Kai went to the white coat's today for his biopsy and xrays. We found two small lumps a few months back and also noticed he didn't like extending his right leg. We thought it might be due to his excess weight so I started him on an exercise & diet program (swimming 3 times a week and 50% pumpkin for his meals).
The good news is that he lost 4 pounds this month!He lost two of those the first week. Not bad at all for a smaller dog! His highest was 47 pounds. The vet thinks 35 would be a good goal.. then we can adjust it from there. He's now 43 pounds.
The bad news is that his hips are horrible. They're a mess. The vet pointed out that it actually looks like his bones (the head of the femur) are disintegrating. On the xrays, it looked like the head of the femur was pressing right into the socket.. the socket almost looked flat. His left hip looks worse than his right one, but surprisingly, it was his right hip that was causing him a lot of discomfort. Ugh.. what's really sad is, all of this could have easily been prevented if his "breeder" had actually screened the parents like he said he did.
His vet said we should stop doing agility.. which would really suck cause Kai LOVES it more than anything else. It has done so much for his confidence.. it'd be a shame to have to stop. I think we'll just take it easy on the jumps and when we're ready to compete, I'll just enter him in specials (one jump height lower) rather than standard.
We still don't know about the lumps. The vet said they didn't concern him too much but since they weren't cysts, he wanted to send the tissue in to be sure it wasn't anything.
Ugh.. it's so much to take in.We have no idea if his situation will get better or worse, so for now we're going to take it easy with the agility and work on getting the remaining excess weight off him.
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Originally Posted by cyber-sibes
50% pumpkin seems to be working really nicely! I don't do poop clean up in the yard anymore since the poop from raw fed dogs turn into white dust after a few days, but I'll take a look tomorrow for you 
LOL He's acting pretty happy about his meals though. As far as he's concerned, he gets to eat even more now! I think 50% might be a bit drastic for most dogs but for such a small dog, he had a lot of body weight to lose.. about 25% 
.. so I guess a drastic change was needed.
I'm going to be emailing a bunch of Sheltie enthusiasts/breeders (starting with the breeders I know he likes to work with) so that they too know about the damage he's doing to our breed. The local news stations have been doing lots of stories about dogs (mainly bad breeders) so it'd be great to get them involved too.. not just to spread word about this horrible breeder, but just about responsible breeding in general.
)
Huney, Bon & Simba-missed so very much
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