A picture of an unusual looking dog, which was claimed to be a Maltese hunting dog, appeared on the back page on January 11.

The poor dog looks more like a German smooth-haired pointer than a Maltese, colour and markings included.

The picture reminds me of a veterinarian, Martin Debattista, who had written a whole page on the Times of Malta saying that, together with others, he was going to revive the Maltese breed, which came in different shapes and sizes. This was more than two years ago. Yet, we neither have a healthy and up-to-standard Maltese hunting dog breed alive nor in pictures.

I had mentioned, when replying to the veterinarian, that the gene pool was shrinking by the minute and that, from the stock available, it was impossible to revive the breed (with all its faults) plus that if one had to manage to create what looked like a Maltese hunting dog it had to be as described in the breed’s standard. I was the only one to write how the breed standard (Maltese hunting dog) should be, in a way that it was not the decorations only that made the breed, but also, that it was suitable for the function of the breed.

If I had to guess, it seems to me the dog in the January 11 picture is more the result of a mutation than anything else.

Imagine that the unhealthy recessive gene had a healthy dominant gene as a copy, Hh as an example, the fault would never be noticed since it would be a heterozygous pair, aka a carrier (genes come in pairs) and until the mutant genes are expressed in a dog with two copies of the gene, in genetics, known as homozygous recessive, the mutant will never exist Hh.

Every organism, including dogs and humans, are carriers for many autosomal recessive conditions, which have been passed from generation to generation without ever being noticed.