AR-News: Medical Care of dogs in "sports"

[Glickman37 at aol.com]

Dogs on the disabled list
When high-performance athletes get hurt, they get spendy, high-tech care from 
a host of medical professionals -- even when the athlete is a canine 

The Oregonian
Sunday, May 23, 2004
KATY MULDOON

The gun cracked and Pricey bolted, cutting a precision-straight line across a 
flat field, a move she'd made countless times in nearly a decade as an elite 
athlete. But on this day, when she returned briskly and obediently with a duck 
in her jaws, she limped, favoring her left rear leg. 

A week before last fall's national field-trial championships, FC-AFC Chena 
River Wild Lady -- Pricey to her friends and admirers -- had ruptured her 
cranial cruciate ligament, the most common orthopedic injury in dogs. 

Ann Rauff, the black Labrador's doting owner, dialed Sun Valley Animal Center 
in Ketchum, Idaho. The West Linn woman would settle only for the veterinarian 
she and many other field-trial aficionados considered the king of cruciate 
surgeons, Randy Acker. A week later, she and Pricey traveled the more than 400 
miles from Oregon to the Idaho clinic, where Acker has performed 4,000 cruciate 
surgeries since 1995 on everything from pedigreed performers to pound dogs. 

Technicians anesthetized Pricey and prepared her for surgery. Acker remembers 
that, as the affable Lab lay sprawled on a table, snoozing, an Idaho dog 
trainer wandered through the clinic and recognized the furry patient. He stopped, 
reeled back, as awed as if he were gazing at Lance Armstrong or Picabo Street 
awaiting surgery, and asked Acker, "Do you know who that is? That's Pricey!" 

*** 

Had Pricey suffered the same injury a decade ago, her storied athletic career 
would have ended the day her ligament ruptured with an audible pop. Instead 
of winning competitions around the West, instead of qualifying for four 
national field-trial championships and two national amateur championships, instead of 
being the nation's High Point Open female in 2000 and an icon of her sport, 
Pricey would have retired to a back yard and limped her years away. 

But her timing proved fortuitous. She found herself recovering in an era when 
veterinarians, physical therapists, nutritionists -- even psychologists -- 
specialize in sports medicine for the bone-and-biscuit set. The emerging 
specialty coincides with the explosion of dog sports, improved medical techniques and 
technology, and shifting attitudes among pet owners increasingly willing to 
pony up when their four-footed friends need, say, an MRI or hydrotherapy. 

In a decade, Americans have doubled the amount they spend on pets, from $17 
billion in 1994 to a projected $34.3 billion this year, the American Pet 
Products Manufacturers Association reports. We'll shell out, according to the 
association, $16.2 billion on veterinary care, supplies and medicine alone. 

Driving pet owners' demand for sports-medicine services, naturally, are 
sports: agility, flyball, disc, freestyle, dock diving, sled pulling, lure coursing 
-- you name it, dogs do it. 

Lots of dogs. 

Ten years ago, for example, only about 2,000 pooches competed in U.S. agility 
trials. But by 2002, there were 452,387 entries in the American Kennel Club's 
1,142 sanctioned agility competitions. 

Sporting dogs paw their way into popular culture, woofing it up in such 
events as ESPN's "Great Outdoor Games" and "The Animal Planet Superstar Challenge" 
on the Discovery Channel. And they charge across the pages of Dog & Handler 
magazine, a sort of canine Sports Illustrated. 

Sports, veterinarians say, keep dogs in good physical shape, head off 
behavioral problems and often lead owners and their pups to form stronger bonds than 
they otherwise might. Plus, they're a romping good time. 

Still, racing and chasing can have consequences. As with athletes of other 
species, dogs are sometimes bound to feel the pain. 

*** 

Pricey's tail slapped a happy-dog beat the mid-January day she stepped onto a 
treadmill in the hydrotherapy tank at Canine Peak Performance Sports Medicine 
& Physical Rehabilitation Center in Southwest Portland. It would be her 
second physical-therapy session since knee surgery two months earlier. 

Veterinarian Carol Helfer closed the tank's door and punched a button. Water 
rose over Pricey's feet, ankles, knees and chest as the treadmill picked up 
speed. Her long pink tongue lapped at the water and she began to trot. 

