At age 4 Eddie was CERF'd normal eyed, then, when he was 6 years old, I received a phone call from owners of his littermate, saying that he had vision problems. Follow-up testing revealed, much to my horror, that three dogs from this litter, including Eddie, were afflicted with Progressive Retinal Atrophy. Only one in this litter had ever produced puppies, and all of them, being assumed carriers, were removed from the gene pool. And so it came to be, quite unexpectedly, that my little but long-standing "family" of Tervuren, dating back 40 years, came to a close.

Michigan State University asked me if I would help them with a genetic study of PRA in the Belgians, by locating other affected dogs and asking their owners to participate. This began in 1998, and at this time MSU has a number of blood samples on affected Tervuren, Groenendael (Belgian Sheepdogs), Lakenois, and Malinois. So far, a marker has not been found although my pedigrees indicate a family relationship within each variety, indicating to me that it is probably carried by a recessive gene.