The Hokkaido Ken has been accepted into the CHIC Program, and now any Hokkaido who meets all of the required breed health testing will be issued a CHIC number. Note that it does not mean that the dog passed all of the tests, only that they were completed and results submitted to the public OFA database. Right now the state of the breed is such that we need these tests in order to make informed breeding decisions, but an abnormal score is not necessarily cause to remove the dog from breeding. Also, we are still gathering info about health statistics in the breed so making results public is extremely valuable.

The required tests as per HANA and CHIC are:

• OFA or PennHIP Hip Dysplasia Evaluation
• OFA Cardiac Evaluation
• OFA/CERF Eye Examination
• Collie Eye Anomaly (CEA) DNA Test

The optional tests are:

• Progressive Retinal Atrophy (PRA) DNA Test
• OFA Patellar Luxation Evaluation
• OFA Elbow Dysplasia Evaluation
• OFA Thyroid Evaluation

You can read more about these on the CHIC website or on our health testing page.