corgi-traveler - I did not "ASSUME" anything, and I acknowledged my particular current case was statistically insignificant.
There were five of us friends/co-workers who had Wheaten Terriers. We all got our dogs from totally unrelated breeders from different areas of Michigan, with mine actually coming from out-of-state. Two of the five had the protein wasting disease, including my West Virginia Wheaten.
My gut feeling is that this high incidence, for what I believe is a pretty rare disorder, did not come about totally by random. But rather the results were skewed by in-breeding in various forms and degrees over a long period of time.
The idea is to go back in time before the problem occurred. If the problem has not yet manifested itself in Ireland, then there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by going outside the country. I think of it as being somewhat akin to doing a "restore" on a computer.
