@tanza:
You made you position very clear and also your choice of breeders, I just happen to not agree that breeder is a responsible breeder. And this especially because they breed more than just one breed….
Right. The difference is that I have actually been there, spent close to a hundred hours on site, talking with her, asking questions, probing her plans, looking at her records, handling her dogs, watching how she handles them and how they respond to her, talking to the vets in the area, talking to other owners, helping with chores and getting an in-depth feel for who she is as a lifelong, dedicated rare-breed preservationist.
On the other hand, you are making judgments from the other side of a computer screen on seemingly arbitrary criteria. Sarah has a name, you don't have to call her "that" or "they". Her name is Sarah and her kennel is Nocturnal. She has raised Basenjis for something like thirty years.
You're right, that the purchase price is just one expense. If you're responsible, like me, you keep an emergency fund set aside. You clearly have plenty of play money, so this may not be a concern for you, but for some of us, keeping an extra $500-1000 in the emergency fund may come in very handy. We have great credit and live debt-free, so while I could put emergency care on credit, I'd rather pay cash for things that matter, and not waste it on things that mostly don't.
Seeing as how 96% of your population doesn't have a problem, how would you know? How about the fact that here in reality, 96% of the time, you have no problem? That is how you know. The same way you know you don't have statistically significant problems with neurological disorders, without demanding every dog be subjected to FMRI. You simply do not have a statistically significant rate either of neurological deficits or CHD.
I have worked extensively with dysplasia prone breeds. Believe me, they know. Yes, it is a problem that dogs may lose joint stability under heavy use; since as we (and Cornell) have already established that up to 3/4ths of all CHD stems from environmental cofactors, simply filtering out four percent of your breeding stock isn't going to fix your problem, if you keep giving your dogs hip dysplasia by the way you feed and work them.
I certainly respect your intentions, but you are using a subjective, observational, non-genetic test as a "quick fix", and thereby unnecessarily narrowing your gene pool. I think it's a fine tool for monitoring your program, but it's not a "quick fix" for breeding good hips, and until a direct, genetic screen becomes available, you should not be using it to cull dogs or to guarantee hip health, or attack other breeders who choose not to use it as a quick fix.