TinyPawPets

They hear that they have been a Good Dog and they know they are So Loved. They know that you are sad and do their best to comfort you because they do not understand why you are sad, they are right here.

They understand that there is food and people who love them.

They understand they have been promised rabbits to chase.

They know heaven is real. They have been living here. But now they have to sleep.

Listen. Ten years ago when I started practicing as a vet it was uncommon to see a pug. It was quite rare to see a boston terrier or a french bulldog.

There has been years of veterinarians campaigning against the breeding of extreme brachycephalic or ‘flat faced’ dogs and where has that gotten us?

About a third the new puppies coming through the clinic are brachycephalic. This is especially obvious with the influx of covid puppies, but this style of dog and the inherent suffering of brachycephalic airway syndrome has just become more popular.

We harp on about it because it is still a growing problem.

And it’s obscene. These dogs sell for multiple thousands of dollars, up to $12,000 for a ‘rare’ color, and people are willing to pay that. Some even take out loans to buy these dogs that breeders say ‘are healthy’.

It’s ludicrous. These dogs have shortened lifespans, struggle to breathe (sometimes surgery improves it but not always), skin problems, dental problems, heart problems, airway problems, digestive problems, knee problems and often hip problems. There is barely an inch of these dogs that are normal. That is so much preventable suffering.

For some reason people get addicted to these dogs, once they’ve had one, they usually get two or three, usually before they get old enough to really be obvious with their problems.

And breeders do not care, it’s too profitable to care. A lot of these pups are coming from places that have 4 or more breeding females, or are being transported in from obscure country locations. They are insanely profitable and small enough to breed in suburbia.

There’s too much money, too much public demand, and too much suffering. Honestly I’m reaching the point where I would say that breeding these dogs without a minimum length of nose should be illegal.

Transitioning your cat from an outdoor cat to an indoor cat.

Maybe you’ve decided to bring your cat indoors because the weather is getting colder. Maybe your neighbours are mad that she digs in their garden. Maybe you want to make it easier for your cat to recover indoors after a surgery. Maybe the dangers of the outdoors now outweigh the rewards, or you’ve moved to a neighbourhood that is not cat-friendly. Whatever the case, it’s fantastic that you’ve decided to keep your cat safe and happy indoors, but now the question is: how do you do that?

If a cat has lived his entire life outside, it may seem like a daunting task to keep him inside. In the long term, it will be better for his health, and if you provide enough enrichment, warm spots to nap, and plenty of treats, there won’t ever be a reason for him to go outside again.

Hello! This my 6 month old pup named Chupey, short for Chupacabra. His DNA test puts him as mostly Pitt/rott mix….but you wouldn’t know it! Most of his deformaties seem to be external rather than internal. We have done blood tests and had several physical exams and things seem to be mostly in order. He had deformed genitals and was cryptorchid, so we neutered him last week. Now he is drinking and peeing more since the surgery. A blood test a few days ago showed elevated liver enzymes but nothing else of concern, kidneys are fine. So we are trying to get the enzymes under control and hopefully he won’t have to go under the knife again!

But he is happy and loving life so that’s all that matters. He is such a sweet pup and I hope I get lots of time with him!

I just wanted to see what you thought of his funky appearance(especially his ears. His embark DNA test revealed nothing in his genes that would explain why he looks the way he does). If you want to see more pics of him, he has an Instagram @cheers.for.chupey  :)

Update on my little Chupey, who I swear gets even more weird looking as he ages! Currently at 9 months old, his teeth are one of the biggest parts on him!

Anonymous said: Do you know if anyone is trying to fix German Shepherds the way the retromop breeders are doing for pugs?

Now this is a complicated mess of a question.

Dog breeders are a very political, gossipy bunch who all have very strong opinions about their breed and the ‘right’ way for those dogs to look or be handled. Some are also highly studious and detail-orientated, but some just have an ego and will come up with and justification for why they should be allowed to do what they want. And groups of German Shepherd breeders will have particularly strong egos among them, as the look of the breed itself will attract people who want this sort of ‘alpha’ image. I have not seen any breed so frequently named after gods and deities as the German Shepherd. (With the exception of Loki. Everything gets named after Loki.)

Hover about the edges of such dog breeding circles and you will find sentiments expressed along the lines of ‘vet’s know nothing about this breed’ or that ‘it’s not that bad’ with varying levels of venom. And I get that someone who has spent a lot of money on a dog and wants to breed it to sell those pups also for a lot of money will be defensive about something that is both their pet and investment. I always encourage onlookers to consider the motives behind both sides in such a conversation. Breeders want to sell you an animal and have you love it as much as they do. Vets don’t want to have to recommend expensive interventions to then be accused of being all about the money.

