Early Takeoff Syndrome?

[Ooky]

Oh gee, thanks for the basic genetics lesson, 'cause gosh ya' know, I didn't 'get it' when Mark explained it without the snark.

 

Absolutely 0 snark intended, and Julie was right, this wasn't directed personally to you at all.

[terrecar]

Oh *^#$. I really am way too paranoid. Apologies!

 

 

ETA: Hoping for a genetic test for that

[Smalahundur]

Because there are plenty of folks apparently "not in their right minds" who would breed from their crossover agility dogs that they've decided to try in the novice levels of sheepdog trialing (i.e., there are people who do both agility and stockwork with the same dog). Would that affect people who use working stockdogs and should know better? Probably not. Could it affect the working gene pool as a whole? Possibly. In other words, those sport dogs might not be completely and irrevocably removed from the working dog gene pool. It's a free country after all, and folks can breed from their dogs if they want to, no matter what the larger picture implication might be.

 

J.

 

Yeah, good points Julie, the fault in my reasoning might be my assumption that those dogs referred to are "gone to never return".

And of course someone starting out might not be aware of these issues (thinking of "the best of both worlds" advertisements on certain "breeder´s" sites).

I made a big mistake in selecting my first dog (though she wasn´t sports bred ), paid mainly for it with a considerable waste of time. Won´t happen again, once bitten etc...

[Smalahundur]

Oh *^#$. I really am way too paranoid. Apologies!

 

 

ETA: Hoping for a genetic test for that

But then the question would arise, would you make breeding decisions based on that?

 

Sorry, couldn´t resist

[Gloria Atwater]

...

As far as ETS goes- I've done some reading on this subject and I wonder if anyone has considered that dogs weren't meant to do the extreme jumping and other maneuvers required on today's international agility courses? If it doesn't impact the health of the dog or the purpose (herding) for which the breed was developed, it doesn't seem to merit much priority in my view.

 

 

Poking my head into the lion's den, here .... I just watched a bunch of videos on YouTube showing ETS. The thing that strikes me most is that the activity in which each dog is involved is so far removed from anything dogs would do in natural life that I wonder if ScoutTS' comment may hold a good point.

 

I don't doubt there is a problem with this Early Takeoff Syndrome. I can clearly see, in each video, that the dog is indeed lifting off early and either barely clearing the obstacle or knocking it down, or in the case of one border terrier, landing right spang in the middle of a double jump. Of course that's not right and not something we want to see in a dog. It must be so frightening to an agility handler, to see their fast, clever, amazing dog crashing into stuff and failing at such a seemingly simple thing. It would be like me seeing Nick suddenly trip and fall on every outrun for no apparent reason.

 

But I also see that we're asking dogs to run at break-neck speed around a pretty tight course, and to jump (what I consider) hard-to-see obstacles every 20 or 30 feet. I know if I was running across the yard full speed and tried to jump half a dozen little white bars, I'd be hard put to judge the distance and I'd probably end up knocking stuff down.

 

That's what I think about. The dog is running full bore, he's aiming to jump a thin little bar that's coming at him fast, and he has to make those calculations in the blink of an eye, over and over and over again.

 

I've always wondered why ETS only manifests in the Agility world, and I really wonder if the problem isn't one that humans have created. We've put dogs in an artificial environment asking them to do something they would never do in nature. I've never heard of a shepherd's dog crashing into fences or stone walls, if asked to leap them to go into the next field. But then they never ask their dog to leap 4 or more fences in a row, one immediately after another.

 

So, I don't doubt ETS exists. But I hope researchers are looking as much into the psychology of the problem, and issues such as depth perception at high speed, as any genetic fault. I wonder if it may not be a genetic fault at all, but rather a mental/psychological one brought on by the intense, fast, complicated nature of an agility course, combined with the dog's own elevated excitement level.

 

Just pondering, is all, so please only throw soft things like tomatoes.

Respectfully submitted,

 

Gloria

[terrecar]

But then the question would arise, would you make breeding decisions based on that?

 

Sorry, couldn´t resist

 

 

LOL!

[terrecar]

So, I don't doubt ETS exists. But I hope researchers are looking as much into the psychology of the problem, and issues such as depth perception at high speed, as any genetic fault. I wonder if it may not be a genetic fault at all, but rather a mental/psychological one brought on by the intense, fast, complicated nature of an agility course, combined with the dog's own elevated excitement level.

