Vet check question, during a vet visit should the vet pull a 3 month pups legs back to check hips - Page 5

Les, thank you for pointing out the inadequacies of going to war on the polluters of the environment, I ought to have added something on those lines myself but grow tired of stating the obvious. I am as concerned about environmental damage as the next person (probably much more than some) and have often written about unnecessary 'filling' of dogfoods etc, but am concerned that when someone rants on about such issues to the exclusion of considering other factors (such as genetics) or, worse, argues that the genetics studies are meaningless / do not work, there are those people only too eager to accept that as their 'go-ahead' to cease bothering about the hereditary factor, thus setting up heartbreak for yet more generations of puppy purchasers. With so much unregulated breeding going on already, this is yet another nail in the GSDs eventual coffin.

Tell me, please, at what point does a 'pullet' become an 'old hen', given
that she is only some twelve years your junior, I believe ? And there was me trying to be a 'wise old bird'. ;-)

I wasn't aware of those comments re the lead paint; thank you for alerting me to those !  [And I have always loved Flanders and Swann !]

I still have not seen anything other than bluster and BS about what variable expressivity is and how incomplete penetrance is part of the SV or OFA programs since HD is a casebook example of both terms. I also find that the Pauling family that has the two Nobel prizes is of the American lineage with parted company with the European and other immigrant parts of the Pauling surname in Germany around 1800 and as we all know the maternal lineage of Linus Pauling played the dominant role in his winning two Nobel prizes not just the paternal side of his pedigree. Molecular genetics has supplanted the role of classical genetics in the diagnosis and understanding of diseases. Classical genetics made up names for genes they did not know actually existed ( before the genome projects ) and used flawed logic and scant scientific proof to back up their claims. When a trait or disease did not follow the mathematical hocus pocus the classical geneticist had created from purely phenotypic observation these traits were give the labels ( also made up ) of variable expressivity and incomplete penetrance. The fact that some of Mendels laws were true and still are does not make them all true as Classical geneticists like to claim. Alas for the good ole boys of Mendel that ship has sailed and now the tools of molecular genetics are teasing out the truth from the Mendelian BS.

[Hundmutter] 5 June 2016 - 20:06

● "Tell me, please, at what point does a 'pullet' become an 'old hen', given that she is only some twelve years your junior, I believe ? And there was me trying to be a 'wise old bird'. ;-)"

The first baker's dozen words of your question, as worded, is easy to answer.
A 'pullet' is a young female chook (progressing from having been a chicken) that has not begun to lay. Once they start laying they are referred to as 'hens'. An ' old hen ' is no doubt one that has reached the stage of having stopped laying and so needs VERY expert culinary skills to make her headless carcass edible (while we had free-range chooks, at Xmas I always preferred the stuffing to the Christmas chook... I'd also had to chase the headless body until it stopped running away and could be retrieved to my axe-wielding sire).
But I think I'd better pretend to be a Yank and "Take the Fifth" regarding the rest of what I quoted.

Continuing the theme of interactions between genes and the environment,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/opinion/sunday/educate-your-immune-system.html?emc=edit_th_20160605&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=21897265&_r=0
gives good quick support for a reduction in "hygiene" - especially for toddlers & pups! - that I have believed in throughout my working life and retirement.

It is also less paranoid than believing that every manufacturer is out to relieve us of our money before we die from their chemicals, and it helpfully points to WHY different environments can produce differing effects in "co-operation with" our genes, in the way that I referred to as "susceptibility".

As for  the life-shortening effect of the "cure" found in the article - let's assume that poor nutrition and excessive work are the explanation....

I DO wish that whoever coined the term "auto-immune system" had chosen some other term. To me "auto-immune" suggests that we are automatically immune to invaders, not that our own immune system attacks us. "Self-attacking", the best alternative I can quickly come up with, is not adequate, either. Maybe one of you has a clever grandchild who is about to make his/her influence in the the world of medicine and will come up with a more self-explanatory term for an immune system that attacks its own corpus - talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

Hey, Les; long time no see! How've you been?

[Keith Grossman] 13.6.2016 - 19:06

● "Hey, Les; long time no see!"
What? - Why have you gone blind?
Wodderyameen, that's not what you meant?

● "How've you been?"

You'll be sorry you asked!
I can still see - but my vision is only JUST good enough to renew my Driver's Licence.
But my tale is all Off Topic for this thread.
 
