems associated with extreme short legs almost did the field spaniel in. The standard was revised, and the field spaniel isn’t extinct. The Sussex spaniel is little more than a museum piece. A testament to a time when people had no more sense than they do now.
The Sussex is very different from the Clumber spaniel. There actually are working lines of Clumbers, which many say are even better than springers. There are no working lines of Sussex because the breed is very rare, and the only people who actually hunt with them are people who own them and thus are breed blind to their obvious deformities. There are reasons why some breeds aren’t commonly used anymore. One of the big ones is they aren’t all that useful.
Now I bet you’ll retort with how awesome your dogs are as hunting dogs. That evidence is not a refutation of what I’m saying. You don’t understand what I’m saying.
As for contacting the specialist club for info, that’s a bit like complaining about a journalist writing about the Abu Graib Prison Scandal without first contacting Rumsfeld about it. Breed clubs are actually totalitarian institutions that are run a bit like cults. They wouldn’t provide me with the evidence I want anyway, because they conveniently don’t keep the records of longevity of any of their dogs.
If you want a short-legged dog that can be trained to hunt birds and just about everything else get a wire-haired dachshund from hunting lines from Germany. Note that I said hunting lines and note that I said wire-haired. Those dogs are much less likely to have issues with slipped discs than show line dogs, and what’s more the wire-haired ones are actually quite biddable dogs. And their coats are well-protected against thorny cover.
If you want to play with museum pieces, no one is going to stop you.
You can plow fields with draft horses all day.
But the tractor is better.
We have a 9year old Sussex who we adore. However, he has had endless health problems including a double hip replacement before he was two and recently spinal surgery. He is a gorgeous animal adored by and adores my children but I can’t let him out round other children as his background of pain has made him fearful of them. Breeding a dog which WILL have a life of pain is WRONG. I have spoken to countless vets and behaviourists over the years, all of whom adore our dog, and all agree that these poor creatures are falsely accused of being aggressive. They aren’t by nature, it is because they are in pain and so fear being told what to do because it might hurt. PLEASE, either find a way of crossbreeding to correct the problems they all have or else just stop breeding them. And please stop denying these problems exist -they do. If you honestly love these gorgeous creatures let them go.
I am commenting on this old thread as I just discovered this blog. I always find it confusing to discuss a breed without defining which country we are talking about. So the sussex spaniels in the US are a different story to the ones in the UK and also a somewhat different story to the few being bred over the years outside the UK. In some countries outside UK more statistics on such things as inbreeding percentage is gathered for every mating, and also hip scores published. However I have found that many Sussex breeders in he UK are open about the problems in the breed and willing to discuss them. So for example the fact that there are anger issues in individuals in the breed is known to everyone within the breed. That many (the majority?) have high scores in HD as well. However not all Sussex with high HD scores appear to be affected by this, i.e. they remain very agile and flexible even in old age. Others (a minority) suffer greatly from AD from a young age and this is a tragedy and something to work on in the breed. Of course a long back increases the risk of disc displacement in dogs. However the sussex should be sturdily built to decrease this risk. There are also sussex spaniels with longer legs born in many litters. Some prefer them and use them outside the show ring. What the breeders do in the states I cannot understand! There is a divide between breeders in UK and the US over this (i.e. height). Also in some European countries outside the UK docking is illegal and the sussex allowed to keep their wonderful tails. For working spaniels this is a plus, regardless of what people in the UK feel about it. A working spaniel with a tail sends more information to the hunter than a tail that is too short to be visible. As a final note one of the health issues I personally feel is at risk of becoming more prevalent in the breed is that the eyes are becoming more soggy with haw visible in young pups. I would like to see breeders becoming more concerned about this.