Osteo Hounds -- Is Gable Dodge, Wigwam Wag Or Hb's Commander In

[racindog]

I personally believe things like the rabies vaccine and chemicals in the enviroment like spot on etc. may be more damaging in cancer propensity. In fact Minny had a terrible rxn to his last rabies shot and nearly died and coincidentally only a year later he went down with seizures/brain cancer etc. I'm not convinced it wasn't initiated by the rabies vaccination which is known to sometimes induce cancer(which is why manufactures direct it be injected into the rear leg). My first hound Ivy(Dream Irish) that I lost to osteo was by an imported Irish stud.

 

like you, I'm convinced Rainey's seizure and brain issues came from her last rabies shot, which was about 3 weeks before her first seizure.

Yep. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck.....

[Guest Diadado]

..

Edited July 25, 2012 by Diadado

[RaineysMom]

I personally believe things like the rabies vaccine and chemicals in the enviroment like spot on etc. may be more damaging in cancer propensity. In fact Minny had a terrible rxn to his last rabies shot and nearly died and coincidentally only a year later he went down with seizures/brain cancer etc. I'm not convinced it wasn't initiated by the rabies vaccination which is known to sometimes induce cancer(which is why manufactures direct it be injected into the rear leg). My first hound Ivy(Dream Irish) that I lost to osteo was by an imported Irish stud.

 

like you, I'm convinced Rainey's seizure and brain issues came from her last rabies shot, which was about 3 weeks before her first seizure.

I'm glad I saw this. I wasn't planning on allowing Passion to get any more shots but for sure not after reading this! In 2 more days it will be a month since her last seizure.

 

I didn't know she had one!!!!! crap. sending her and you many hugs!

It was a grand mal and horrible. I know you can relate.

 

not trying to hijack but...

 

I just looked up your posts and saw that she will be 10 in October....and is more vocal than she used to. Rainey's first seizure was in August prior to her 10th birthday. AND she had pancreatitis as well AND she became increasingly more vocal (that started maybe 1-2 months before the 1st seizure). :( we used green beans (I'd just defrost the frozen cut beans) and give those as in-between meal treats as she acted constanly hungry too -- they were low fat and she liked them.

 

sending many, MANY MANY prayers that she doesn't have any more seizures.

I tried to find your posts about Rainey but they must be gone. You never figured out what was causing them, right?

Passion is actually acting more like her old self. She doesn't seem overly hungry, not drinking a lot and not whining as much as a month ago. She's also not needing to be with me every second. She still lays by the door which is a new behavior. I guess she thinks if she lays there, I will take her with me when I leave

 

I'll see if I can find them. I know there's some out on GPA-Wi's medical section.

 

sounds like she's doing ok then -- what you said scared me, sounded so much like her. And no, we never did find out what caused it. We may have, had we gone through with the 2nd MRI but we decided to let her go the day before. Her neurologist said he was confident he would have found atropying and destruction in the brain had we done it.

 

sending more prayers the seizure was a one time thing.

[Wonder]

I'll check on GPA-WI board. I haven't been there in ages

[Wonder]

OMG Kim, I read your posts there How horrible that you went through that with Rainey.

[Guest PhillyPups]

I wouldn't want the thread to be deleted either, this is an interesting conversation. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, anyway.

 

Its going to be hard for me to justify adopting another greyhound in the future, now that I know how prone they are to osteo and how expensive it is to treat. I knew they were prone before, but I guess I hadn't thought of it that much, I just hoped it would never happen. If I ever adopt another, I will have to do so with the knowledge that I may have to spend over $15,000 once they get to age 7-12. If I win the lotto then it won't be an issue.

 

 

 

I definitely will adopt another greyhound, quite a few people I know (myself included) will opt for pain management only with an osteo diagnosis, a personal choice made with all the information at hand. Not every hound diagnosed and amputated is a "Miss Nellie", "Charlie" or a "Twiggy". This choice does not mean any less of a commitment to our hounds or any less love for our hounds, I feel after seeing hounds diagnosed, amputated, etc., and weighing the outcomes, I would not go that route. I was taught by a very wise man, very familiar with the breed, and the breeder of my first that I lost to osteo to ask myself "am I keeping her alive for me or for her?". SugarBear was 14.5 when diagnosed and osteo was newly being discussed openly at that time.

