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Dog health problems

MEDICAL TOPICS

HIP DYSPLASIA

When people think of medical problems with german shepherds the first thing they're worried about is hip-dysplasia. We've spoken to many hundreds of people over the years who've told us that they've had to put their dogs down because of bad hips. WITHOUT EXCEPTION EVERY ONE OF THEM HAS THEN GONE ON TO DESCRIBE A SPINEPROBLEM AND NOT A HIP PROBLEM. We have NEVER encountered a dog with hip problems. Sure we've seen dogs walking in a bit of a wonky way, but that has never caused a medical problem.

Helmut Raiser, the new breed warden for Germany's S.V, seems to have come to the same conclusion as us. He says that after 40 years of x-raying hips their dogs are more unhealthy than ever because they have been looking at the wrong thing. What has been causing the problem is the bent spine that has caused the spinal chord to narrow and pinch nerves. (Spondylosis and Cauda Equina.) The friction against the nerve sheaths causes pain which Helmut believes is responsible for the frantic 'drive' that has been selected for, and also the reason why many GSDs are reluctant to sit (he says it's like sitting on nails). As the nerve sheaths are worn away the back leg muscles waste away until the nerves stop functioning completely and the dog becomes paralyzed. He says that the problem has become much worse. "10 years ago dogs were breaking down at 4 years old, nowadays they break down at 2 years old." He is so despondent about the GSD's health that he's considering crossing them with the Malinois (Belgian Shepherds). He says "...the Malinois people are smart. They don't x-ray. They don't need to. If a dog can jump a 2.2 metre wall at 10 years old, you don't need an x-ray."

We want to get smart now too! We've gathered enough evidence over the last 10 years to convince us that hip x-rays are a waste of time. Breeders should select for performance. If a dog is 8 years old and jumping and working well then he should be used for stud. (Wolfram's father Ben was doing that at 11 and still siring puppies. He was 9 when he sired Wolfram.) If a dog shows poor health he should not be used.

Firstly there is no standard system of interpreting x-rays, so different radiologists will read the same x-rays with different results. In fact the same radiologist will read the same x-ray differently at different times. We tested the radiologist responsible for giving official x-ray readings for breeding purposes. We sent the same bitch twice - once by identifying her by her ear tattoo and then a week later by using her microchip. She was given two different readings - one acceptable for breeding and one not. We were told by the university that reading hip x-rays is not a scientific field but subjective. We had to understand that the first time the radiologist read our bitch's x-rays in the privacy of his rooms and the second time in the hospital with a colleague!! This was mind-blowing for us who had not used dogs with hips other than 0-0 because we had accepted that this was a scientific appraisal of the health of the hips. Now we were hearing that the 'readings' depended as much on the reader's frame of mind as on the dog's state of health! We would expect this to be so for apsychic reading but not a medical one! Remember we are talking here of a radiologist who has spent years specializing in interpreting x-rays and who is one of only three radiologists in South Africa qualified to give official readings for breeding purposes. What about ordinary vets who do a short course on radiology during their studies?

Vets do not know what they are seeing when they look at hip x-rays. They see the gap between the femur head and socket and the shape of the head and hairline cracks in the bone but they don't know the significance of any of that. They can't tell whether there has been trauma in the area. The positioning of the dog for the x-rays makes a big difference to the gap seen. Muscle tone also makes a difference to the gap. (Bitches on heat or having just had puppies have bigger gaps due to hormones making their muscles slacker.) Someone x-rayed his dogs every year for several years and found that each dog's readings varied by one point up or down each time. A professor with 40 years experience in reading hip x-rays says that he realizes that he doesn't know what he is looking at on these x-rays - what causes what he sees and it's significance. There seems to be no correlation between what they see and actual physical problems.

Yet vets actually euthanase young dogs because they x-ray the hips and the 'readings' are bad.