Even among the German Shepherd circles, there is ongoing debate about ‘show lines’ versus ‘working lines’, and sometimes you’ll see ‘Schutzhund lines’ mentioned.

Show Lines

At this stage I am pretty convinced that ‘show line’ shepherds are a lost cause, particularly the pictures coming out of North America. If we ignore whatever is going on with that chest, which I hope if just fur, he has a severely sloped back, dropped hocks, and his knee drops below the hock of the same leg when the metatarsals are vertical. There’s more photos of him here, but none are flattering.

So we have multiple orthopedic issues which are selected for. Hips and elbows are the best known, but there will be stifle and hock instabilities, and we’re seeing more lumbosacral disease diagnosed in German Shepherds, which are independent to hips.

Working Lines

You would expect ‘working lines’ to not have gone down the path of madness afflicting the show shepherds, and that more or less seems to be true, but there’s no real regulation out there in regards to who can call their dogs working line, so a bunch of backyard breeders sneak in here. Structurally these dogs look better but there’s a lot of variability in the group.

Even if you compare posed dogs, their stifles remain above the hock, the back is not as sloped and you never see their hock touch the ground when moving.

That is not to say these dogs are problem-free, because they’re not, and a true working line dog will have a personality for that work, but an effort is being made. They still have reduced genetic diversity and a predisposition to assorted immune mediated conditions, but it’s better than a deliberate disaster.

Schutzhund 

A variation or subgroup of the working line shepherds is the Schutzhund dogs. Schutzhund is a sport, and only dogs that pass it can be counted here. The sport consists of field tracking, obedience and ‘protection’, which consists of both biting and releasing an assailant.

This sport has both physical and psychological demands and if you are selecting stock that only pass these tests in addition to regular health screening, you would expect athletic dogs that are structurally sound with a high degree of drive, however not all pet homes would be suitable for such a creature.

Yes, large dog speys are that intimidating. Especially with a deep chest.

Partly this is because owners have this expectation that absolutely nothing will go wrong and do not appreciate how difficult that surgery actually is.

Anaesthesia at 6 weeks isn’t an extreme risk. Maybe 20 years ago but not any more, especially with propofol and alfaxalone axailable. And the procedure is so fast when they’re that young because there isn’t any fat, the blood vessels are tiny,and everything’s easy to reach. They cope suprisingly well. My preference is a pup be at least 2kg but that’s because oral pain relief is off label use for anything smaller.

And we anaesthetise greyhounds everyday at work. They’re not ‘at increased risk’ there’s just a couple of drugs you don’t use. You make it sound like anesthesia is far more dangerous than it is.

I am very suss on those behavioral studies, and the fact that unwanted or backyard for profit litters happen, and desexing is the most reliable way to prevent them. Accidents happen, dogs get out, so of course a shelter is going to spay everything immediately. People forget or lie about doing it in the future.

And there are health benefits to a spay. If a spay is difficult, a pyometra is 20 times worse.

Spay your pets. It’s not a super easy procedure especially in a large animal, but it’s something we do almost every day because as a profession we genuinely believe in the benefit of the procedure, both social and medial.

Hello! This my 6 month old pup named Chupey, short for Chupacabra. His DNA test puts him as mostly Pitt/rott mix….but you wouldn’t know it! Most of his deformaties seem to be external rather than internal. We have done blood tests and had several physical exams and things seem to be mostly in order. He had deformed genitals and was cryptorchid, so we neutered him last week. Now he is drinking and peeing more since the surgery. A blood test a few days ago showed elevated liver enzymes but nothing else of concern, kidneys are fine. So we are trying to get the enzymes under control and hopefully he won’t have to go under the knife again!

But he is happy and loving life so that’s all that matters. He is such a sweet pup and I hope I get lots of time with him!

I just wanted to see what you thought of his funky appearance(especially his ears. His embark DNA test revealed nothing in his genes that would explain why he looks the way he does). If you want to see more pics of him, he has an Instagram @cheers.for.chupey  :)

I can’t laugh at the joke, because it’s jokes and memes like this that contribute to the ‘vets are expensive’ mindset that so much of the population has, when really they have no idea what veterinary medicine costs and so waste time with home remedies instead of at least checking with a vet clinic.

@lucihasissues That’s how retail works. In every store, in every industry. You buy a product, you sell it with a modest mark up. For our e collars it’s 30%, and that includes the 10% tax we have to collect and pay on everything we sell.