 

If I waited to have a child until I was financially ready, I would be missing out on a fabulous son and wonderful grandchildren. Again, everyone has their choices to make. I am not criticizing ours, I am just giving you mine for food for thought.

 

I promise all my hounds that they willl never have a day where they do not know they are loved totally, they will always have the best that I can give them, they will always have a fancy collar (for SugarBear) and when the time comes, I will give them the hardest gift I will ever have to give them and let them go with love, and to the best of my ability let them always havr their dignity and grace.

 

Now back to the offsring of WigWam Wag (Gable Dodge is one) with osteo relevance. The Divine Ms SugarBear (JDs Proud Bear) my first that I lost to osteo, had neither of those lines, as WigWam Wag was only 6 months old when she was born. TigerPower, whom I lost to osteo, did not have WigWam Wag in his pedigree either. DonJuan, was a son of WigWam Wag (1/2 brother to Gable Dodge).

 

This is my unscientific finding. I must say, SugarBeaer was 14.5 years old, TigerPower was 10 and DonJuan was 12-1/2 all good ages for large dogs. I only lost one greyhound under the age of 10, my first, my beloved Runner, who I lost two weeks prior to his 8th birthday, to a massive heart attack while we were at a M&G at Tony Stewart's tent in Daytona. It did keep me from enjoying M&G's for a long time, as he was the total picture of health.

Edited July 29, 2012 by PhillyPups

[Charlies_Dad]

I have to add that being one who was lucky to have a Grey who 'battled' Osteo and enjoyed 21 mths post dx, this disease is one we have to deal with when having Greys. It is a very cruel and very aggressive cancer and there are no right choices, they all suck. Unfortunately these days, having a dog of any breed, one has to possibly deal with cancer, perhaps not Osteo but others like Hemangio or others that will also end a dogs life. Just yesterday I was speaking with a gentleman at a nursery who has the most cutest loving Lab I have ever met. She was adorable and being one who has never been a huge fan of the breed, I was tempted to steal her right there and then. How does this relate to the OP's subject? Well our conversation went to the Labs he has had and he commented, "not one of past 3 Labs has made it passed 10 years all due to cancer". He even singled out bone cancer as one and just can't believe what he thinks is the prevalence of cancer in dogs these days. So it tells me that this disease that takes so many of our furry friends and humans alike, is cruel and unforgiving therefore you need to enjoy the times you have as you never know when or if your life will change. Are we 'afraid' of adopting a Grey again? Yes, we are but we also love this breed so much that we know they will always be part of family and we will enjoy the good times as much as possible.

[dante2zoe]

I, too, have lost a grey to osteo. However, I didn't get the opportunity to decide the course of treatment. He was one week shy of his 12th birthday. He was trotting across the yard one day and two days later, his leg broke and he had cancer everywhere. I let him go. HB's is his grandfather. Another dog is a Gable Dodge pup and she broke her leg racing. She will be 11 in three weeks. I always felt that she would be the one I lose to osteo, due to her bone break, but not due to her lineage.

 

I have learned that life is a cr@p shoot and I try to enjoy what I have at that time. My son had cancer at 11 (a sarcoma wrapped around his spinal cord), so my personal feelings about the disease are probably different from others.

 

Even knowing that I would lose Dante the way I did and having to go through the trials that I did with my son, I would still make the decision to have both in my life.

 

I just lost my whippet to old age and other complicating factors. Watching him decline for months really took a toll on me, but his death was as much of a blow as losing Dante. There is no good way to lose a beloved pet or family member.

 

Everyone is different and will make choices that are best suited to themselves.

[GreytHurleyDawg]

Hurley is the only greyhound I have lost. He had osteo at 8.5 years of age (his heart stopped functioning properly at the end: after amputation, chemo and a new xray showed cancer riddling his lungs and probably taking hold of his heart) and he was a Gable Dodge son. I really like the line...someone mentioned smart and good personality....I couldn't agree more!! I would never stay away from his offspring. Hurley was the most intelligent, sensitive, obedient (to a point and also to a fault! He policed the other two hounds!) and life-affirming hound I could ever have possibly had the privilege of loving.

