Scam: Carol Beuchat of The Institute of Canine Biology

This post is going to be a bit heavy on detail but I think it's quite important, so please bear with me.

Some of you may have heard of Carol Beuchat, the principal of "The Institute of Canine Biology." I think it's important to first note that it's not an institute in any traditional sense but is rather a for-profit business in which Carol Beuchat charges well-intentioned breeders looking to improve the quality of their dogs through proper selective breeding practices.

Her "courses" are basically comprised of what appears to be publicly available information in a wide array of canine topics as they concern breeding and genetic health.

Out of curiosity, I signed up for her Hip Dysplasia "course" - which turned out to be simply a compilation of research work of others that she summarizes (sometimes quite incorrectly).

We do not have a hip dysplasia problem in our own breeding program, which we started in 2000. But it is a topic of fascination for me because this disease is so prevalent in our breed's general population (American Bulldogs) as well as in many breeds. Beside breeding, we are heavily involved in providing free education to American Bulldog owners and breeders in our own community comprised of nearly 10,000 members, which we accrued in just 2 years. RESPONSIBLE AMERICAN BULLDOGGERS on Facebook: https://facebook.com/groups/525838554282004/
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START April 28th, 2019 - contemporaneous notes from the phone call with Carol Beuchat, PhD
I just had a 45 minute conversation with Carol Beuchat and she has presented the following as FACT. Her conviction of being right despite claiming to be a scientist was formidable, as her supposed facts directly oppose reality.

She made the following categorical claims:

1) Before 1940s dogs didn’t have hip dysplasia. It only appeared once breeders began to whelp dogs inside instead of in the barn.

2) Hip dysplasia is a result of deformations around the hip sockets and ligament inside the hip socket that take place at whelping age of the pups.

3) Hip dysplasia is wholly environmental and dysplastic dogs are fine to breed because it’s not heritable.

4) Weight of the puppy after birth during whelping is a variable and that weight can cause damage resulting in hip dysplasia in the dog.

5) Hip laxity is not heritable. Note: This is blatantly wrong based on actual research done using the PennHip method. Hip laxity is highly heritable and offspring littermates will all have hip laxity very similar to the parents’ hip laxity within a certain range. This is the definition of heritability.

She claimed that puppies are born with perfect hip sockets. I said that puppies at birth don’t even have formed hip sockets. She then began to ramble how it’s just cartilage at that point.... so which is it?

The correct statement would be:
“Hip dysplasia is a degenerative disease, so obviously newborns can’t have it by definition.”

I asked her if she has breeding experience and she said “No, I’m a biologist.”

I brought up an immediate example that came to mind of a puppy that we recently produced, who was born at nearly 2 lbs as he was the only one in the litter.

We did PennHip on him at 5 months old at 65 lbs and his laxity is 0.32/0.36. He has excellent hips. She concurred that it’s a great laxity score. At 9 months old he was already 100 lbs.

When we spoke of the very low incidence of hip dysplasia in our experience of breeding hundreds of dogs since 2000, she asked me whether we whelp the pups indoors or outside. I told her that it depends, because we also have people that own our dogs who end up breeding them and we have no control over the whelping or raising environment but the only thing we do control is the actual selection of the breeding mate. So we retain control over selective breeding.

Despite this information she still claimed that it does not contradict her “factual” information that whelping environment and weight of the puppies are the determinant factors for hip dysplasia and genetics play no role.

So I asked her if dysplastic dogs can be bred to produce dogs with healthy hips and there is no heritability of the disease. She said yes.

I suggested that she prove this theory by taking two extremely dysplastic dogs of any breed she wants and breed them to produce a litter of pups with no hip dysplasia. She said that she doesn’t have time for that.
She told me near the end of the call that I’m now wasting her time. She said that she has science and data and I have an opinion.....

She doesn’t speak like a scientist at all. I know scientists. My family is full of them. My brother has a Ph.D. in International Economics, my father has a Ph.D. in Physics. My mother has a M.S. in Physics.

END April 28th, 2019 - contemporaneous notes from the phone call with Carol Beuchat, PhD
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So, why am I posting this information now? It has come to my attention that she is charging breeders with newborns nearly $500 to run some kind of an experiment of the controlled environment for the very young pups to try to prove her theory that she had talked about during our call back in April.

I am concerned that she is wholly out of her depth with regards to this subject based on her delusional thinking that she can produce a fully healthy litter with no hip dysplasia out of dysplastic parents just by manipulating the environment and weight of the newborns.