Growing dogs, usually in their first year, often limp and have what vets coin as 'growing pains'. We believe that these pains are in the muscles and are caused by faulty nutrition (unless of course the limp is due to an injury or sore foot- pads). Giving them bone shavings, either liver or brewer's yeast, vitamine C, vitamine E and micro-organisms to improve intestinal flora (such as yoghurt with live cultures or raw dirty tripe), in addition to their basic diet, rectifies these pains within about 3 weeks. What happens often though is that an owner takes a dog to the vet because of a limp. Because it's a GSD the vet immediately suspects hip or elbow dysplasia (depending on whether it's a front or back leg) and x-rays. He 'reads' that they are bad and predicts that if they are bad at this early age they will be shocking by the time the dog is adult. To prevent further suffering (after all the puppy is limping already) they put him down there and then. Or the vet tells the owner that he has to operate on the hips immediately to prevent them from getting worse. Sound unbelievable? Well this has happened several times to people who have bought our puppies. Here are some examples:-

One puppy was 6 months old and suddenly had a limp. Without even x-raying the vet decided that this was the typical first sign of hip dysplasia and euthanased him! Another year-old puppy was perfectly healthy. He didn't even have a limp. Someone pointed out to the owners that he had an uneven gait at which they rushed to the vet for x-rays. Seeing that the hips were 'bad' they killed the puppy there and then. One of our bushdogs limped when he was almost a year old. The owner had not followed our advice on diet and was feeding only pellets recommended by the vet. The vet x-rayed his hips and told the woman that if he didn't operate on him within the week (in between two other hip-operations that he had that week) then he could just as well put the dog down. Luckily the owner then phoned us and we explained the diet to her again and asked for the x-rays. An experienced professor felt that the hips were 1-2 which is good enough for breeding according to K.U.S.A, the registration body in South Africa, and on the correct diet the puppy stopped limping. A 6 month old puppy, who we got back limping on his front leg from an owner, came right on the correct diet in a few weeks. We resold him and at a year took him back again because the new owners were told that his hips were shot. The vet had wanted to put him down. He was limping on a front and back leg. The owners had only fed the pellets recommended by the vet and ignored our instructions on food. When the dog was 2 years old we x-rayed his hips, shoulders and elbows and all were perfect. Another puppy was brought to us at about 9 months of age, lame on all fours, as a last effort before euthanasing him. We discovered that the pads on his feet were very thin and sensitive. He'd only walked on grass his whole life. After a few weeks of walking on rough ground his lameness vanished.

We are very upset knowing that healthy young dogs are being euthanased or operated on probably on a daily basis. Please do not x-ray your dogs' hips unless it's a requirement for breeding, in which case go to a qualified radiologist and accept the reading with a pinch of salt. If your dog is lame and has not got an obvious injury (like a broken leg or ripped muscle) then up his nutrition (see our page on nutrition) to make him healthy again. If you have a modern shepherd with a bent spine then give him the best nutrition possible to extend his life as long as possible because there's nothing else you can do to change the fate of his pinched nerves.

DIARRHOEA

Years ago we heard of a lot of puppies and young dogs with the squirts that vets were not able to stop, despite months of treatment and massive bills. Dogs were immediately put onto expensive 'intestinal' dog cubes. All sorts of expensive lab' tests were done to find the cause, anti-biotics given blindly hoping that they would cover any bugs going, biopsies taken (cutting a piece of the gut to analyse) and cortisone given in case it's an allergy. After all this the dogs' squirts continued and still nobody was the wiser.

We discovered through lab' tests that there were bacteria that cause runny stomachs that were resistant to the common anti-biotics used by vets. The following seemed to be successful:-

- the active ingredient cephalexine. ( brand names Rilexine/ Ceporex / Betaceph etc.
- the active ingredient enrofloxacin ( brand name Baytril )
- the active ingredient colistine sulphate ( brand name potencil )

Here's a case history as an illustration:

One of the bitches that we sold had the squirts for about 7 months. ( Unfortunately the owner didn't tell us.) During that time the vets had tried treating for giardia with panacur and flagyl; given a wide-spectrum anti-biotic; done numerous tests and a biopsy, and finally put her on a massive dose of cortisone for a couple of weeks. The owner then phoned us and we asked her to bring her bitch back to us for a while so that we could sort her out.

