Ranger was born at Spicemill on 4 July 2009 from Venka and Apoll America litter.

Our veterinary surgeon noticed he had a heart murmur at the litter check just before the puppies reached 7 weeks. So Ranger was booked for another check 10 days later to check on the progression of the murmur. Unfortunately, there was still a significant murmur. An ultrasound at a specialist clinic in Surrey revealed a very serious problem. Our poor little pup was born with 2 heart defects. He has pulmonic stenosis together with tryscupid displasia. This is a very rare defect in our breed, in fact, the British club does not seem to have any report of such problem in our breed in this country. From then, we knew Ranger life expectancy was unfortunately much reduced. We discussed the various options with the heart specialist, but his problem could not be fixed by surgery or medication. So we decided to keep Ranger and let him live as normal a puppyhood as possible. He spent a lot of time playing with our Scamp and they were great friends. We knew he will not be around for long, but we enjoyed very much the time we had with him and did our best to make his short life a good one. To our surprise, Ranger made it until November the following year, when our vet explained that progressive heat failure was setting in. His quality of life degraded rapidely and we had to make the terrible decision to let him go. He is very sadly missed.

A little more about heart problems in hovawart

It seems that the most common heart defect reported in hovawarts is aortic stenosis and we have actually been unable to locate other owners who have had hovawarts with pulmonic stenosis. We are aware this does not mean it has never happen. But there is no obvious genetic link. We have obviously informed the Hovawart Club of Great Britain and the owner of the stud dog of Ranger's problem so a log of it can be made and we can be informed of other arising cases. If anybody reading this page know of any hovawarts born with this heart defect, we would like to hear about them, even if they are not related to our lines. It is interesting to us to obtain any information that could confirm or not that there is a genetic link.

Update: Since we originally wrote this page, we received information from the continent where other cases have been reported. Although there has been only a limited number of hovawarts, the main German club treat it as genetic and recommend that when a dog is diagnosed with it, his dam and sire are no longer bred from. It is also recommended that littermates have their heart scanned before being bred from.