My Papillon, Taylor, exhibits this syndrome and those of you at Nationals saw it on display when he won the 4′ Preferred National Championship last week. He has always had trouble judging his jumps and stutter steps, most noticeably when he is tired.
I wrote it about it on my blog, View from 4 Inch last year:
http://viewfr4inch.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-4-take-on-early-takeoff-syndrome-ets.html
His did have knee surgery several years ago, which is the main reason why I dropped him to Preferred, but he also seemed to be, for a lack of a better term, “near sighted”. I could see this in obedience and just a number of things where his ability to sight things seemed to be affected.
It wasn’t until I brought him in this past spring for a back injury that a brief in-office test showed some slightly irregular ocular reflexes. I made an appointment with a veterinary ophthamologist, and one week before Nationals, Taylor was diagnosed with PRA at 8 years old.
PRA is late onset in Papillons, commonly appearing between the ages of 6 and 8 years old.
Based on the fact that I could detect comparative deficiencies in his vision…for years before the actual diagnosis of an eye disease, it may be that defects in vision to small to detect may be enough to affect performance of training behaviors.
Basically, difficulty in performing visually-related tasks may be one of the first noticeable symptoms of an eye disease, and might even be in evidence for a long, long time before a disease can be medically diagnosed.
Perhaps, based on Taylor’s case, could there theoretically be eye problems to faint to be authoritatively diagnosed, but be enough to throw off things like depth perception, distance vision or possibly eye reflexes.
I would compare it to the fact that many people who are nearsighted can have their vision corrected by glasses, as opposed to people who have dramatic vision loss and blindness. At this point it could very well be that veterinary medicine is able to diagnose “blindness” but not mild deficiencies in vision.
It is likely that dogs could be as likely as humans to have slight visual deficiencies, but because most dogs are not subjected to measurable “tests” of their vision, these deficiencies are never detected.
It is only because high level performance of agility demands good vision to support judgement of approaches, etc., that these slight deficiencies are now being detected in practice.
Of note, our opthamologist noted that eye disease detected at early stage as Taylor was usually comes in the case when a person has a working relationship with the dog, not only in agility, but in activities like hunting.
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