Dutch Shepherd Forum

I hoping some of the breeders on here can chime in. I took Odin in for hip x-rays today. He's been having a few issues and I wanted to get everything checked out anyway before I planned out the next year's competition goals.

I'm not too happy with the off centered positioning, and I think I'm going to take him back to my old clinic in Chicago so I can assist with the x-rays and we can do it without any sedation at all. We went with just pre-med drugs ( Diazepam) instead of full anesthesia this time.

Can these x-rays give an idea of what's going on despite the position? I posted this on a conformation breeder site and they suggested asking for a refund. The vet I used did give me his evaluations on the hips as well, but I'll leave them out for now.

The offcenter makes it harder to evaluate. See some athrose at the right, but overall good hips.

Stephanie - send Asheley Winters a PM. I am sure she would be happy to help. Personally, I think that positioning is important, but I think it is hard to make "Good" hips look really bad. I think the right is mildly sub-luxed and see some flattening of the femoral head on both sides. Nothing huge and nothing that would make me go "Woah that is why he is acting off."

I wouldn't recommend doing it without sedation if you're trying to reshoot for better positioning - even with the calmest dog and best techs in the world, it's not easy to get a perfect shot while the dog is awake. That's just naturally not a comfortable position to lie in. My standard poodle had rads when she was awake that had us ready to run for a TPO - took them again under full sedation and the specialist said she had very mild dysplasia on one side, not enough to warrant surgery - the original rads looked like both hips were subluxated. she was straight, but she was so tense that it looked worse than it was. They won't even accept radiographs for pennhip from dogs that are awake honestly, there's a chance that just giving diazepam instead of fully sedating him may be partly the reason for the poor positioning in the first place.

positioning aside, if you're looking for working purposes and not breeding purposes, I don't think they look bad enough for him to be experiencing any discomfort. But I would go ahead and start him on glucosamine/chondroitin/msm supplement if he isn't already taking one