Blind and abandoned double merle Lily and her seeing eye guide dog Maddison.
There are very few homes equipped to adopt one Great Dane, let alone two. Add in advanced age and congenital blindness, and it’s not surprising that the former owners just couldn’t handle the onus any more and ditched blind Lily and her seeing-eye-dog Maddison at the shelter.
When illness forced vets to remove Great Dane Lily’s eyes, the prospects of a fulfilling life didn’t look good. But then no one had reckoned on her pal Maddison stepping in to turn guide dog. The pair have been inseparable for years but now find themselves looking for a new home because their owner could no longer cope. The catch for anyone interested is that the Great Danes come as a package. They have been waiting at the Dogs Trust re-homing centre in Shrewsbury since July.
Lily, six, was barely a puppy when she was struck down by a condition that caused her eyelashes to grown into her eyeballs, damaging them beyond repair. It was after this traumatic event that her relationship with seven-year-old Maddison developed as she took her under her wing. The best buddies lived together until their owners decided they couldn’t look after them any more. Miss Campbell said: ‘With her lack of sight, Lily’s other senses have heightened so although we don’t split them up often she can tell if Maddison is nearby.
“They curl up together to go to sleep and they are very vocal with each other. We haven’t analysed their different barks but if Lily wants to go forward and Maddison is in her way, the bark will have a different pitch. They are very close to one another and enjoy each other’s company.”
This is the burden created by breeders who mate merle to merle, merle to harlequin, and harlequin to harlequin. They afflict their puppies and the big hearted owners who adopt them with a lifetime concern. Dealing with a blind puppy might pull at the heart strings enough, but compassion fatigue and mounting veterinary bills can quickly make the prospect of caring for two middle aged or geriatric dogs more burden than bliss.
Before you start judging the owners, realize that up 80% of parents with special needs children divorce due to the stress. It takes extraordinary people to care for a special needs child or pet, but it only takes one uninformed or callous breeder to create them and flood the local community’s ability to cope.
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Awww. This story makes me happy and sad at the same time, multiple times. Such a shame their original owners could no longer cope. I wonder if Lily’s breeder ever wonders what becomes of the puppies s/he condems to a life of suffering? Probably not. They are most likely too focued on the money rolling in.
I hope these two find a home soon. 6 is a great age for a great dane. It would be nice if they could spend their last days together in a cozy home.
Pennypup recently posted..Sit’N’Stay, But Only If You’re Not A Pit Bull
What’s with the straw argument breeders are in it for the moolah?
People do horrible things in the name of being trendy, even if there is no monetary incentive.
Dave recently posted..Upgrade Needed
I didn’t mean all breeders. Just those who breed for “rare white dane” puppies and the like. Those who aren’t ethical in any form of the word and simply pump out puppies. Most responsible breeders would know that breeding for double merle is a death sentance for those pups and don’t do a merle x merle litter.
Pennypup recently posted..Sit’N’Stay, But Only If You’re Not A Pit Bull
I am glad to add that Lily and Maddison received 200 offers of new homes.
Poor dane.
Stupid dane breeders.
Retrieverman recently posted..I hate “canned hunting,” except when I do it
I second this. I am on a Natural Rearing list and several No vaccine/raw feeding lists to keep up on information out there. There is one breeder of danes out there who is constantly bad mouthing former puppy buyers who stray from their protocal and “kill” their puppies. Well they breed rare “white” danes. Me thinks the breeder holds more responsibilty in early deaths of their dogs than they realize.
Thanks for the comment Kristy. I’d watch out for some really troublesome dogma on the no-vaccine lists. There’s a lot of stupid going on there too. There are people who will, out of hysteria, blame every problem on dogs on vaccines, and there’s just no solid evidence for this. I’ve seen breeders of some of the worst breeds claiming that it’s not horrible breeding fads for deficient genetics and inbreeding… no no no, it’s x-rays and vaccines that are causing cancer and every other dog problem. Rubbish.
I feel the most humane thing to do is to not breed known genetic conditions for aesthetic reasons, second most humane and efficient thing is to put defective puppies down near birth and learn the lesson, and the least humane and efficient thing is to breed these dogs intentionally and then farm out the defective ones to the rescue system.
I agree Christopher! The stupid on both ends of the spectrum on any of these lists burns. I prefer to look at both sides of the story and research to form an educated opinion and to do what is best for the dog.
There was a recent spat on 2 lists simultaneously about the evils of Xrays/MRI’s/ultrasounds and the back and forth about how the hell people were supposed to breed ethically when they couldn’t do rads for OFA ratings and the safety of their expecting females.