To reiterate:
1) She has no dog breeding experience whatsoever.
2) She is convinced that hip dysplasia is not hereditary.
3) She appears to be convinced that she can raise any dog, regardless of its genetics, to not develop hip dysplasia through manipulation of the newborn's environment and weight/size.

I think it's important that breeders become aware of this information as she continues to try to profit off of her whacky theories on the back of well-meaning breeders. She flouts her Ph.D in a completely unrelated field and presents herself as an expert in these matters to canine breeders.

I do not know the specifics of what she will try to manipulate in the environment, but given the fact that she is certain bigger newborn puppies are at higher risk of hip dysplasia, which is absurd, there may even be legitimate concerns that she may "diet" the pups of the breeders in her "program." That could be dangerous and irresponsible. Again - she herself has never produced a single litter of puppies.

To make matters worse, she is misrepresenting this for-profit business by placing the following text on her homepage since at least June 28, 2013, for over 6 years now: "Non-profit status pending." That is a lie. There is no chance that her non-profit status has been pending from the IRS for over 6 years. If she did apply for a non-profit status, the IRS made a negative determination. Period. This text still appearing on her website today may actually constitute fraud.

Copy of her homepage from June 28, 2013 via archive.org with text "Non-profit status pending." near the bottom of her page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130628101120/http://www.instituteofcaninebiology.org/

 

This is current

 

Seriously? "Working hard on a project to eliminate hip dysplasia" ? Carol Beuchat has zero dog breeding experience and no direct experience even whelping a single litter of puppies.

 

In my contemporaneous notes you’ll see I just wrote down her statements and only addressed 5) with my own opinion at that time but obviously each of her statements are seriously flawed. So I can address this here:

She made the following categorical claims:

1) Before 1940s dogs didn’t have hip dysplasia. It only appeared once breeders began to whelp dogs inside instead of in the barn.
**** She confuses lack of diagnoses with lack of the issue. No one was x raying their dogs before the 1940s. Her statement is so beyond simple reason that it’s dumbfounding, especially considering her claims that she’s a scientist. Hip dysplasia, although rare, exists in the wild in wolves. They just tend not to survive to procreate in cases of severe dysplasia. Survival of the fittest.

2) Hip dysplasia is a result of deformations around the hip sockets and ligament inside the hip socket that take place at whelping age of the pups.
*** Hip laxity is inherited from the parents. It can be objectively measured via PennHip. PennHip studies have shown this, and their entire methodology, which produces highly heritable results, easily demonstrates that. Her stress on the puppy developing anatomically during “whelping age” is not here nor there. Thank you captain obvious.

3) Hip dysplasia is wholly environmental and dysplastic dogs are fine to breed because it’s not heritable.
*** This is just insane. But it makes sense if she’s never produced a single litter of puppies. To think that she charges people for her “knowledge” is plain scary.

4) Weight of the puppy after birth during whelping is a variable and that weight can cause damage resulting in hip dysplasia in the dog.
*** Nonsense.

5) Hip laxity is not heritable. Note: This is blatantly wrong based on actual research done using the PennHip method. Hip laxity is highly heritable and offspring littermates will all have hip laxity very similar to the parents’ hip laxity within a certain range. This is the definition of heritability.
*** As you can see I addressed this specific point even in my notes right after the call. Again, nonsense.

 

Gail - Surface in the whelping box will not make any difference because puppies don't even walk for the first 4 weeks of their life. They do not have formed hip sockets either so there's nothing to do damage to. We always advise our owners to ensure their home does not have any slippery surfaces that their puppy will be walking/running on - so that's after they are already walking and running in their new house at 8 weeks old. If a household has slippery tile or wood floors we suggest rubber matting for everywhere the puppy will be. While they are still at our home and walking/running from 4 weeks old until 8 weeks old they are on these kinds of pads that are highly absorbent for urine: https://amzn.to/3xP0aid

We use the EZWhelp 6x4 whelping box and it's fantastic. https://www.ezwhelp.com/collections...s/fab-system-whelping-box?variant=19585649219

The most efficient process to continuously improve hip quality would be to utilize PennHip methodology. Hip laxity measurement by PennHip is a score given for each hip in a dog. You can apply selective pressure using these numbers. So prioritize breeding dogs that have the tighter hips. Among littermates, the scores will vary but will be in the same ballpark for the most part, so focus on breeding the pup(s) in any given litter that have the tightest hips in the litter. By repeating this over several generations you can drastically reduce incidence and risk of hip dysplasia in the dogs you produce.

Here's an example of how one of the top Boerboel breeders, Shaun Eric Ewing, used PennHip to address the problems of hip dysplasia in his kennel.
http://topboerboel.ning.com/forum/topics/pennhip-vs-ofa