The bitch came here puffed up like a balloon from the cortisone and squirting water. After giving her Baytril for 5 days her stools began to get firmer and by week 2 were rock hard.

There are several causes of diarrhoea such as something the dog's eaten - especially a change in food (so if a puppy's stomach is runny don't chop and change food) , or giardia ( a protozoa that lives in the gut ) or viruses like parvo virus or corona virus, but it seems sensible to us, where diarrhoea is persistent, to use an anti-biotic that is most likely to succeed in killing resistant bacteria, because whatever the original cause, if the gut lining gets raw it will be open to secondary bacterial infection.

It's vital to build up the dog's intestinal flora -especially when anti-biotics are used - with one of the probiotics available on the market, or better still a little raw, dirty tripe or yoghurt with live cultures, as well as a bit of vegetables every day. When a dog has the runs he does not digest his food very well because it passes through too quickly. The flora in his intestines also get flushed out and must be replaced. They are needed to digest food and produce vitamines.

INTUSSUSCEPTION.

BEWARE! If your dog vomits persistently but does not pass any stools (faeces) then it probably has a piece of it's intestine that has pushed into itself and is causing a block. That piece of gut dies and will kill your dog quickly if not quickly removed surgically.

This often follows diarrhoea with or without a virus like corona or parvo virus that makes the gut lining raw. If it's a large piece of gut then a vet can feel it manually, otherwise an x-ray is needed.

PARVOVIRUS.

If you think you have a sure cure for parvovirus then you probably just haven't had enough puppies with it. Some puppies make it and others don't with exactly the same treatment. We have had numerous bouts and go the whole nine yards to save puppies every time with anti-biotics, blood transfusions, vitamines, nutritional drips, homeopathic remedies, etc, etc.

After all this there is one single piece of advice that we can give that we have learnt from experience is the most important factor. The puppy's stomach must be kept full - preferably with a smooth milk food with wheatgerm and yoghurt with live cultures and vitamine E. If you catch the parvo fast enough (when the pup just goes off food and /or has a runny stomach) and force-feed the pup (as well as giving whatever other treatment), then there's a good chance that the puppy will not start vomiting and will survive. (Especially if you give wheatgerm , B-vitamines, especially B6, Magnesium, and vitamine C and E.) The food protects the gut lining. (The easiest way to force-feed is with a large syringe and food sloppy enough to pass through the nozzle.)

If you treat parvo early without force-feeding the chances are very good that the pup will get worse and worse until it's gut is empty from the diarrhoea and vomiting and the gut lining gets destroyed and is passed out as bloody pools.

If you think that this section on parvovirus isn't important for you because your pup is fully vaccinated then read on for an eye-opener!

VACCINES.

If you think that because your puppy is up to date with it's vaccinations it is protected and won't get parvovirus or distemper (the most fatal two covered by vaccines) then your bubble is about to pop I'm afraid. That's what we thought until our first parvo outbreak.

The recommended vaccination programme is usually that the pup is vaccinated at 6, 9 and 12 weeks of age. This was our regime and we were happy that it worked UNTIL we had a live virus outbreak.

During that outbreak we lost four- week old puppies (whose mothers were thoroughly vaccinated) and puppies of varying ages between 4 and 10 weeks. Puppies died that had already had 2 vaccinations.

Confronting the vaccine company whose vaccines we used, we were told that a puppy is only protected after it's third vaccine at 12 weeks and that they can't understand why the maternal antibodies in the pups hadn't protected them at 4 weeks. Their suggestion was to vaccinate at 4 weeks of age with parvo and corona virus. They explained that the maternal antibodies should protect a pup up to about 9 weeks and that they counteract vaccines (seeing them as the virus itself). Vaccines can therefore only take effect when the maternal antibodies are no longer working. Seeing that you don't know when that is (individuals will vary) you don't know when a vaccine is going to take effect. This they call the 'window of susceptibility'. The safest would be to vaccinate weekly, we were told! Except that they didn't know what effect that would have on the pup's immunity system and the cost would be prohibitive.