 

My question would be, would serious researchers really take a shot at this? Being unfamiliar with the criteria that would prompt a peer reviewed study (business major here), I am surprised that something like this would take hold in the scientific community at all.

[Pearse]

I do know that there are most likely those who have motives that I most likely haven't considered or taken into account.

 

But I do know for a fact, from talking to fellow sport participants, and watching the way that they interact with their dogs during competitions in the face of every outcome imaginable, that there are those who have chosen to be there for reasons that go beyond ego and breeding.

 

If you choose not to believe it, that is certainly your perogative. However, that choice in no way changes the true motivations of those folks. Attributing motives to others that are, in fact, not in play, is only a guess at best.

 

 

 

A false assumption.

 

There was exactly one year when I participated in video events more than live events

 

Strictly out of curiosity, what is "video competition"? I don't do agility or freestyle so I honestly have no idea and am curious.

[Ooky]

Oh *^#$. I really am way too paranoid. Apologies!

 

 

ETA: Hoping for a genetic test for that

 

ROFL! No, I think my "forum muscles" have atrophied, I'm not as concerned as I should be how things are coming out!

[Ooky]

My question would be, would serious researchers really take a shot at this? Being unfamiliar with the criteria that would prompt a peer reviewed study (business major here), I am surprised that something like this would take hold in the scientific community at all.

 

All it would really take is for a grad student to successfully pitch the idea to a major professor and then secure some sort of funding. It could easily take hoid if there is a lot of chatter about this, and could also be influenced by the researcher's off-line hobbies and interests.

[Pearse]

 

Finally, just a basic genetics lesson. If you disproportionately breed dogs that have a random trait, not related to ANYTHING that was originally selected on to develop these dogs in the first place, you don't know what else you are excluding from the genepool. You also don't know what else you are inflating within the genepool. All you can be sure of is that the exclusions and inflations will have nothing to do with stockwork or the type of balancing selection that gave us this breed in the first place.

 

How would one know that any "random" trait is (un)related to any other trait if you don't know the genetic basis for both traits (assuming they are genetically determined at al) and their relative positions in the genome?

 

One would have no way, a priori, of knowing that the "exclusions and inflations have nothing to do with stock work" They may be neutral, positive, or negative.

 

That doesn't negate the argument that the only way right now to select for good stock dogs is to breed only good stock dogs to good stock dogs and pick the best of the offspring to produce the next generation of good stock dogs and given the slow pace of genetic research on selection of complex behavioral traits, will likely remain that way for the next 20 years at least. Genetic testing for anything other than monogenic diseases (think CEA) is pretty much a waste of time right now.

 

Pearse

 

 

 

 

[Gloria Atwater]

My question would be, would serious researchers really take a shot at this? Being unfamiliar with the criteria that would prompt a peer reviewed study (business major here), I am surprised that something like this would take hold in the scientific community at all.

 

 

I would actually agree, Terrecar, because ETS is so activity-specific. If I had a horse that kept clipping and knocking down jump bars and went to my vet about it, my vet would probably say, "Then stop jumping him. Go do endurance riding or something else that doesn't put him in that position."

 

But ... people are genuinely concerned about it and I can see how it would frighten and upset an agility trainer. Why is my dog suddenly unable to do a simple jump? Why can't he see and clear an obstacle that's right in front of him?

 

However, looking at various videos, in any given run, it's not all jumps and it's not all the time, which leads me to suspect it's more an environmental/situational/psychological problem. That it seems to progress and get worse, in at least some dogs, further suggests this to me. That ETS becomes cumulative may well be because it is (probably) a psychological rather than physical/genetic problem. The dog starts having trouble with jumps and then starts worrying about having trouble with jumps, so he has more trouble with jumps. That's like a dog who gets bowled over by nasty sheep at the pen several times in a row: after a while, he starts worrying about doing the pen.

 

But if agility breeders were to start shaping their breeding programs with the view that ETS is a genetic fault, I'd have to wonder if that would be about as helpful as breeding humans with the view that being near-sighted or non-musical is a deep genetic fault.

 

Anyhow, again, just musing.

 

~ Gloria

[Liz P]

That is an excellent point. Is there such thing as ETS in flyball? If not, I would argue that it is a product of the sport (agility) and not a physical condition.

[juliepoudrier]

I mentioned flyball earlier, but of course flyball is in a straight line and the jumps aren't as high (I don't think).