Every place that ever sells you something has sold it to you for more than the retail price. The price you pay for milk at the supermarket check out is much, much more than thte supermarket paid for it.

I looked, out of curiosity, at what Amazon was selling E collars and pet cones for. They are more expensive than my local vet clinics for exactly the same product, by anywhere from $3 to $12, plus pushing a bunch of fancied up ones. And then you have to wait for delivery, while a vet clinic has them right there, in stock, ready to use.

Anonymous said to @ask-drferox: Theoretically, is it possible to reconstruct an animal’s face, such as a pug, to where they can breathe like normal? I have a pretty good guess that that would be extremely complicated and very expensive, but I thought I’d ask someone that professionally deals with animals in a medical environment

If you mean with selective breeding over multiple generations, that’s certainly possible to do and the way I hope these brachycephalic breeds will go in the future.

If you’re asking whether there are surgical methods to correct the extreme brachycephalic morphology we have bred into dogs, then the answer is ‘sort of but not quite’.

Brachycephalic Airway Syndrome, as we see in breeds like the pug, French bulldog and Boston Terrier, has a number of features all occurring together. There is more information, and some videos, in this post.

The thing is, a brachycephalic dog skull isn’t just a normal dog skull that’s been squished up. Sure, the skull has a shortened length, but the amount of soft tissue hasn’t changed.

Consider these CT images of a brachycephalic dog, and a normal dog skull side by side from the British Veterinary Association.

There is no question that the air ways (black = air) are very different between these dogs. Grey is flesh, and white is bone, and you can see that the tongue is shorter and thicker, as is the soft palate.

If you’re not used to looking at CT scans, here’s a crude color outlined one. I know it looks like it was made in MS Paint, because it was, as I never claimed to be an artist.

I’ll ask you to pay particular attention to the airway - all the black running from mouth and nose down to the trachea on the left.

The lower dog has a airway all the way from its nose, through the nasal turbinates, over the back of the soft palate, past the epiglottis and into the trachea.

The brachycephalic dog does not have any nasal opening to speak of, minimal space in the nasal turbinates, a very thickened soft palate that goes too far back, and even a small trachea. And that’s not to mention the skeletal differences, particularly with the brain case.

In terms of surgical reconstruction, we can:

Open the nostrils (treat stenotic nares)

Shorten the soft palate

Remove any everted laryngeal saccules (bulbs of flesh that get sucked inside out at the larynx)

Remove nasal turbinates (a relatively advanced procedure)

And this makes things better, certainly, but it’s not completely normal, and there still isn’t a technique for correcting the hypoplastic trachea - a wind pipe to the lungs which is two sizes too small.

Oh, and there’s a risk of tissue swelling after surgery, as there always is, but swelling in the airways of a dog with already restricted airways is distinctly not good.

While there is certainly a lot that could be said about the practice of breeding purebred dogs, a lot of attention has focused on extreme brachycephalic faces, and the Brachycephalic Airway Syndrome (BAS) this causes, and rightly so. Many inherited problems in purebred animals have been selected accidentally, but the extremely shortened faces of brachycephalic dogs have been selected deliberately to appear to human aesthetics, to the marked detriment of these dogs.

What is brachycephaly and Brachycephalic Airway Syndrome (BAS?)

Brachycephaly is a term used to describe skulls as being broader and shorter than typical for their species. You can use the cephalic index to compare skulls between members of the same species, or between closely related species (don’t bother trying to use this as an indicator of race). There is obviously a spectrum between skulls that are longer than average, about average, and shorter than average, but it is those that are much shorter than average which we are concerned with in this article, because they are suffering with brachycephalic Airway Syndrome.

Not all brachycephalic dogs have BAS, but the shorter their muzzle, the more at risk they are.

Brachycephalic Airway Syndrome is a collection of conditions where there is excess soft tissue within the shortened airways, making it difficult for the dog to breathe for its entire life. This causes significant suffering, imaging trying to go about your day but you can only breathe through a plastic straw.

Is X breed Brachycephalic

Lots of them are, you can find an incomplete list here.

But is it bad?

The more extreme the brachycephally, the more likely the individual is to have Brachycephalic Airway Syndrome and suffer because of it. A mastiff or a rottweiler might be brachycephalic, but (hopefully) not to the same degree as a pug or french bulldog.

What happens with BAS?

Imagine you’ve taken a perfectly normal dog head, and shortened the bones of the face while keeping the same amount of soft tissue, forcing it to be packed into a smaller space, because that’s what we’ve done with these brachycephalic dogs. And the more soft tissue we pack into the reduced space inside the skull, the less space there is for air, which is rather important for the whole ‘breathing thing’.