Ugh. . .and the dog who had a near deadly load of tapeworms who’s owner got flack for using a conventional dewormer instead of Diatomaceous Earth. The once monthly litter of puppies that are wiped out by parvo. I could go on forever.
I never got the anti-vaccine people. I have seen ferrets die from canine distemper. It is not pretty.
Geez, folks, there are such thing as bad batches. I got one of those blotched vaccines, but it is not going to deter me from vaccinating myself because the odds of statistics is much more powerful than anecdotes.
Dave recently posted..Lumberjack Dog
People like the illusion of control. It’s an unpleasant thing to realize that disease and death in your dogs and yourself and your family is part and parcel of simply being alive. It’s in the genes. The Natural Rearing movement, and the hardcore alternative medicine movement, assuage the uncertainty by shifting the blame for disease onto the diseased. Or the owners of the diseased.
I know this. I used to be a believer. I will never lose the sick guilt I feel over that.
Jess recently posted..I had not intended to do any writing right now…
I agree Dave.
The nice thing is the no vaccine camp has at least stimulated are some studies that have led to a more healthy vaccination protocal in dogs, cats, and now ferrets. I am not a no vaccine person. I am not a yearly vaccine person for the biggies though after reading titer research. Dogs every 3 years per AVMA protocal. Same for Cats. Every 18-24 months for ferrets based on the research of Dr Heller (I do not believe the follow up has been completed for publishing yet but she is on several of the lists I participate in and she is advising Distemper shots at this interval based on the results so far several years out.)
Jess-I read your piece when you first posted it. It was the most honest and introspective piece I have seen on the topic. That alone eased any nagging thoughts about the issue in the back of my mind. Thank you for writing the piece and putting it out for all.
I saw this story on how the great danes found a home and I thought of you. Of course you already had it. As tough as it is, this trend of finding homes for badly disabled dogs is a result of breeders not making hard decisions about their progeny. I have been thinking about your article on Torture Breeding (qualzucht?) ever since you wrote it. It has unleashed a whole flood of thoughts that will probably make a few posts on my blog.
The AKC has found itself painted into a corner with advancing knowledge, yet so many breeders and owners just expect to have to care for genetically diseased and disabled dogs and refuse to turn to science for the hard truths they need to produce sound puppies.
Jess,
I had no idea that “Natural rearing” had a name, but I engaged in it with my kids and dogs.Sincerely. wholeheartedly, but 1/2 assedly because I was too lazy for much rigor. Although I did not ever get parvo in my dogs, I took ridiculous chances which, one day, I woke up and realized.
I am looking askance at the feeding distortions going on right now. Pardon me, I feel a post coming on; I’ll catch up with all you other dogs, later.
Kate recently posted..Big Chihuahua
Sadly, our culture seems to favor using animals up and dumping them when they become old and inconvenient. Here’s a link to the fate of the dog that starred in the Harry Potter movies, it seems he got old and sick and now it’s time to dump him.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2011/09/harry-potter-dog-padfoot-needs-new-home/
I just hope they don’t do that to me……
I am not sure why Padfoot is relevant? Working dogs have a high turnover rate compared to ones marketed as pets.
It’s not relevant. The dog and it’s companion were not dumped because they got ‘old and sick.’
People who work the movie industry are frequently away from home.
Evidently the owner cannot depend on his family to care properly for the dogs while he is away. As the owner of a dog in failing health, that needs meds twice a day, and fed four times a day, I understand this. I can’t even depend on my husband to care for Zora properly, he’s afraid he’s going to screw something up.
What is truly sad is the judgmental attitudes that people have towards owners who give their pets up, as though most people make this decision as easily as deciding which restaurant to eat at. You see the same thing with anti-choice protesters, as if women just decide to pop in for an abortion on the way to the grocery store.
It’s called walking in someone else’s shoes, and it’s a major part of the No Kill movement. Try it sometime. (Not you, Dave.)
Jess recently posted..I had not intended to do any writing right now…
I’m more annoyed that the rescue in that case refuses to adopt him out now, because they fear he’s such a star he won’t find a home that ‘really loves him’. Better for him to remain in their hands (good publicity!) til he dies, I guess.
While I applaud the fight against poor breeding practices, this dog is not blind due to being a double merle. She doesn’t even appear to be a merle at all. She had entropion- disease that rarely requires removal of the eyes! There is a simple surgery that can be done to correct the condition long before the eyes are actually damaged tot he point of requiring removal. I sounds like the owners are to blame for neglecting her eyes til they got so bad as to require removal & then dumping the dogs at the shelter.