We then started our vaccination programme at 4 weeks with great success UNTIL THE NEXT LIVE OUTBREAK. Again we lost puppies only a week old right the way up to 11 weeks old. We also had a distemper outbreak (as did the whole country) and some of the puppies we lost was due to distemper (which can have exactly the same symptoms as parvo - you only see nervous symptoms if the pup lives long enough). Again the vaccine company was summoned to our kennels (a different one from the first because we'd lost confidence in them). Again we listened to the same story about the window! We did hear some new interesting facts though, which are valuable to know.

Firstly, while the parvo part of a vaccine takes approximately a week to work (if the maternal antibodies allow it), the distemper part takes 3 weeks. This means that if the 6 week vaccine fails to work because of the maternal antibodies, but the 9 week one does work, then it will be a week before the parvo part kicks in, and 3 weeks before the distemper part works. That means that the puppy is vulnerable to parvo for that first week and distemper until it's 12 weeks old.

In other words, before your pup is 12 weeks old he can get parvo or distemper in between vaccines.

There is a way to protect a puppy against distemper . That is by vaccinating it against measles. The human measles virus looks similar to the canine distemper virus and so immunity against it will give immunity against distemper. However, the difference is such that the mother's distemper anti-bodies do not recognise the measles virus, and so do nothing to it. The pup can therefore get immunity to distemper in 3 days regardless of the amount of mother's antibodies in it's system.

We have not only successfully prevented distemper in our puppies with this vaccine, but we have actually saved dogs with distemper by giving them the vaccine. One dog already had severe nervous symptoms. Before this we had NEVER been able to save dogs with distemper.

Because distemper outbreaks are rare, few vets have had cause to learn about or use this measles vaccine.

The second interesting piece of information was that a dog's antibodies can be destroyed during illness. If this is true (we have only heard this from the vaccine company) then that could explain why a bitch might not pass on enough immunity to pups if she's been ill since her last vaccine.

Lastly we were reminded that it's important to make sure that newborn pups drink as much mother's milk as possible in the first couple of days because that is how they get immunity from their mother.

GENETIC AND CONGENITAL ABNORMALITIES

Here's Duffy, our dwarf german shepherd trying to find out if his dwarfism is genetic or just congenital! (Purists don't worry: Yin Yan, our cocker spaniel, wasn't on heat!)

A genetic characteristic is something that is passed on to a puppy from it's parent's DNA . Because it could be something that only appears in a small percentage of the same parent's puppies (such as Von Willebrandt's disease - a bleeding disorder), it is not always easy to determine when something is genetic and when not.

A congenital condition is something that a puppy is born with but has nothing to do with his parent's genes. Many things can influence the development of a foetus in the womb. I think most people are aware of the many deformed babies that were born in the late 1950s after mothers took the drug thalidomide. Drugs and other chemicals given early in pregnancy can cause birth defects. Illnesses causing high temperatures can do the same, and so can deficiencies. A deficiency of Vit. B6, for example, has been found to cause cleft palates and other abnormalities.

There's a tendency today to blame all congenital defects on genetics. If a puppy is born with a cleft palate, overshot jaw, liver shunt, three toes on the hind feet, no anus , kinked tail, or turns out to be a dwarf, then genetics is the prime suspect even if the same parents have had many healthy litters before. It's only when a large number in a litter are affected that vets will suspect an external cause for the congenital defects (because they think that a genetic characteristic can only appear in a certain percentage of offspring). We do not agree with this reasoning because if many puppies in a litter can be deformed due to a chemical then so can just one. Our experience with birth defects has led us to believe that ALL of the above defects are caused by environmental factors.

This is briefly our history of birth defects over the last twenty years which has led us to this belief.

---After a bout of some virus (or whatever) that caused the abortion of two litters and the death of one of the mothers, our first live litter had a puppy with a split palate. We hand-reared Orkney (a puppy with a split palate can't suck on it's mother because of the hole in the roof of his mouth) and had him operated on and he has turned into a magnificent dog.