 

J.

[juliepoudrier]

Poking my head into the lion's den, here .... I just watched a bunch of videos on YouTube showing ETS. The thing that strikes me most is that the activity in which each dog is involved is so far removed from anything dogs would do in natural life that I wonder if ScoutTS' comment may hold a good point.

Gloria

Gloria,

I think this very thing came up earlier in this thread, lo, many pages ago. Frankly I think it's the most likely explanation, coupled with your comments in a later post about it being self-perpetuating and cumulative. We are talking about dogs who are mentally "amped up," running at a great speed, and running ever more technically difficult courses (per what I gather from my agility friends). It's not hard for me to believe that some limit, both mental and physical, might simply have been reached.

 

But of course we are agility outsiders, and if the agility experts believe this is not the likely cause, then it's unlikely an outsider will convince them otherwise.

 

J.

[Gloria Atwater]

P.S.

In other words, I remain unconvinced that ETS is genetically based. If it is, why does it only show up in Agility, and why only on the last decade or so? Is it the dogs, or is it what we're asking them to do?

 

Is a problem a genetic problem if we've created the situation in which it manifests?

 

Think I see the tomatoes gathering. I'll be quiet now.

Respectfully submitted,

 

Gloria

[PSmitty]

However, looking at various videos, in any given run, it's not all jumps and it's not all the time, which leads me to suspect it's more an environmental/situational/psychological problem. That it seems to progress and get worse, in at least some dogs, further suggests this to me. That ETS becomes cumulative may well be because it is (probably) a psychological rather than physical/genetic problem. The dog starts having trouble with jumps and then starts worrying about having trouble with jumps, so he has more trouble with jumps.

 

&

 

So, I don't doubt ETS exists. But I hope researchers are looking as much into the psychology of the problem, and issues such as depth perception at high speed, as any genetic fault. I wonder if it may not be a genetic fault at all, but rather a mental/psychological one brought on by the intense, fast, complicated nature of an agility course, combined with the dog's own elevated excitement level.

 

This really makes a lot of sense to me. And this is coming from an agility competitor, too. I know one dog that I would say had ETS. She started out really well in agility, seemed to love it, but after a couple of years, her jumping went all to hell. And it was the stutter step, bad timing of takeoff kind of thing that sent all the bars down. Owner had her eyes checked, everything physical checked, could find nothing. This was a dog who previously jumped just fine. What happened to change that? More pressure, faster speed? *shrugs* She was retired from agility.

 

So, anyway, there's really no point here, but that I'm still not convinced there's anything genetic to test for, breed against or whatever. Maybe if I had a dog with the problem, it'd be different. Luckily I have an awesome little jumper.

 

And Liz, in flyball, I have seen border collies that have an odd, stutter step before they jump (mostly before the first jump). Never heard ETS mentioned, I think most flyball people probably chalk it up to poor jump training, but don't quote me on that. In both flyball and agility, I'm not one of the elite, so they may have a different take on it.

[Ooky]

How would one know that any "random" trait is (un)related to any other trait if you don't know the genetic basis for both traits (assuming they are genetically determined at al) and their relative positions in the genome?

 

One would have no way, a priori, of knowing that the "exclusions and inflations have nothing to do with stock work" They may be neutral, positive, or negative.

 

Pearse

 

Sure, the same way you'd have no real a priori way of knowing whether excluding all dogs with a certain earset would be neutral, positive, or negative - any outcome COULD be possible. However it seems easier for many here to see how selection based on muzzle length or earset would be likely to be counterproductive for maintaining working border collies. And I'm also going with what is MOST likely -A restriction of the gene pool that is not based on traits you have been trying to select for to achieve a certain phenotype -- particularly a very complex phenotype based on a lot of individual traits that need to be finely balanced -- is very unlikely to aid your selection towards that given phenotype. As you also say here. In reality I'm less concerned about specific selection on this trait (still not convinced it deserves such a designation) than I am more about the rhetoric this represents towards enhancing a systematic, holostic approach to selection and breeding decisions that's based solely on agility. this does concern me, as long as dogs from the two worlds are interbred and considered by the general populace to be the same breed. I agree there could be surprising linkages though, as well as stochastic effects that are hard to predict, but I was trying to stay "basic" (that's all I meant by that word, by the way). I'm saying selection decisions based on ETS have nothing to do stockwork,so you might as well just be spinning the genetic roulette wheel.

