Purebred dogs can present various dilemmas to practicing veterinarians. One area in which we can look incompetent is with regard to inherited diseases in certain breeds, especially rare ones. It isn’t uncommon to have an owner come in with rare (and of course oh-so valuable) breed “x” with a rare condition “y”(which of course everyone who deals with this exciting breed knows about). In many cases the first problem is that we don’t recognize the dog as being breed “x,” to us it merely looks like a not very pretty mutt, but then beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The other issue is keeping abreast of all these breed-specific problems, which is where this book can be an invaluable resource. It won’t help in breed identification (that is what Wikipedia is for), but it will give you a rundown of diseases the breed can have (ever heard of trapped neutrophil syndrome in border collies, ocular melanosis in Cairn terriers, or Burmese head defect??). The list of diseases is quite exhaustive and is divided into groups or conditions such as neurological, ocular, neoplastic, physiological, GI, musculoskeletal, reproductive, respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, and hematological/immunological. The list for each breed varies in length but can be very extensive, for instance in the West Highland white terrier the list of 31 conditions is almost 3 pages long. Each condition has some short bullet points to go along with it, in most cases with a reference provided. The list of dog and cat breeds is also quite long, some breeds I haven’t seen and some I have never even heard of (Alaskan Klee Kai, Boerboel, McNab shepherd to mention just a few).
展开▼