The dog is a double merle + piebald and probably Harlequin too. The disabling of the color proteins is a known cause of eye issues like entropion. Did you fail to notice that the dog has very little color on it?
Re: Padfoot, there is a certain amount of scepticism among the dog community in the UK that the dog in the article is anything to do with the film.
This is also the dog who played Padfoot…
http://www.petconnection.com/blog/2007/07/13/harrypotter/
Yeah, I just watched the film again recently and said to myself “Surely that’s some kind of lurcher or Wolfhound, and not a German Shelpherd?”
As mentioned previously, entropian can be remedied if caught early enough with a simple, relatively inexpensive surgery. This condition is not always genetic and can be easily identified. Simply, the eyelashes grow inwards and rub against the cornea. The dog will be in a fair amount of pain. If the cornea is too badly damaged, the dog will lose sight. Owners might have a clue when there is a lot of tearing and staining around the eye area. It is unfortunate this dog was not identified sooner. I truly hope these two sweet creatures have found a new home together.
Don’t you think that observation suggests that this was, in fact, entropion secondary to congential malformations of the eye due to merle homozygosity with harlequin? Just look at the dog, it’s albino over 90% of its body, it’s from a breed that has both merle and harlequin and the presentation FITS that status, and it had to have both eyes removed.
We can either believe that none of those things we can see are relevant and it was a totally unrelated case of entropion that went massively out of control and was not treated, or add up the evidence we can see and make the most obvious and supported decision.
This dog was blinded by a breeding decision, not a random happenstance that was left untreated.
Poor dogs. I’m glad they found a home, though – it’s amazing what a little media attention will accomplish.
I owned a wonderful blind dog for seven years, a collie born without eyes. She probably should have been culled, but the breeder instead decided to place her. Amazingly smart, funny, sweet dog – Bonnie eventually became a therapy dog and competed in Rally and draft dog trials.
Do you think that the breeder should have made the decision to cull the white dane so it wouldn’t have been a burden on someone? NOT doing the breeding in the first place would of course be the ideal, but is it better to plan on offing the white pups if they occur, or placing them as pets?
I’m lucky that I planned ahead on my litter to avoid issues known to cause defective puppies and I was blessed not to have any issues that are hard to plan for pop up (such as a cleft palate in a breed where it is rare). So I’ve never had to actually make the decision to put down a puppy, all of mine have been healthy. But the time to ask that question is not, in my view, when you’re faced with it but well before hand when immediacy and emotion are likely to lead to poor long term decisions.
These dogs are clearly burdensome due to their conditions. The emotional gut reaction to tend to the sick and needy clearly has a shelf life and in the case of these two dogs and many many others (there are whole rescues devoted to blind danes and collies) the financial and emotional cost of caring eventually outweighed the sense of good deed, and the dog’s youth and cuteness has already been spent, so have the easy good years. What’s left is a dog which will now have to adapt to a rescue and then a new home, and which is no longer a cute spry puppy that you can dawww over and which will likely have mounting medical bills for both the conditions and general old age.
And remember that these two dogs are incredibly lucky to have gotten media attention that went viral. That nearly never happens and the many months these dogs already languished in the rescue is proof enough of that.
It’s clear to me that even in this optimal scenario, that this dog lived has created a large and widening burden on owners and rescues. To me, a good breeder is one who makes hard decisions that increase order and health instead of passing on the tough decisions and thus create chaos and disease. While they don’t usually write articles about healthy dogs that find lifetime homes with nice people who don’t have to spend a fortune on their care, they also don’t need to. I personally think that this breeder made two mistakes, one breeding this dog, and two passing it on to others to deal with. Both are signs of stupidity and weakness to me. Avoiding responsibility at every turn. And for what? Is there anything to offset the problems caused here? Not really. Nothing of value was created in this process.
That’s not to say these dogs are worthless and can’t be loved and loved back and live quasi-normal lives. We don’t get anywhere if we frame this around evaluating the dogs. If we do that, we agree to allow breeders to churn out whatever and as long as it has a pulse, we should be ok with that. This sort of thinking leads people to buy puppymill dogs to “save” them. That plan has never worked, and just enables the suffering. The problem is not that defective dogs happen and that people step up and care for them, the problem is that stupid breeders make them happen many times more than they need to happen.
To support this creates a moral hazard where there is no incentive to guard against risk because the decision makers never face the consequences of their decisions.
I had a puppy with a persistent right aortic arch in one of my litters. He was the only male in a litter where I wanted males. He started having problems at about four weeks old. There is a surgery for this condition (must be done by a cardiologist and you are looking at $2000-6000), but many pups are still never normal afterwards and require the same management and have the same health risks as as megaesophagus dog. Once he was diagnosed, I had him euthanized. This was the only pup in the litter that my husband had already named, btw.
