Can I know if my german shepherd dog has hip problem or not? He looks perfect in terms of shape and color?

Vets are your best friends. Calling them is free and better than any advice you will receive on here.

The vet can x-ray his hips and give you a hip score – the lower the score the better his hips are. It’s very common for the hips to score differently. Even a medium hip score doesn’t necessarily mean future problems – don’t over-exercise him at this young age, avoid stair climbing with him, no making him jump over obstacles and you’ll be doing him and his hips a favour. If he’s a pedigree, you should know from his breeder what his parents hip scores were, and whether there has been any incidence of dysplasia in the last couple of generations, and that will also give you some idea of what to expect.

hip problems are most common in german shepards, but they usually develop in the dogs later years, about 12 or 13 years old

i am a GSD owner, probably the only way you are ever going to know this for sure,(unless they have hip problems at all) is by having there hips ex raid on a regular basis, the one i have now is my fourth GSD, luckily not one of them has had hip problems.

You are asking at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons.

The first time to worry about hip dysplasia (AND about elbow dysplasia) is before you obtain your pup. At that stage you require to to see the hip & elbow results of both parents and all 4 grandparents. Because both dysplasia are the effects of recessive alleles, those results doesn’t guarantee that the parents aren’t each carrying several recessives heterozygously (and so each recessive is “switched off” by its dominant partner); and if they are carrying the SAME recessive, one in four pups is likely to be affected by it. But that’s the best you can do until progeny analysis results become available (progeny analyses are the reason that Germany’s ZWs are superior to OFA and PennHIP and FCI results, and part of the reason why BIF-scoring is superior to all of them).

The second time to worry about either of those 2 dysplasias is when one of the next 3 occurs – whichever of them happens to come first:
(1) The dog indicates hip pain – sometimes by limping, more likely by refusing to jump in or out of the car or, worst, crying when it has to get up from a lying position.
(2) You want to know if the dog is sound enough to begin the high impact aspects of Agility or DogSport (=SchutzHund & IPO) or S&R.
(3) You are considering breeding from him/her so want to know whether there is any indication that the dog has one or more pairs of the “bad” recessives.

In the case of #1 you have the joints at the limping end xrayed IMMEDIATELY, and while waiting for the plates to be developed you work out the best place to sell your soul in case the xray plates show major deterioration has occurred and you are faced with the choice between raising a few thousand dollars in a hurry or euthanasing the pooch.

In the case of #2 or #3 you delay until just a few weeks before you HAVE to know – the older the pooch, the better the reliability of predictions based on its xray plates.

Dr Willis published this table stating what percentage of dysplastic hips get detected by each age:
15.8% by 6m, 68.9% by 12m, 82.7% by 18m, 95.4% by 24m, 97.5% by 36m

Which kinda indicates that prelims done at much under 12 months old are going to miss most of the poor joints, because they won’t have deteriorated enough yet to be obvious.
The “good” xray schemes (ZWs, and BIF-scoring) certificate at any age from 12 months onwards. The 70% detection by that age is good enough to predict that, of the dogs whose joints look acceptable then, only the hardest working are likely to later develop enough deterioration to be a problem. And for breeders that small (less than 30%) risk of that milder amount of deterioration is more than offset by the huge benefits of having progeny analyses available when the parents are only 3 years old – it is the progeny analyses that reveal how many recessives the pooch carries..

Please don’t believe the rubbish you read in the “pet literature”, printed or on-line.
To learn some of the realities about Elbow Dysplasia and then about Hip Dysplasia, click on those terms in http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/The_GSD_Source/links/Diseases_001198817153/

Although hip dysplasia became rife in all large breeds thanks to the lack of publicity & HD detection schemes in the 50s and early 60s, it is nowadays rare except in carelessly-bred stock such as you find produced by puppy millers (which is where pet shops get their stock) and BYBers and ignoramuses who think that letting a dog & bit.ch mate makes them breeders.

Be aware that YahooAnswers is full of kids pretending to know everything. It’s hard to believe that “ann w” has lived long enough to have had 4 GSDs “ex raid”… tch tch!

Despite the claims by kids such as “siwonemi…” (who can’t even spell our breed!) and “imamom”, any breeder who merits the description s *breeder* will have few instances of getting caught by those recessives. In my kennel, the last litter to have dysplastics in it was born in 1983 and WASN’T planned by me – it was a “surprise gift” from a pup who was allowed to run unsupervised with his dam while she was on-heat, because he was too small to reach her “target”, and anyway he was too young to be fertile. Yeah, right…..
I COULD get caught again in my very next litter, but my record shows that “common” is NOT the right word.

At 5 months your pup should no longer carry any “puppy fat”, he should be developing the build of a champion marathon runner. Most of his adult coat should be present within a couple of weeks. From then on, unless you have chosen a long-coat -
•• when he is gaiting or panting you should be able to see each rib outlined by the muscles working over it;
•• when he is rested you should see no more than one edge of the very last rib.
Don’t achieve that by FORCED exercise, but by supplying a diet that is high quality rather than high quantity, and by allowing free exercise (no all-day crating!) plus some quiet on-lead socialisation+training walks.

Anyway, if you have further questions about GSDs the place to ask them is in a couple of the 300+ YahooGroups dedicated to aspects of GSDs. For each one you like the name of, click that name to go to its Home Page. Once there, read the “mission statement” to find out whether what they want to talk about is what you want to talk about (some let visitors look through their actual messages, others are more secretive), then scroll down to the Monthly Activity boxes – you want neither a group that is “dead” nor a group that is going to overflow your Mailbox.
Les P, owner of GSD_Friendly: http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/GSD_Friendly
“In GSDs” as of 1967