---The second split palate case we had was when all six males of a litter were born with overshot jaws, huge cleft palates, three toes on their front or back paws (instead of four) and very kinked tails. All but one were so deformed that we had them euthanased immediately. The one with the smallest cleft palate,Fluffy (after the Harry Potter three-headed dog!!), has joined the ranks of good adverts for our Olderhill line in our home!!!! The four females in the litter are perfect except for one girl who has three toes on one of her back feet. We had dewormed and dipped the mother at the time of conception.

---Our third and last split palate was in a bitch puppy Aiy Aiy again at a time where we had many stillborn puppies in litters born within two weeks of each other. Almost all the stillborn puppies were male.

--- After years of breeding we suddenly got a scottish terrier puppy and vietnamese miniature potbellied piglet born with no anus (there is skin where there should be a hole for them to go to the toilet.) We have often seen that the same defects can appear in different breeds and even species at the same time and then never appear again. This certainly leads us to suspect that the problem is environmental.

--- Someone breeding with a dog and bitch bred by us first had three healthy litters of puppies. She then had a litter with one puppy much smaller than the others that died. The next litter had two such puppies that died. The last litter had another two that survived, Dixie and Duffy, who have turned out to be dwarves. At going on 2 years of age they are the size of 8 week-old puppies! Their hair is patchy and skin smooth and black. Onderstepoort, our veterinary university, tested one of them, expecting a pituitary deficiency (the classic 'genetic' defect in german shepherds), and found the pituitary gland to be normal!! They are also puzzled by the unexpected number of them that have been born. (Again they expect only a small percentage of puppies to be affected if it's genetic.) We suspect that there might be a chemical responsible that is in their environment because of the local industries.

Here are some photos of the two at nearly two years of age. They are smaller than our cocker spaniels.

Update April 2005 : Unfortunately Dixie died a year ago from hypothermia. Her body temperature dropped very low and nothing we did (infra red light/hot water bottles) over a week got it up again. We were very sad to lose her. Duffy almost died shortly afterwards in the same way but we luckily pulled him through and realized that his thyroid couldn't be working properly if he can't regulate his body temperature. We had it tested and there was zero function. He's been on eltroxin since then and his hair has started to grow. (He'd become completely naked.) Here are a couple of photos showing his 'socks' that he's growing They are gradually creeping up his legs. We just hope that he'll completely pull his socks up before winter!

From our experience it is clear that vets often can't tell whether a congenital problem is genetic or not.

Yet many are quick to blame just about anything on genetics, and the public has learnt from them to do the same.

If a german shepherd is thin then he's got a pancreas deficiency! If he limps it's hip dysplasia. If he has mange it was something passed onto him by his mother - even if he only shows symptoms at 9 months of age and none of his ancestors have ever had a skin problem! If he suddenly gets epilepsy then it's genetic and he needs medication for the rest of his life - never mind if his ancestors have never had it! A dog can be thin for many reasons:- lack of food; an illness like erlichiosis caused by a tick bite; faulty digestion; worms; etc. A limp can be caused by a sore paw; a bump or other injury; sore muscles; etc. Mange can be picked up anywhere and any time. Epilepsy can be caused by poison; a distemper vaccine; a light bout of distemper itself; an injury to or growth in the brain or spinal chord; etc. We had a cocker spaniel who had some grand mal fits after the vaccine and then never again. We had a couple of dogs who suddenly got grand mal fits at the same time as an outbreak of distemper and after anti biotic never had a recurrence.

The message we would like to convey to you is that vets and owners should not jump to the conclusion that a medical problem is genetic before investigating all other possibilities. It can cause a dog to get the wrong treatment and even die as a result. It can also cause breeders to be too worried to breed from parents which are in actual fact great breeding dogs. Defective puppies that survive should later be sterilized in case it's genetic or in case whatever has affected it's development as a foetus might have affected it's genetic material - as does radiation and goodness knows what else.