  There has been much concern about health issues associated with the breeding
of short-muzzled pedigree dogs. The Dutch government commissioned a scientific
report \emph{Fokken met Kortsnuitige Honden} (Breeding of short muzzled dogs),
van Hagen (2019), and based on it rather stringent legislation, restricting
breeding primarily on the basis of a single simple measurement of
brachycephaly, the CFR: cranial-facial ratio. Van Hagen's work is a literature
study and it draws heavily on statistical results obtained in three
publications: Njikam (2009), Packer et al.~(2015), and Liu et al.~(2017). In
this paper I discuss some serious shortcomings of those three studies and in
particular show that Packer et al.\ have drawn unwarranted conclusions from
their study. In fact, new analyses using their data leads to an entirely
different conclusion.
