Is the Pug a "typical" dog?

By Carol Beuchat PhD

There is a paper about the health of Pugs just pubished by the group focusing on canine health at The Royal Veterinary College in the UK (O'Neill et al 2022). They report that Pugs are less likely than other dogs to have several disorders including lipomas and heart murmurs, but they have a higher incidence of many health other issues.

It's hard to get anything out of a table of numbers, so I have produced a chart summarizing the data in their Table 2, plotting the percentage of dogs affected for each disorder, ranked by prevalence in Pugs.  (Note that they applied several statistical treatments to adjust for effects of age, weight, spay/neuter status, etc.)
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It seems unlikely that these results reflect an unhealthy population of dogs produced by puppy mills and back yard breeders, vs the mainstream breeders in the dog fancy, because a number of these health issues result from traits stipulated in the breed standard (e.g., shortened muzzle, skin folds), but the data aren't there to support this assumption.
  

  

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REFERENCES

O'Neill, J Sahota, DC Brodbelt, DB Church,, RMA Packer, & C Pegram. 2022. Health of Pug dogs in the UK: disorder predispositions and protections. Canine Medicine and Genetics 9:4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40575-022-00117-6

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