Talk:Great Dane

Do you own a Great Dane?

Pictures needed!Nancy Sculerati MD 11:41, 4 February 2007 (CST)

holding cut info here

Understand what the author wanted to say but as written this is untrue:

Each purebred dog has particular health problems that are more common in its breed than in others. Some of these concerns are due to recessive genes that are more likely to "show" in animals that come from related ancestors. Other problems are simply associated with the typical physical features characteristic of a breed.

Cutting and holding here so the thought doesn't get lost: needs to be reworked and placed in dog: health, at Dog/Draft

Aleta Curry 02:26, 16 June 2007 (CDT)

Reaching out for collaboration

Aleta, I don't know what your previous experience in wiki writing has been. I myself had little to none before I started writing on CZ several months ago. Here there are few or no anonymous "authors", if you look back on the history page, I started this article from scratch. There have been only a couple of other contributors. As one of the biology editors, we had a number of people with common interested writing articles, and ended up having a lively collaboration, that included pointing out references to each other and many conversations ob our talk pages. I would love to have that with you -and others interested and knowlegable about dogs. So, what are trhe inaccuracies that you are concerned with? I'd like to discuss them, and perhaps if I make the biology clearer you can make the wording clearer.Nancy Sculerati 09:02, 16 June 2007 (CDT)

Hello there Nancy! I didn't want to make any assumptions about authorship. Yes, certainly, that type of collaboration is absolutely necessary in these articles that will span more than one workgroup.

Here’s what I meant:

• The book references in para. 2 should have the complete citation—or at the very least the full title and author—placed at the bottom of the article
• the paragraph I moved suggests that the health concerns subsequently mentioned are specific to individual dog breeds, and that *all* breeds have disorders specific to that breed only. This is not usually true: those concerns are generally related to dog groups, whether informal groups such as large vs. small dogs, or a formal group: “terriers”, “gundogs”. There are of course disorders that do relate to specific breeds, but even there the genetic link itself is not usually breed-specific. For example, the blindness and deafness associated with [white] Great Danes relates to the gene(s) responsible for whiteness, not with the genes causing the dog’s "great-daneness", if I’m making myself clear, so you can find the same problem in other white breeds—but again, not all—the White German Shepherd, for example, does not generally evidence this problem—and many white dogs do not seem to have this disorder gene-linked. Further, some purebred dog breeds are completely free of breed-specific disorders.
• Finally, the sentence about recessive genes needs to be reconsidered. The use of the verb “show” is problematic, since you and I know that “show” is more often associated with dominant genes; the recessive can be carried but not ‘show’ until it teems up with the other allele.

I would like to place these items into the health section at Dog/Draft, (and eventually a vet with excellent writing skills is going to come along and do an in-depth article on dog health, right?) since they relate to dog health in general rather than Great Danes in particular. I have mentioned Great Dane-related disorders in the article.

Aleta Curry 17:42, 16 June 2007 (CDT)

p.s. my previous wiki experience is years of fun and frustration at Wikipedia. Aleta Curry 17:42, 16 June 2007 (CDT)