Since surgery, Pricey had lost muscle mass in her injured leg, its thigh 
circumference now 3 centimeters smaller than her healthy right rear leg's. Her 
range of motion wasn't nearly what it had been before she blew out her knee. 

Left to her own devices, Pricey might not have healed as quickly as Rauff, 
her owner, wanted -- or worse: She could have reinjured herself. After all, like 
most Labs, she doesn't know the meaning of moderation. 

So here she was, weeks before she'd be allowed off-leash and months before 
she could return to competition, trotting along for 15 minutes twice weekly at 
1.5 mph on a high-tech treadmill. Buoyant in the 85-degree water, Pricey could 
strengthen her muscles without stressing the joint rebuilt in surgery. Her 
owner had paid $350 for 10 hydrotherapy sessions. 

Pricey moved her sinewy limbs gracefully and clenched a squeaky ball between 
her teeth. Black fur stuck to the tank's inside walls and a distinctive 
wet-dog aroma permeated Helfer's small office. 

When time was up and Pricey had traveled one-third of a mile, Helfer drained 
the water and armed herself with dry towels before she opened the tank door. 
Pricey's superstar status didn't preclude her from doing what a dog's gotta do: 
She stepped out onto the gray linoleum floor and, with an exuberant shake, 
showered everything in sight. 

*** 

Until Carol Helfer started competing in agility trials with Danya, her German 
shepherd, she hadn't considered how little was known about competitive dogs. 

Canine sports-medicine courses weren't part of the curriculum when she 
graduated from Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine in 1981. 
Even at schools that offer such courses today, they're usually electives. 

But when Helfer attended the first international veterinary symposium on 
rehabilitation and physical therapy in 1999 -- five days of information-sharing at 
Oregon State University in Corvallis -- "a whole new world opened up to me." 
She studied canine rehabilitation through the University of Tennessee and 
opened her specialty practice in 2002. 

Elsewhere in Oregon and across the nation, veterinarians are following suit. 
They have their own professional group, the American Canine Sports Medicine 
Association. The American Physical Therapy Association even has a 
special-interest group for members who are expanding their practices from two-legged 
patients to those with four legs and fur. 

And the winners are . . . the dogs, whether they're toned athletes or sofa 
surfers. 

*** 

Her surgery healed, Pricey returned the last week of February from her home 
in West Linn to the Yelm, Wash., kennel where she works with professional 
trainers who specialize in field-trial dogs. 

The sport, based on skills required of bird-hunting dogs, took hold in this 
country among aristocratic dog owners in the 1930s. Quivering with 
anticipation, competitors wait for a signal, then bolt across fields and through water to 
retrieve ducks or pheasants. The best, like Pricey, use keen eyesight, superb 
depth perception and uncanny instincts to "mark," or remember, the birds' 
locations. 

Pricey lives for the work, said Rauff, who has owned "oodles of dogs," but 
never one as supremely skilled and driven to perform. So when Pricey's knee 
healed, Rauff loaded the Lab into a kennel custom-built into the bed of her gold 
GMC pickup and returned her to her trainers. 

There, on her first day back at work, charging toward the first irresistible 
duck, Pricey ripped the cranial cruciate ligament in her right rear leg -- up 
until that moment, her good leg. 

Rauff dialed Sun Valley: Was there room in Acker's surgery schedule, she 
inquired, for one really good dog with really bad luck? 

*** 

Small-animal veterinarians with hotshot-athlete patients aim first to prevent 
injuries. Then, when they must, they try to speed recovery so that a dog 
doesn't lose all its hard-won conditioning. 

At Auburn University in Alabama, where he directs the veterinary 
sports-medicine program, Robert Gillette often performs preseason work-ups on dogs, just 
as a team physician might for football players. He investigates muscles, bones 
and joints, looking for problems that might predispose a dog to injury. He 
queries owners on their dogs' nutrition and drive. 

As track coaches might with runners, some veterinarians videotape athletic 
and working dogs, then study the tape at slow speed, searching for evidence of 
injury or clues that might help the pups perform better. They look at metabolic 
needs and how they differ between dogs involved in endurance events and those 
that are sprinters. Some prescribe supplements, something like pooch Power 
Bars. 