Woodie is an HB Commander offspring (via Molotov) and he is stocky, goofy and lovable. He will be 10 soon. I do not like to think "Oh, he could be next" or that he is doomed. He does have a toe and neck issue right now and we are waiting it out to see how related they are and whether they go away on their own. He has always had joint issues so we expect arthritis will continue to progress. But other than that, he is healthy as a horse.

Petra is Hurley's niece so she has a similar body type as Hurley and she has Gable Dodge as a granddad. She isn't as immediately responsive as Hurley and she has emotional girly issues that she needs to vocalize. (I can often imagine what she would be saying if she spoke English: "Um, I would rather........ggrrrr, grrr, whine!) But she is getting there, blooming all along. She is our 4 year old baby. I'm not ready to view her as a full grown adult greyhound yet. Maybe next year!

 

It's certainly a hot button issue. I would not appreciate having to go through osteo with every hound, or any cancer or debilitating disease, for that matter. But you do what you have to. And a lot of times, things go pretty normally. Every pet dies. How many times have you heard people say greyhounds live every moment to its fullest upon retirement? It is a continuous process. And you do what you can do to make that portion of their lives as comfortable and exciting for them as possible. With both respect and love. It makes sense to me that Hurley left us in this way....he fought until the end, which came quite swiftly in that last weekend, but we had over 3 months post-diagnosis to enjoy him and join him in his life-affirmation. In his "obituary", my husband wrote about how he waited for me every morning to start each day (at the end) and there was nowhere else I would rather have been than with him. It didn't matter that he was sick because he was alive. Sorry if anyone else is tearing up, especially if you are currently going through something similar but Hurley was my gentlehound. I will always speak highly of him!

[RaineysMom]

absolutely! I love Gable Dodge pups and will always actively seek them out when possible. I swear, they are the sweetest and GOOFIEST pups and I'm sure it's from GD

[Guest stephkayeturner]

We lost both our girls in the summer of 2015 to bone cancer. One had Gable Dodge as sire, one had him as grandsire.

[Greydawg]

I just checked Heisman's lineage.

A double-whammy... HB's Commander was his paternal great-grandsire and Wigwam Wag was his maternal grandsire.

 

Sadly, we lost him to presumed osteo on 2/1/2016.

(If interested, see "Remembering Heisman.")

[dmdsmoxie]

Osteo goes back way before these dogs so you would see that many dogs with Gable Dodge or Commander died from osteo, The same way you find many dogs with Gable Dodge and Commander didn't die from osteo.

[cleptogrey]

emily, who had osteo (died at 8.5) was a product of wigwam wag, here's her pedigree http://greyhound-data.com/d?z=j7NwO3&d=rj+august+rain&sex=&color=&birthyear=&birthland=

 

 

my other female annie is http://greyhound-data.com/d?i=1600813

she's now 8.5 and has a loaded pedigree, she's like a walking time bomb. i sorta try to ignore things since she is a drama queen(we went thru one huge scare last spring) and just hope she beats the bullet. when we fostered her we couldn't figure out why she seemed so familiar....until we compared the pedigrees

Edited March 19, 2016 by cleptogrey

[Koyotekyle]

My Sam was a descendant of Gable Dodge. Gable Dodge has over 10,000 decendants

[DocsDoctor]

Well, Doc was a great-grandson of Greenpark Fox, whom I have also seen described more than once as a 'cancer carrier'. Nevertheless he managed to live to the ripe old age of 13 years 7 months without developing cancer.

 

So I won't fret about the fact that Ken is a great-great-grandson of HB's Commander. If that should be what lies ahead of us, we will just have to deal with it the best we can, as and when. Everyone has to die of something eventually...

 

to those of you who have lost beloved hounds to this cruel disease.

