New Hope for Dog Owners: The Adequan Alternative
by Barry G. Davis
As soon as the orthopedic surgeon walked into the room, I knew the news wasn't good. The cold look in his eyes was a dead giveaway. Shuffling through the X-rays just taken of Misty, my 2-year-old Golden Retriever, he picked the most definitive one, slid it onto the light screen and pointed to the left hip joint with his pen.
The words were a blur, but the diagnosis confirmed that of my veterinarian: a moderately severe subluxated left hip - in simple terms hip dysplasia. And, the prognosis was poor. In his opinion, total hip-replacement surgery was necessary, and even then, it was extremely questionable that Misty would ever work again as a gun dog. It was a crushing feeling, one that mixed equal doses of anger and hurt, because Misty had exhibited more pure talent than any of our goldens since her late grandfather.
Hip dysplasia, a genetically inherited skeletal problem, has become the insidious scourge or a growing number of both working and non-working dogs, mostly the larger breeds. Basically, it is a matter of poor fit between the hip socket and the had of the femur, or upper leg bone. Any condition in which less than 40 percent of the femoral head rests within the acetabulum (hip socket) is considered dysplastic. What results is a gradual wearing down of the separating cushion of cartilage and synovial fluid (a gel like substance that provides lubrication for movement). Eventually, direct contact is made between the two bones and the dog begins to suffer severe pain from both the contact and the inflammation that comes with it. The deterioration is usually progressive, until it eventually cripples the dog completely.
Depending upon the degree of severity and the amount of work a dog does, dysplasia can rear its head from as early as 6 months to well into retirement age. One of the problems with detecting it early in gun dogs is that they all tend to possess an inherent gut-it-out toughness , a dedication to purpose that would enable them to ignore pain that would floor the normal pet. My goldens work hard, but considering the care we take in breeding, Misty's problem came as a shock. As I've subsequently learned, no matter how select the breeding of dogs with certifiably good hips, dysplasia still can occur. That's not to say that dogs with bad hips should be bred. They shouldn't. It's not only unethical and immoral, but the suffering that the individual animals go through, especially after they become a part of your life, is hard to take. |