[Root Beer]

P.S.

In other words, I remain unconvinced that ETS is genetically based. If it is, why does it only show up in Agility, and why only on the last decade or so? Is it the dogs, or is it what we're asking them to do?

 

Part of the reason for this is that traditionally, all issues that are not structural or physical have been attributed to training. If a dog developed a jumping problem, it would have been, barring any detectable structural or physical issues, considered out of hand a training problem. Perhaps the handler, supposedly, did not lay a good enough jumping foundation, or the handler had allowed the dog to develop bad habits, etc.

 

What Mecklenburg and her colleagues found was that this is indeed true for many dogs. Most of the time, if no physical cause could be found, retraining would solve the problem.

 

But in a certain percentage of cases, retraining that worked for the majority of dogs, would not solve the problem.

 

That is what led Mecklenburg, et al, to consider the possibility that there is something else going on here.

 

This is all based on what Mecklenburg herself published in Clean Run magazine. I am going off of memory from the article, which I do not have in front of me, but that is definitely the basic gist of it.

 

It may not be the case that this was never around before, but that it simply may not have been recognized as possibly something other than a training issue.

 

Agility training has changed a lot in the last 10 years. It has become a lot more specialized. Many techniques that are considered commonplace now were not around, at least in the mainstream, all that long ago.

 

It has only been in recent years that full start to finish jump training programs have become available to the general public. It may well be that prior to this time, more handlers gave up on jumping problems, assuming that they simply did not have the training tools to fix the issues. But we have so much more available to us now.

 

If a dog has jumping issues and there are no structural or physical problems with the dog, one can try the Salo program, the Mecklenburg program, Susan Garrett's approach, etc. etc. etc. And if the problem is stimulation, there are programs like Control Unleashed (Off Switch Games are fabulous for dogs who knock bars because they are overly excited) and others.

 

We have much more ways now to determine that a problem is not, in fact, likely to be training related, than we did not all that long ago.

 

This problem may well have existed since Agility began, but the ability to determine that the problem may go beyond training issues is far more recent.

 

Gloria, I hope that is helpful in some way.

[Gloria Atwater]

Gloria,

I think this very thing came up earlier in this thread, lo, many pages ago. Frankly I think it's the most likely explanation, coupled with your comments in a later post about it being self-perpetuating and cumulative. We are talking about dogs who are mentally "amped up," running at a great speed, and running ever more technically difficult courses (per what I gather from my agility friends). It's not hard for me to believe that some limit, both mental and physical, might simply have been reached.

 

But of course we are agility outsiders, and if the agility experts believe this is not the likely cause, then it's unlikely an outsider will convince them otherwise.

 

J.

 

Lol, probably that was at the point where my eyes started crossing, while I was trying to read and catch up.

 

And true, because we are agility outsiders, we are only hypothesizing, much as if an agility person were trying to address a point of sheepdogging, such as young dogs who want to turn every drive into a fetch. The agility person might offer a theory, but we'd argue they don't know because they don't do it.

 

Though, still, since there is no sign of an ETS dog becoming lame or disabled or otherwise unsound, I feel there remains strong argument that it's not a physical or genetic problem at all.

 

Oops, I was shutting up, wasn't I?

 

~ ZGloria

[Root Beer]

And true, because we are agility outsiders, we are only hypothesizing, much as if an agility person were trying to address a point of sheepdogging, such as young dogs who want to turn every drive into a fetch. The agility person might offer a theory, but we'd argue they don't know because they don't do it.

 

That is true.

 

But it actually is more than that.

 

The reason they would be unlikely to consider these things has less to do with the fact that one is an outsider who is hypothesizing, and much more to do with the fact that these exact hypotheses were the first things that they took into consideration for themselves when they began to consider this to be something other than a training issue.

 

Every idea as to why this might occur, every possible solution that has been proposed (retrain jumping, find ways to reduce excitement, etc.), has already been considered by those who are deeply involved in study of this issue. They have attempted retraining at length. They have worked with stimulation levels. They have looked to see if the problem exists in other sports, etc.

 

I would expect that if someone came along with a truly new hypothesis, they would be more than happy to take that into consideration.

