The third lucky break also traces back to those original 30 or so dogs. Owners have worked hard to breed out disease and keep the population going, and along the way they became extremely knowledgeable about genetics and its role in health, said Susan Becker, president of the Portuguese Water Dog Club of Greater Chicagoland.
Intense genetic screening and awareness of lineage has always been a philosophy of the breed in the U.S., Becker said.
"Everybody participates in health screening and there is always someone [at the shows] drawing blood from the dogs," she said. "You get virtually 100% compliance."
When the Georgie Project started asking water dog owners to provide blood samples, pedigree lines, X-rays and even, more recently, to ship their dead pets to Utah for autopsies, many owners agreed to do it, Chase said.
So far, the project has looked at the genomes of more than 1,000 water dogs, has X-rays from 600 and has conducted more than 150 autopsies.
"They have been phenomenally supportive of these efforts," Ostrander said, adding that at one show, owners stood in line to offer samples of their dogs' blood. "We came back with 420 blood samples."
The whole idea to use the Portuguese water dog for genetic research actually came from a breeder, not a scientist, Chase said.
About a dozen years ago, University of Utah soybean geneticist Gordon Lark contacted breeder Karen Miller after his water dog, Georgie, died. Miller, who now lives in Maine, sent Lark a puppy for free and urged him to study the genetics of Addison's disease, a form of which strikes both dogs and people. (President Kennedy famously suffered from it.) The Georgie Project was born.
Miller said she did not know whether the Obamas would be participating in the Georgie Project, but said she planned to send Michelle Obama a T-shirt and an issue of the breed's magazine.
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