[RaineysMom]

Ironic that this popped back up after almost 4 years....our Larry just started showing issues with this back right leg, favoring it and walking oddly now on it just in the past few days. He just turned 9 in February and his grand dad is Gable Dodge so every limp or anything worries me. We're hoping it's just an minor issue with that leg (he hurt the ACL in that leg when he was 3, before we got him in June of 2011). If it gets worse, time for the dreaded x-ray.....

 

if it is, we've already decided to just manage the pain. He's not a candidate for amputation, he's already having big issues with the front right due to multiple corns....and after putting Nube through radiation treatments and chemo, we don't want to do that either -- I think the cons outweigh the (possible) extra time we even got with him.

 

I'm sure Larry's fine but I can't help but worry.

[robinw]

I think it's a crap shoot. I lost all three of my greyhounds to osteo. The gene is everywhere and as long as dogs with osteo in their background continue to be bred, osteo will continue to flourish.

[RaineysMom]

I forgot to mention that Nube's sister Noelle (RJ's Noel) also developed osteo in November of 2012 (we let Nube go 9/12/12) and went to be with her brother and sister Holly (and hopefully not the rest by that point , I have no idea what happened to them) in January of 2013. So that was 3 out of the 7 (that we know where they were) that developed Osteo....

[GreytHoundPoet]

Lucius (Closin Time) had Gable Dodge and HB's Commander. His littermate sister that we fostered also got Osteo (Ninetytonothing).

Timmy (Demon Dancer) had HB's Commander. He had Onie Jones too, a name I remember being thrown out there in cancer speculation threads in the past.

 

One thing to consider is that popular sires are used an insane amount of times so it'll be a huge undertaking to track and make connections. Dr. Lake is working on it and she has my info.

Edited March 20, 2016 by GreytHoundPoet

[KF_in_Georgia]

I lost my Tigger Friday night. He raced as Flying Clemenza, son of Flying Penske, and he has none of the named dogs in his ancestry up either line of his pedigree.

 

He was 8 years old. Tuesday morning he woke me to the GSOD when he got his foot tangled in his Slumber Ball. At the vet on Tuesday morning, the vet pronounced it a sprained knee. I asked for x-rays. She agreed, they took one, and she came back and reported, "Just as I thought. A sprain. No sign of a break."

 

And that's when I failed to do something I should have done. I should have specifically asked, "And you checked for cancer, too, right?"

This vet wasn't Tigger's regular vet, and I'm betting she wasn't even thinking about osteo in long-boned dogs. My regular vet wasn't due in until late afternoon, and I didn't want Tigger to wait in pain for 6 hours before he was seen. Figuring his visit wasn't going to require a knowledgeable greyhound vet--no issues of lab numbers that are right for some breeds but wrong for greyhounds--I didn't wait for Tigger's regular vet--which is fine--but I didn't specifically wave the cancer flag in the face of the substitute vet...and I should have. The vet found what she expected on the x-ray, and I didn't make sure she looked for something more.

 

She prescribed rimadyl and tramadol--fine for a sprain but inadequate for osteo--and I took Tigger home. He was better Tuesday night, Wednesday, and Thursday. Friday, he yelped again, but I thought he'd stumbled on a bed again (he never did it while I was watching him), and I jokingly threatened to make him sleep on the bare floor. Friday night, he fell--three feet from the nearest bed--and couldn't get his leg under himself to stand back up. I picked him up, saw that it was 2 minutes to closing time at my vet's, and just took him to the ER. The vet at the ER knows greyhounds. (In fact, she was Jacey's ER vet when I lost her to immune mediated thrombocytopenia in 2011.) They did x-rays right away. She was able to get a second opinion from another vet right on the spot, but it really wasn't necessary. The osteo showed its typical moth-eaten bone look just above his knee. The vet said, "We can give him stronger pain killers than tramadol, but I can't estimate how long he'll have before the bone breaks." I said, "Oh hell no. That's not going to happen. He's already in pain and falling down. I'm not going to risk that happening to him some time when he's home alone, just because I'm not ready to let him go. I'll never be ready to let him go."