Others, Gillette said, employ sports psychology to help overly excitable dogs 
focus on what their handlers want. 

Athletic dogs, he said, "are treated like kings and queens, because if you 
didn't, they wouldn't perform as well." 

The added benefit: Veterinary sports medicine can help average house dogs, 
too. 

At Carol Helfer's Portland clinic, for instance, the patient that followed 
Pricey in the hydrotherapy tank that January day was a quadriplegic pooch with 
no pedigree or performance schedule, but who needed his exercise as much as the 
next dog. 

*** 

Anesthetized, Pricey sprawled on her back atop a metal table heated to 101 
degrees, slightly warmer than her body temperature. Blue cloths and green towels 
draped her torso. A device used to monitor her heart rate snaked past her 
slack tongue, down her throat into her chest. 

It had been four months since her last surgery. The early March sun 
reflecting off snowy slopes blazed through the windows of the Sun Valley Animal 
Center's surgical suite, where Randy Acker would rebuild Pricey's right rear knee at 
a cost of $1,800 to $2,000. Ann Rauff could have asked an Oregon veterinarian 
to operate on the prized dog. But she chose Acker for his reputation with the 
technique he favored, tibial plateau leveling osteotomy, or TPLO. 

In dogs and humans, ligaments work like bungee cords connecting the femur, or 
thigh bone, the tibia, or shin bone, and the patella, or kneecap. 
Similarities stop at the tibial plateau, the top of the shin bone. Because humans walk 
upright, that plateau is fairly flat. But a dog's tibial plateau slopes forward, 
producing greater force on the ligaments. 

Barclay Slocum, a Eugene veterinarian who died in 2001, wondered in the early 
1980s whether, if he reconfigured dogs' knees to more closely resemble the 
human joint, he could neutralize that force. The question led him to develop the 
TPLO procedure, widely used today to rebuild dogs' blown-out knees. 

As Pricey snoozed, a veterinary technician who was assisting asked Acker if 
this was the "expensive dog" -- the valuable field-trial hotshot she'd heard 
about. The skin around his eyes crinkled as he smiled behind a blue surgical 
mask. "Pretend," Acker replied, "like she's just a Lab." 

Using a tool that cuts and cauterizes, Acker sliced a 3-inch incision and 
lifted Pricey's skin off the bone. He could see that her meniscus, the kneecap's 
cushion, was intact, but the cranial cruciate ligament was completely torn, as 
he had suspected. 

He pushed ligament and muscle away from Pricey's tibia, powered up a saw 
designed especially for this surgery and carefully cut through the bone. Droplets 
of blood spattered the floor and Acker's gown as his carpentry turned the 
27-degree slope of the dog's tibia into a 5-degree slope. 

Pricey's chest rose and fell. Her lips quivered. A vet tech held the dog's 
right front paw, consoling, as Acker proceeded with the next step: screwing a 
2.5-inch-long metal plate into the bone. It would help the tibia heal in its new 
position. 

He covered the exposed bone and shiny new plate with Pricey's muscle and 
other tissue and, 35 minutes after he had started, sewed the incision closed. 

*** 

That afternoon, Rauff retrieved Pricey, limping and still dopey from 
anesthesia. The two began the drive back to their Oregon home, where a kitchen wall 
plastered with field-trial ribbons serves as a mini Pricey Hall of Fame. There, 
the patient with the slap-happy tail would be treated like athletic royalty. 

By spring, Pricey lounged on an extra-firm bed that wouldn't jiggle her 
tender knee when she stood on it. Rauff bought it from a San Francisco store, she 
said, "where all the uptown dogs shop." 

Now, Pricey spends her days trailing her owner through the garden, rolling in 
the grass and eyeballing robins rather than ducks. As the pooch grows 
stronger, Rauff will decide if her 9-year-old Lab with two rebuilt knees, the best 
furry athlete she's ever had, will compete again. 

If not, Rauff said, Pricey can live out her days "just being a dog." 

Katy Muldoon: 503-221-8526; katymuldoon at news.oregonian.com 

http://www.oregonlive.com/living/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/exclude/1085313471145970.xml 











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