On 24 April 2015 I went to see my GP about some infected toes. I then had to beg time to get the DCO to come & collect my Bea:
http://www.pedigreedatabase.com/dog.html?id=1325022
and look after her until I was allowed to go home again. As it turned out, she is with her breeders until either the end of this month or I obtain the solution to my next obstacle. Meantime, back to chronology...
The ambulance then arrived and carried me away to the main hospital.
Next night (ANZAC Day, plus my grandfather's birthday) 2 toes and most of the sole of my left foot were removed. And a few days later I watched (on a large screen xray display) a surgeon push stent-like things through one of the 3 veins or arteries to that foot in order to give it a good blood supply.
Later, a vacuum pup was attached to my foot, and I was ambulanced home. Then the vacuum pump failed at night and the District Nurses refused to visit my steep property with its lots of steps at night. So it was back to hospital I was ambulanced a day or 2 later. Then I was transferred to my local hospital (about 2 miles away from my home) despite the protests from its managers that I wasn't "geriatric enough". Eventually the staff there discovered that although the tank in my vacuum pump was full, they didn't have a spare tank - and nobody was willing to request that one be put on the shuttle (NASA may have retired ITS shuttle, but our shuttles are much less expensive to run! Mind you, ours are not allowed to exceed 100kph!) that travels between the 2 hospitals every hour on the hour, transporting mobile out-patients to & from checks at the main hospital.
Eventually I was given the choice between #1 continuing with antibiotics & suction and probably losing my life, or #2 losing my left leg. As I'd promised my bride that I was going to live to 100, that wasn't much of a choice! So, during our Queen's Birthday Weekend (first Monday in June) the surgeons "celebrated" by lopping my leg off below the knee at about midnight, "feeding" me 2 litres of blood, and keeping me foodless in the Recovery Room until noon - by which time my tummy was READY for lunch.
On Thursday 25 June I was ambulance to an unmodified home, except that the sliding door between the dining-room and passage-way had been removed so that my wheelchair could get through, a commode had been placed in the doorway of the toilet and a plastic stool-with-handles had been placed in the doorway of the bathroom - there wasn't room in the passage to turn the wheelchair to get into either room, so I had to park outside then swivel to sit on the commode. My way into the bathroom involved grabbing the stool's handles then doing a one legged Moon-Walk - eatchaheartout, Michael Jackson!
And I couldn't shut the den door after I'd moved my wheelchair to face the computer that I hadn't seen for TWO MONTHS (hoo yoo kallin' a naddict?). I wore a seaman's furlined coat for several days until I was able to get my helper to shift stuff from between my desk & the photocopier, after which I could back my wheelchair into the den, shut the door, wheel & turn to put my lap under the desk, and switch the heater & computer on. I reckoned that that was the coldest week Wellington has ever endured - but the weather record disagrees, claiming  9 July's 1.8°C/35.2°F as Wellington's coldest day of the year. The first photos in
http://i.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/75317108/Wellington-year-of-weather-extremes-from-hot-dry-days-to-fatal-floods
show you what I'd happily missed while in hospital. (But I'd kept my transistor radio tuned in, the road north of Porirua being blocked by a landslide and the staff at Porirua railway station cutting the safety barrier wires so that people could cross the lines - see, the pedestrian tunnel under the lines was FULL of water.)
 

However, I survived, and after about 4 months I was ambulanced to the Limb Centre where an electronic 3-D model of my stump was captured before I was sent home again (imagine how much the ambulance staff enjoyed carrying me up and down my steep driveway and all the steps! At that stage I weighed 103kg/227 lbs).
And eventually I was allowed to bring my prosthetic leg home, support rails were installed in toilet & bathroom, a grab handle on the pillar inside my front door (so I could grab it and HOLD ON if Bea saw an evil C A T as I was opening the door to take her outside), and support rails down the steps outside the front door plus beside the steps between the house level and the driveway, an Orca

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT3C6GLVBns ) was installed in my bath. I needed 2 more rails, but had to pay for them myself - one to get up & down the steps & ramp to the clothes-line and "backyard", one to get in & out the back door. So now I can travel by ringing a taxi and demanding that it park at the top of my drive, facing downhill. But it gets very tiring standing waiting at the supermarket for a taxi to arrive.
My next problems are
#1: Buying an automatic ute (for "utility" - our word for what Yanks call a well-side pickup-truck with a canopy over the tray). Because it is so damned difficult to get my prosthetic past the steering wheel of my own bench-seat ute (plus that it is too dangerous to rely on my prosthetuic "foot" to NOT get caught UNDER the clutch pedal just when I need to de-clutch) I'm going to have get one with rear seats as well, so that my garage owner can move the seat rails back a couple of inches. (I don't suppose you've just won a major lottery and are feeling generous enough to send me $20,000 or so? VBG) and
#2: Persuading Bea that she is NOT to pull me suddenly. In her youth she DID lunge after a cat as I was bringing her & my takeaway dinner from the carshed - I tried to swerve enough to grab a tree beside the driveway but had to eventually let her leash go because I couldn't run downhill any faster, after which I slowed then followed her up the steep steps of the house 2 away where the woman leaves a tray of "white stuff" on the front porch for the stray cats. Although I now have a "panic button" that calls the ambulance if I fall while on my property (which I've done only once so far,  back in February when my real foot slid out from under me on the bone-dry grass), I'm led to believe that its range doesn't extend much past my own boundaries.

You should still know a couple of ways to contact me if you wish to tell me what YOU've been up to since May 2010, 5 months before I had to put a childless Offa to sleep because of cancers.

Could we please get back to the topic. Anything else Les please use the PM function as this is not the place for a lot of the posts here. While it's nice to update your friends it should be done off forum, thank you for your understanding in this matter.