Some random musings.
It's hot here in Little Rock. Like Saudi Arabia hot. I don't miss the baby-powder-fine dust that coats everything in the Eastern Province. But the heat, the humidity, the haze in the air--it feels very much the same, just with trees in the landscape.
I've been to two agility trials recently, both hosted by the same club. They did a fantastic job at redesigning the way that agility trials happen to remove cluster points and to manage the flow of people and dogs. In June, I was voted in as the Agility Trial Director of our local dog training club, and I was so happy to be able to pick the brains of the host club. Our club has a trial on the books for the end of October. Can we hold it safely? I'm not sure, but I'm going to at least work on identifying as many risks as possible and seeing if we can reduce them.
These particular trials were held indoors in a youth soccer facility. The club required everyone to wear masks while in the building, unless you were running in the ring or eating or drinking at your setup. The compliance was astonishingly high. I mentioned this with some surprise to my lab director after the first trial, and he said it might be due to the fact that dog show people are used to following rules. And yes, at dog shows, there are lots of rules. So I think he's probably right.
Two agility trial pet peeves: exhibitors that just let their dogs bark and bark and bark, and exhibitors that cram big dogs into crates that are obviously too small for them. Some handlers have elaborate setups, with arrays of crates, personalized crate covers, color-coordinated everything, a fan for every dog. One guy went to the other end of the spectrum, and didn't even have a chair or ground mat or much of anything except some toys and his dog, and just plopped himself on the floor with his dog in the middle of his chosen crating space. I'm not advocating such a spartan trial experience, but I do think handlers should pay attention to making their dogs comfortable.
At work, our necropsy and biopsy submissions dropped off quite a bit in March and April, but seem to be back to normal levels now. We've had some very interesting necropsy cases in the past few weeks. Our first heat stroke dog came in last week (a French Bulldog). I expect to see more as temperatures are expected to be even higher in the coming 2-3 weeks. We've also been seeing a lot of puppies with horrible bloody enteritis that looks like parvo, quacks like parvo, but isn't parvo. Those are frustrating as those cases often represent a kennel health issue and submitting vets need answers quickly. We do our best.
I had my second case of canine caval syndrome this past week. My colleague has had a few as well. It's associated with chronic heartworm disease. Not all dogs with heartworms get caval syndrome but when it develops, it's very bad. Worm leave the right side of the heart and move UPSTREAM into the large veins. I found an adult heartworm in one of the large veins above its heart, but we've also found them in other cases in the descending caudal vena cava. This dog also had heartworms in the arteries in its lungs; in our exerience, this is a common finding in dogs with heartworms. This dog died of seizures with blood pouring from its mouth and nose. Horrifying. Among the many things that go wrong once this develops, red blood cells get shredded as they try to squeeze past the worms in the veins, and cardiopulmonary collapse is inevitable. Sadly, an entirely preventable death. The take home message is this: get your dogs tested annually for heartworm disease, and give them monthly preventatives to kill larvae in their bloodstream.
I had a very exciting day last week when I got a call from a guy who said, his daughter found a bat in their bathtub, the public health vet told him to get it euthanized and take it to the lab so he was calling the lab to find out how to accomplish that. In just a few seconds of conversation with him, I realized that the most important thing was to get that bat away from this family. Asking him to cart it around to a vet wasn't a good option. At the lab, we don't euthanize animals. I don't have a DEA license and we don't keep euthanasia drugs on site. But all of our commercial poultry submissions are brought in live, and we euthanize those with CO2 gas. I decided that I could use that method on this bat. Quite a bit of capering and hand flapping ensued as my tech and I worked together to come up with a plan to euthanize the bat and keep both of us safe. All turned out okay in the end. Bat was rabies negative.
As an aside, everyone at the lab is required to have a rabies vaccination, and our titers are checked yearly. It doesn't mean there is no risk to us, but we were better positioned to deal with that tiny bat than that guy and his family.
And this week I had to work with a wild cottontail who had neurological signs then died. My god, the list of differentials was a horror show: rabies (unlikely, but it was a mammal so rabies has to be on the list; it's unlikely because small, delicate animals like a rabbit would not likely survive an attack by a rabid animal and thus live long enough to develop symptoms themselves), tularemia (zoonotic and reportable), rabbit hemorrhagic disease (also reportable, may be zoonotic), tick-borne blood parasite Encephalitozoon cuniculi, Baylissascaris worms in the brain (zoonotic, deadly to humans). And heat stress, always on the list for rabbits wild or farmed or kept as pets. Samples had to be obtained and sent to national vet labs and the state health department for testing. We did the necropsy in a fume hood and discarded all of our PPE as soon as we finished. It was nerve wracking to work with this animal.
Never a dull day at the state vet lab.
