What an elbow grade actually tells you

A breeder mentions the sire's elbows were graded 1. Next to a hip score that might run into the twenties or thirties out of a possible 106, a 1 out of 3 sounds like nothing worth asking about. That comparison is the trap. Elbow grading and hip scoring are run by the same scheme, read by the same panel of specialists, and printed on certificates that look almost identical — but they measure differently, and a grade has to be read on its own terms, not as a smaller version of a hip score.

The same scheme, a different scale

The Elbow Dysplasia Scheme is run jointly by the British Veterinary Association and the Kennel Club, using the grading protocol set out by the International Elbow Working Group, and has been operating in the UK since 1998. The mechanics up to the X-ray are shared with the hip scheme: the dog must be at least a year old, permanently microchipped, and X-rayed under anaesthesia or heavy sedation, with the films submitted through the same CHS portal and read by pairs drawn from the same panel of ten scrutineers — vets with advanced qualifications in radiology or orthopaedics, who between them score and grade more than 16,000 hip and elbow submissions a year.

Where the schemes part company is the scale itself. A hip score adds nine measurements per hip into a total running from 0 to 53, and the two hips are added together for a score out of 106 — a fine-grained number that rewards reading against a median. Elbow grading is coarser by design: each elbow is read for a single overall picture and assigned one of four grades.

• 0 — radiographically normal
• 1 — mild osteoarthritis
• 2 — moderate osteoarthritis, or a primary lesion with no osteoarthritis yet visible
• 3 — severe osteoarthritis, or a primary lesion with osteoarthritis

Both elbows are graded, but the dog's overall result is not the sum of the two — it is whichever elbow scored worse. A dog with one elbow at 0 and one at 2 is a grade 2 dog. That is a different piece of arithmetic from the hip scheme's total, and worth knowing before you assume the two certificates can be read the same way.

Why there is no median to compare it against

The hip score piece we wrote last week turns on a single fact: a hip total means nothing until you check it against the breed median for that year. Elbow grading doesn't offer that comparison, because it isn't built as a graded scale the way hip scoring is — it's a four-point clinical read, and CHS's own guidance is a threshold rather than a ranking: breed only from dogs with a grade of 0. There is no "acceptable if below the median" version of a grade 1 the way there is for a hip total sitting under the breed average.

What does exist is a published breed-by-breed breakdown of how many dogs in each breed have been graded at each level since the scheme's records began in 1999 — useful for seeing how common anything above 0 is in a given breed, but not a line to grade an individual dog against the way a hip median works. In a breed where the overwhelming majority of graded dogs come back at 0, a 1 is a more meaningful outlier than the same grade in a breed where 1s and 2s are routine. Reading the breed statistics alongside an individual certificate tells you which situation you're in; the certificate alone does not.

Where an EBV changes the answer

For a short list of breeds — currently including the Labrador Retriever, Golden Retriever, German Shepherd Dog, Rottweiler, Bernese Mountain Dog and Newfoundland — the Kennel Club and BVA also publish an Estimated Breeding Value for elbow grade. An EBV draws on the graded results of a dog's relatives across the pedigree, not just its own certificate, to estimate the genetic contribution that dog is actually likely to pass on. The breed average is fixed at zero; a dog scoring below that has a lower-than-average genetic risk to offer a litter regardless of what its own grade happens to say, and a dog scoring above it carries more risk than its own certificate alone would suggest.

This matters most exactly where the grade-only picture is ambiguous — a grade 1 dog with a good EBV is a genuinely different breeding prospect from a grade 1 dog with a poor one, in a way the certificate on its own cannot show. Where a breed has an EBV published, the Kennel Club's own guidance is to weigh it alongside, not instead of, the raw grade.

What a good grade doesn't guarantee

Elbow dysplasia is, like hip dysplasia, multifactorial: growth rate, weight as a puppy, and exercise before the growth plates close all interact with genetics in ways a single radiograph of a parent cannot fully capture. Two grade 0 parents can still produce a puppy that grades poorly, and breeding from good-graded stock reduces the incidence of the condition across a breed over generations without eliminating it from any individual litter. The breeds BVA names as most commonly affected — Basset Hound, Bernese Mountain Dog, Dogue de Bordeaux, German Shepherd Dog, Great Dane, Irish Water Spaniel, Newfoundland, Labrador Retriever, Rottweiler, and increasingly the popular doodle crosses — are exactly the breeds where asking the question is most worth the five minutes it takes.

It's also a smaller dataset to lean on than the hip scheme's: just over 5,300 dogs had their elbows graded in 2025 against more than 6,400 hip submissions in the same year, so for less common breeds the breed-specific statistics behind any individual grade may be thinner than they look.

What to actually ask for

• The actual grade for each parent — remembering it's the worse elbow, not an average of the two.
• The date the X-ray was taken, and the dog's age at the time.
• Whether an EBV exists for the breed, and what it says, rather than relying on the grade alone.
• Whether the result is published on the Kennel Club's Health Test Results Finder — a published grade is independently checkable; one only described to you verbally is not.

Reading it alongside the rest of the file

We wrote about what a hip score actually tells you for the same reason we're writing this one: a certificate that states a number without the context needed to read it is giving a buyer half the picture. The two schemes sit side by side on most working and pedigree dogs' paperwork, and it's easy to assume they can be read the same way because they come from the same panel and the same portal. They can't, quite — and the gap between what a hip total and an elbow grade each actually claim is the kind of detail we think belongs on a listing itself, not left for a buyer to piece together afterwards. It's the same principle behind what good health testing actually looks like and what verified breeder actually means: publish the record, and publish what the record needs to be read against.

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Sources

• BVA Elbow Dysplasia Scheme for dogs
• Understanding the results — CHS online submission portal
• Elbow breed-specific statistics 2024 — BVA
• Royal Kennel Club Health Test Results Finder

— Rene