 

Mecklenburg went to great length in the original Clean Run article to explain that the decision to propose identification of this issue as a syndrome was not done hastily or without a large degree of thought, nor without quite a lot of testing of other possibilities (like those proposed throughout this thread). I take her at her word on that. Why would she risk her reputation to propose such a controversial idea without thoroughly exploring every other possibility imaginable?

 

So, it is not that the experts would not listen because you don't know what you are talking about. It is that they have considered these things, determined these causes to be unlikely, and have gone on to search for other answers.

[Gloria Atwater]

Thank you, Rootbeer/Kristine. That's an excellent explanation and does clarify why it wasn't noted as a "problem" until more recently. Changes in training methods and all that. And given the evolutions in agility training and performance, I see why people want to find the root of ETS.

 

I do, however, remain unconvinced there's any genetic link, unless it's the same sort of genetic markers that could point out why some human folks are born with beautiful singing voices and the rest of us are not.

 

~ Gloria

*really shutting up, now. I have to make stew and apple crisp for a fun trial tomorrow - yay!*

 

 

ETA: I'm not doubting Dr. Mecklenburg's credentials or expertise, or her correctness in labeling it a "syndrome." But I do doubt there's a physical factor, and I fear what would happen to dogs if agility breeders started shaping their programs to account for something as elusive as a specific psychological factor.

[Pearse]

What Mecklenburg and her colleagues found was that this is indeed true for many dogs. Most of the time, if no physical cause could be found, retraining would solve the problem.

 

But in a certain percentage of cases, retraining that worked for the majority of dogs, would not solve the problem.

 

That is what led Mecklenburg, et al, to consider the possibility that there is something else going on here.

 

This is all based on what Mecklenburg herself published in Clean Run magazine. I am going off of memory from the article, which I do not have in front of me, but that is definitely the basic gist of it.

 

It may not be the case that this was never around before, but that it simply may not have been recognized as possibly something other than a training issue.

 

 

And, there's still no hard evidence that it is anything other than a training issue.

 

What Mecklenburg has done is to publish a hypothesis that (paraphrasing) says: "We have observed this trait. We have been unable to correct it using currently available training techniques in a subset of affected dogs. We hypothesize that it is due to some phyisical/physiological/psychological defect in some dogs"

 

That's an acceptable hypothesis as far as it goes. So far, there have been no studies published where experiments have been performed with normal controls and affected dogs to test the hypothesis. Therefore, there are no data to support, or refute, the hypothesis.

 

It's NOT the same as saying: "We've observed this trait. We've been unable to correct it in some dogs using available training techniques. Therefore, it MUST be due to some physical/physiological/psychological defect".

 

It's light years away from a point where you can say: "this is due to a heritable defect. You should breed away from it".

 

[edited to add] and "published" in Clear Run magazine is not the same as published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association (i.e. not peer reviewed, and more editorial than scholarship)

 

So, why are we wasting time arguing about the effect of breeding to genetic tests for a condition that may not be biologically based at all, for which no decent research has ever been done, and which is of no consequence to the long term health of the breed?

 

Pearse

 

 

 

 

[Debbie Meier]

Kristine, here is a way to sway me and maybe other working breeders. Research the pedigrees of the dogs that suffer from ETS and determine whether or not the dogs are the result of bonefide working dog matings where the selection criteria was actually for work. It would surprise me if it is not found that ETS is a result of poor selection or appeared in dogs that were also not good representatives of working dogs. I see many dogs that are passed off as working bred and from working lines that are from breeders that didn't really use their dogs for stockwork aside from low level requirments, basically breeding border collies that have not been proven to have the special traits that make a border collie a exceptional stockdog. Just because a dog works does not mean that it should be bred and also does not mean that just any other working dog would be a suitable mate for it.

 

Now, if your investigation determines that the dogs afflicted come from real working breeders, not just dogs that were mated together by sport/pet people that have some working dogs in their pedigrees, the next step is to see if those dogs also have limitations when working. If so, then you would have a valid case to convince me to look closer from a selection perspective because ultimately if I can see something to factor into my select criteria that will increase the percentage of quality pups I can produce I will be willing to suppress the trait via selective breeding. But, I have to be able to identify it and with out a doubt know that the trait is reducing the percentage of good/great pups that I am producing.

 

I also would be interested to see, percentage wise, how many agility dogs are really coming from bonefide working breeders.

[PSmitty]

ETS is not limited to border collies, right? The dog I mentioned was a Wheaton Terrier. Definitely not from a working border collie breeder, lol.