A High-Risk Breed



Hans on St. Vrain Trail, Colorado. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I just received the WebMD Healthy Dogs newsletter, and there is an item of particular interest.  They have a slideshow of the health issues associated with the 25 most popular breeds.  According to them, the Miniature Schnauzer is prone to diabetes (the problem they cite for Pomeranians is hair loss, which my Tony did not experience until his cancer was very advanced).  At any rate, if you have a Miniature Schnauzer, keep an eye out for symptoms like excessive drinking and urination, and make sure he or she eats right and gets plenty of exercise.  Of course, that's good advice for any breed!
I've got a couple of videos listed below with these very cute dogs performing tricks, and the first thing that struck me when I saw them was the rewards they received.  I hope the humans are keeping track of how many treats they're getting.

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• Miniature Schnauzers- Things you should know
• Dog Tricks
• Synchronized Dog Tricks

Wait a Minute --Maybe Dogs aren't People

Right after publishing my last post, I realized that I hadn't put up any pictures, so I went looking for one.  Aargh!  You would not believe how many REALLY DISTURBING pictures and videos of extremely overweight animals are on the web.  And it's disturbing on more than one level, too.  Can you say "animal exploitation"?  I think it's entirely possible that some of the people who are uploading these (especially the videos) let their dogs get this way on purpose.  But maybe I'm just being overly cynical and suspicious.  Maybe not. 

However, the thing that I found most ironic was the title of my last posting -- hence the title of this one.  Unlike excess weight in people, a pet parent can usually prevent or treat this ailment without a lot of problems.  This isn't true for people, for a wide variety of reasons that I can't get into here, and I know this from personal experience as well as from keeping up with the research in this area.
 
Now, if your dog has his or her own line of credit at the grocery store, yeah, you're going to have trouble controlling intake, but otherwise, you are the human,  you are in charge of the food and exercise, and you need to make the effort.  Talk to your vet.  If you do make a sincere and serious effort and the weight does not come down in a reasonable amount of time, see your vet again.  Also see your vet if you aren't trying to slim your dog down and he or she suddenly does it anyway:  this is one of the classic symptoms of diabetes!

And no, I'm not going to post any of those disturbing images.  If you can stand it, just go to your favorite search engine and search "fat dogs" --and prepare to be appalled.

Hey, Dogs are People, too, WebMD!

I've talked about WebMD before, but they sent me an email about a new feature that got me very excited.  It's a free online Symptom Checker.  What's funny about this is that I got the email because I subscribe to their Healthy Dogs newsletter, and I (naturally) assumed it was for animals.  Now that I'm writing that, it does sound like I was kind of nuts for thinking that.  Anyway, I'm hoping that they will have this service for dogs sometime soon.
On another WebMD note, their latest newsletter is headlined "Is Your Dog Too Fat?" -- an issue of interest, or it should be-- for all doghumans.  There is clearly a connection between excess weight and diabetes (although if you read the research on this, you'll find that nobody is quite sure what that connection means or why it exists), and trust me, you want to eliminate as many risk factors as you can.  At any rate, there is a video from their Ask the Veterinarian series, and this is the third question.  My own take on the connection (and no, I'm not a veterinarian or a physician), after doing a lot of research on diabetes in both dogs and humans, is that exercise seems to be the real root.  If your dog (or you) is overweight AND doesn't get much exercise, you've got a lot more to worry about that those who are overweight and active.