Stenotic nares: On the outside, you can see nostrils that are pinched shut, already restricting the flow of are before it even enters the dog. Surgery can be done to open these nostrils.

Long soft palate: Because everything in the mouth is crowded, these dogs often have a long soft palate, a flap of flesh that prevents food entering the airway. If it is too long in the dog, it will flap and close off the airway even when they’re not eating, and can swell to become even more obstructive over time. Surgery can be done to resect the long soft palate also.

Hypoplastic trachea: If the trachea (windpipe) is undersized relative to the rest of the dog, there is no surgical remedy for this. Affected dogs are also often prone to collapsing trachea, where the cartilage of the trachea collapses when the dog breathes heavily, and frankly most dogs with BAS will breath heavily a lot of the time.

Everted laryngeal saccules: A normal laryngeal saccule is a bulging of flesh either side of the larynx, but in dogs with BAS who are breathing hard for much of their life, they can be sucked inside out (everted) which occupies even more space in the already restricted and crowded airway and makes the dog struggle further to breathe.

Hypertrophic Nasal Turbinates: That shortening of the skull I mentioned earlier? Does not apply to the complex lacework of bone that usually occupies the nasal sinuses, moistening inhaled air and allowing for a sense of smell. Some of these dogs have their nasal turbinates pushed backwards into their airway, or grossly thickened from constant suction of the airways.

Gastric reflux/vomiting: The constant struggling to breathe results in increases negative pressure within the thorax, which makes these dogs prone to gastric reflux and vomiting. Some of them also have hiatal hernias (stomach herniating into the thorax) to make it even worse. And if they inhale they inhale that vomit, they’re not built well enough to cope with that aspiration pneumonia very well.

And these are not the only structural issues bred into these dogs by selective breeding, only the ones associated with the flattened faces.

Isn’t that enough?

So what’s the solution?

Longer faces, obviously, and we need breeders and breed clubs to get on board with this, and start prioritizing the health and welfare of these dogs. We love them, right? They deserve to breathe by default, not just after thousands of dollars worth of surgery.

But 'longer’ is subjective. Perhaps we should be pushing to demand a minimum muzzle length, or a maximum skull width to length ratio? Or alternatively, disqualify dogs that have muzzles too short for their teeth. If we define 'too short’ as 'not enough room in your skull for all your teeth sit straight’ then there should still be plenty of room for the airway

Look at this very familiar example of a normal muzzle and a brachycephalic muzzle, and note the severe distortion of the dental alignment, particularly of the premolars and carnassial teeth in green and blue. If rotated teeth disqualified dogs in the show ring, and therefor from breeding, that should prevent the extreme brachycephalic features that are becoming more popular, and their associated suffering.

Videos from the University of Cambridge, additional information available on their website.

The sentiment is in the right place, but the idea is unwise. Denying veterinary treatment to dogs that already exist, especially the breeds likely to need it most? Yeah, let’s not do that.

Let’s consider instead:

- Stop giving ‘breeder discounts’, especially for these trrendy, brachycephalic breeds that are selling for about $3,000 each at the moment. No vaccine discounts, no caesarian discounts (and spay the female if they need a payment plan for the caesar), and definitely no discounts or surgical procedures performed on the entire litter before they go to their new homes, eg eyelid tacking in Shar Peis.

- Stop accepting pathology as ‘normal’ for the breed. Instead of writing ‘no significant findings’ on the respiratory exam for a pug, note the stenotic nares, long soft palate and brachycephalic airway syndrome as relevant clinicla findings. Mention it, to both new puppy owners (who often genuinely had no idea and thought it was normal) and to breeders. Keep doing it until it gets annoying and they either change vets or do something about it.

- Stop using these ethically compromised breeds in promotional and advertising material. 

We can’t deny veterianry treatment to the sickest breeds that already exist, just because we disapprove of their creation. It’s not the dogs’ fault. 

It’s really obvious that you don’t follow the blog, or you would have seen 4 posts ago about how some advice simply cannot be given online. You also didn’t read the FAQ, even though the link to ask a question says “please read the FAQ”, because if you had then you would see firstly that it can take weeks to get an answer, but secondly that I cannot give medical advice about a pet over the internet that I have not seen. It’s illegal and unethical, I can’t see it, treat it, or do anything but worry about it which is absolutely unfair.

So you say “I don’t mean to bother you” but you made no avoid bothering me and guess what, you have.