By Jennifer Lee
Tailcreek Mastiffs
Every day families across the country decide they want to bring a puppy into their home. The focus tends to be on WHERE the dog comes from but very few people are asking questions about the history of the parents and grandparents of the puppy they are interested in purchasing. However, people need to be conscious of the fact that the care given to the puppy’s predecessors will have a significant impact on the puppy’s future health and wellbeing.
In many cases the family history of the dog is not known and there is no way to track that information down. But when dogs are acquired from breeders who have been working with particular lines for a length of time they can often give buyers very detailed information about the ancestors. I’m not talking about titles and awards; I’m referring to the medical and care history.
The environment and lifestyle of an animal has the power to affect its genome by way of epigenetic changes. The DNA sequence itself remains unaffected but epigenetic modifications alter how a gene is expressed, including completely “turning on” or “turning off” a gene. You can think of the DNA sequence as the letters that form sentences in a paragraph and epigenetics as the punctuation marks which have the ability to change the meaning of the words entirely.
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