Degenerative Myelopathy - Page 2

To expand on what HM has said, diet and exercise matter a lot. However, and I am not trying to be negative, merely realistic...that pedigree is not a pedigree of a dog whose breeder had a plan, a goal...or even a clue. It is a hodge-podge of show/pet from all origins with even some working lines tossed in for good measure. Chances are better than average that the pup just has poor conformation, causing his abnormal gait.

Again, as HM said, many times vets and owners are way too fast to say there is something wrong with a puppy when it is simply gangly. Some lines go through a leggy phase where the rear in particular has no place else to go but under the dog and side to side in a very awkward way. They do grow out it to a degree, typically. We would have to see video of the dog to say any more than we already have.

Hundmutter, of all the times I have seen him he is more underweight than anything. He has never jumped into her car, he always crawls in. It's like he can't jump. She said she has been feeding him Diamond Naturals puppy.

Jenni, yes I thought the same thing when I finally looked up his sire & dam. She bought him thinking she would be able to stud him out. Even said she paid extra for full breeding rights. But I showed her on his AKC app that the breeder blackened out the box so he is limited.

She is our farrier for our horses and is due out this weekend. Hopefully she brings him along like usual and I will get a video of him moving.

Well what is his rear muscle development like ? If, e.g., it is like feeling "a skinless, boneless chicken fillet" when you grasp his thighs, then frankly it would be no wonder if he can't jump up into a car. There are owners who take the business of not 'over-exercising' youngsters, to avoid joint disease, to ridiculous extent and do not allow them sufficient exercise, so they do not build muscles as they grow. Not saying this IS what she has done but you need to consider something on those lines...

You would think a farrier would suss such issues more than your usual dog owner - but didn't you say that you called her attention to this weakness in the first instance ?

 

PS This is entirely anecdotal, and about an older GSD, but it is nonetheless an interesting aside that my mentor sold a bitch pup to someone and she later proved to have very poor hips.  From about the time those results were known, that bitch would not / could not jump into the car for her owners.  But funnily enough, when my mentor, visiting, told her to jump in the car, she did.

Really. SMH at the suggestion this young pup’s condition is being falsified.

Here is another anecdotal story. My young rescue GSD Silas, who manifested all the symptoms of DM and suffered through extensive expensive testing to rule out other possible conditions, had littermates that were described as weak in the hindquarters. Silas was PTS just before the age of 15 months.

Without a pedigree one can only wonder and go, hmmm....could genetics be at play here?

Not suggesting it is falsified, just possibly misinterpreted, or maybe made worse than it would be by circumstances outwith cherjam's control.

What is also true is that so far nobody has denied that there might be something genetic going on.  Its all up for grabs, there has been no diagnosis per se.

OP, was Lyme disease and other tick diseases ruled out? Many vets will not check for this at first because of the young age. Still, It does happen.

Hundmutter, yes when we first saw him at 12-14 weeks old he was very thin. I would almost say skin and bones. I know some people keep their dogs trim to were you can see a couple ribs, but I have never had a puppy as thin as he was. When we last seen him in Oct. he wasn't overly thin. When he moved he still looked weak in the rear end.

Beetree, I don't know if she ever tested him for anything. I know she keeps saying she is going to get him checked but don't know if she will. I think she is afraid to find out the truth. I told her I would research his pedigree to see if there were any with bad hips. From what it shows there isn't any that are bad, but there are also a lot with no hip scores.

Cherjam, agreed; it does not pay to keep a juvenile puppy too thin, they need a little 'chunkiness' to grow on with, fortification against unnecessarily succumbing to diseases of all kinds, IMO. Including tick-borne ones.
The fact that he was so thin at the beginning is either down to your farrier, or the breeder of the pup, or both, paying insufficient attention to diet, in the post-weaning pup and / or its dam. If that can happen, so can other stuff (like the worming regimen, and misconceptions about how much exercise to allow !).
Again, in one so young it really isn't all that likely to have anything to do with his hips; if the sockets are so malformed from birth that they are going to be symptomatic at that young an age ( I know he is past that stage now) then it ought to have been blindingly obvious when he reached 3-4 months or so that he was unable to walk without pain and should see a Vet. (You do not say whether YOU think he is in pain ?). Even crap hips can often be supported without problems all a dogs' adult life if there is sufficient muscle development (I owned the half sister of the bitch in my anecdote above, her hip score was almost as bad as her kid sister's but she never went 'off' her hips in 14 years).

Bee, was there an autopsy on Silas ?

No. This was before I had heard of PDB or DM. If I had known then what I know now, I would have insisted on one. His story has been told here many times already. Mojo is my only pedigreed dog.

DM and bad hips due to bone structure are not related, in any case.