There is no evidence that Hip Dysplasia is more common in Havanese than other small breeds.

The British Veterinary Association does not yet have enough hip X-ray results in their database to make a judgement of the prevalence of Hip Dysplasia in Havanese. However, the Orthopedic Foundation For Animals in the US has data on 7,129 tested Havanese and their results show Havanese are comparable to many other small breeds. Below is a list of OFA hip statistics as published to date (accessed in January 2025), in breeds from toy and other groups.

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You may have seen posts on social media stating that the -highly respected- Finnish canine health database shows that more than 50% of Havanese screened in Finland had Hip Dysplasia on Xray. This is based on only 332 tested Havanese over a nine year period. As with hip testing results in the UK, in terms of statistical validity this is a small number of dogs, and it is therefore not yet possible to draw conclusions about the breed as a whole.

In contrast, the OFA data, based on 7,129 tested Havanese, demonstrates that at least 90% of tested dogs had a normal hip conformation, an additional 1% were indeterminate, and the vast majority of the remaining 9% fell into the 'mild' category.

 

Any health data analyst would therefore ask questions as to why the results in the Finnish database are skewed towards hip dysplasia, before making any generalisations about the breed.

There may be many different reasons, which theoretically may include the issue of small numbers, differences the methodology used to obtain and/or score Xrays, or factors specific to the local population. There may be any number of other factors we don’t know about.

Until more dogs are added to their database, it will remain difficult to interpret the results. Nevertheless, we must not disregard this statistic but keep an open mind, closely monitor the data going forward, and review conclusions on an ongoing basis.