So I said goodbye to him that night. They'd sedated him a little for the x-rays, so when they brought him to me, he was ready to lie down and nap on the blanket. I sat with him, kissed him, told him he was a good boy, and just stayed until he was gone. He had horrible separation anxiety (for anyone, not just for me), but he had people with him the whole time he was at the ER and he wasn't scared while he was there. He just laid down to take a nap, and slept his pain away.

My first greyhound, Oreo, was the first dog I ever owned. I'd had her 4 years when she broke her humerus in my living room, and I had to drive my screaming dog to the ER. The x-ray didn't show cancer, so the recommendation was to implant a pin to stabilize the bone. They didn't want me to see her that night--or the next morning--for fear the visit would agitate her. Then she threw a blood clot in surgery and died, and I never got to see her. For all she knew, I took her to the ER, handed her over to total strangers, and walked out without a second glance. That was 10 years ago, and I've never gotten over that. I still cry quicker for Oreo's end than for any of the other dogs I've lost. And that includes Tigger, because I know how much worse things could have gone Friday night. I miss Tigger--my excellent R.E.A.D. and therapy dog, the meet-and-greet schmoozer who'd do anything for a treat--but I'm at peace with his ending.



So learn from my experience. Yes, greyhound owners are paranoid about cancer (justifiably so). But don't assume all vets are as paranoid as you. If the vet had gotten the diagnosis right, Tigger would have been spared three uncomfortable days and a night that was worse than it needed to be (even if it was better than it could have been).

(I've assumed that Oreo's leg broke from osteo that just wasn't visible on her x-rays. So the blood clot that killed her probably spared her from weeks of suffering from a break that was never going to heel before osteo reared its ugly head. But Oreo was a bounce with unreadable tattoos, so I've never known her racing name or her pedigree.)

[Guest Elytc129]

We've had Mark (Parkin Mark) for a month and I just looked his lineage up. He has a double dose of HB Commander, a double dose of Wigwam Wag and a single dose of Gable Dodge. He will be two in June and is a sweet guy but has an abnormally large head lol.

[JJNg]

I didn't go back to read all of the previous comments in this thread, so this may have been mentioned already. But before people with dogs who have the listed sires in their pedigree get too worried, keep in mind that we don't have any percentages. In addition to just looking to see if dogs diagnosed with OSA have these sires in their pedigree, you also need to compare it to the number of dogs with those sires who *don't* develop OSA for the numbers to mean anything.

 

Gable Dodge has over 11,000 offspring, and Wigwam Wag and HB's Commander have over 3000 each. Commander's son Molotov has over 7000 offspring. A huge number of dogs go back to these sires, so they are going to show up in the pedigrees of a lot of greyhounds with OSA simply because of that. My 2 older greyhounds both have HB's Commander 2-3 generations back. They are doing well at 11 and almost 11 years old.

[SanTanSnuggles]

I lost Heart Suite to Oseto in 2014. She was a descendant of HB Commander.

 

I lost San Tan Snuggles to GME in 2015. She was a descendant of HB Commander and Wigwam Wag.

 

I just adopted a new baby girl and she too is a descendant of HB Commander and Wigwam Wag. Now that I have seen this post, I will be watching her so very close.

 

I also had another male greyhound called "i'm Just Stormy". He lived till he was almost 13. He did not have HB commander or Wigwam Wag in his lineage.

 

I also had another girl, called Ec Flirt and she was my first greyhound and lived to 13. She did not have HB commander or Wigwam Wag in her lineage.

 

My Surprise does not have any HB Commander or Wigwam Wag in his lineage.Group Rooster and Hanks Cool Cat is where he comes from. He is seven years old. However he did develop Hemangiopericytoma. He is doing very good on his treatment. The stage 1 growth was removed from his leg and he is on medication to stop it from coming back.

[racindog]

Momma Seabird was HB's Commander blood. She made it to 3 weeks shy of 15. healthy but hips basically gave out.

Aggie Desperado was Wigwam Wag blood and she made it to 14 1/2-healthy/kidney disease/old age.

Minny's dad was Gable Dodge. Minny left at 9 years old probably brain cancer aggravated by a rabies shot.