I also had a litter some years ago that got a bacterial infection at two weeks old. One pup had a very hard time, and despite treatment the infection crossed the blood/brain barrier and he started having seizures. I was home alone with no vehicle, my husband was hours away, and I had a pup that was in continual seizure. I killed him myself with my own hands to end his suffering.
Breeding is not for the fainthearted or emotionally frail. I have seen people nurse failing pups along for weeks only to be emotionally devastated when the pup finally dies. Worse are the breeders who look for a ‘special’ home for the ones which don’t die.
I breed dogs that appeal to a specialized market and I have a hard enough time finding good, qualified homes for my healthy pups. I’d never attempt to place a defective one.
To be perfectly frank, that is why dogs have litters.
Jess recently posted..Ding a Ding Dang
Actually, my dog was a surprise – the breeder didn’t realize that she was blind until she was three weeks old. At first they thought she was just slow to open her eyes. She wasn’t from a merle to merle breeding – she was a blue, but from tri and blue parents.
I don’t know of any rescue devoted to blind collies – although there are a couple of rescues, mailing lists, and bulletin boards that are specifically for white aussies (AussieLads, White Angels Hope, Amazing Aussies).
Homozygous merle aussies seem to be pretty common, probably because blue merle is the “signature” color of the breed. It’s too easy for an uninformed breeder to assume that the best way to make pretty blue puppies is to breed pretty blue parents!
The Stirling puppies (which are still on the website, now almost 4 months old and still unwanted) were an accident – the breeder apparently didn’t know that the sire was a sable merle. The knowledge gap when it comes to merle genetics is really discouraging.
By the way, if you’d like to see a “normal” double merle, this is my dog Pepper. She competed in agility, obedience, and herding; CEA noncarrier, OFA excellent. I didn’t breed her, though, and I wouldn’t do a breeding that would produce such a pup.
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg230/hookedoncollies/pepper.jpg
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg230/hookedoncollies/scan.jpg
There are a few breed-clubs who banned sable to merle breedings. You would think by now it would be common knowledge.
Sable x Merle is still a big fight in the breed in the US. The pro-sable-merle people actually tried to use my recent double merle posts as reason to demand to be included in the breed standard! Way to miss the point people. That issue and the bad publicity from the Wyndlair Avalanche supposedly contributed to the current president of the breed club resigning his post.
One copy of merle (which I think is synonymous with “blue” in Collies, no?) is sadly enough to cause problems. This is exacerbated by piebald and harlequin or another copy of Merle. It is, of course, more rare to have blindness with only one copy of merle. But you can see why cryptic and sable-merle is such a touchy issue in breeds where it is rare or new. Who wants to deal with this on accident?
And you’ve hit the problem on the head for Aussies. When you make Merle the signature (I’ve read that both Aussies and Shelties tried to have this as the only color, which is impossible given its homozygous lethal status) you end up with severely limited breeding choices or you roll the dice every litter with crappy odds.
I don’t have much sympathies for accidents like the Stirling litter. That breeder had 4+ litters on the ground at the same time and there’s no indication that this is part of a well designed breeding program. If you want to breed that many dogs at the same time you’d better have your stuff together. I’ll also note that their lawsuit threat against me went nowhere, they really are half-assed and uninformed in their endeavors.
Pepper is a very pretty dog, I’d even say that she has a better head shape than the current fad in some show collies for ultra oblique eyes. She looks like she can actually see in front of her; I’ve seen a tri collie at a show walk full on into a pole and the only reason I could think was the horrible–but fashionable–eye set. Good to see that you keep your dogs so active as well, performance is really where these dogs shine.
Do you have any stats about blindness in heterozygous merles? It’s come up before on mailing lists, but nobody seems to have any definitive answers. I’d love to see an actual survey or study, done within any breed!
Some dog breed books caution about deafness in merles, but these are usually older editions, and they don’t specify whether the deaf dogs were merle (hetero) or double (homo). And unilaterally deaf dogs compensate so well, they’re hard to diagnose.
Merle is a pretty fascinating gene, and it works a little differently in some breeds. Double dapple (homozygous merle) dachshunds aren’t always mostly white – they look very similar to piebald dachsies, which is why many breeders avoid piebald dogs.
Blue used to be a “bad” color for collies. One book from about 1915 says that blue dogs are more likely to be “common” in type (wide head, large eyes) and notes that the color is typical for working dogs, but not show dogs. At the time, black/tan and black/white still occured regularly in the collie breed.
Another collie book, from 1940 or so, notes that blue had been gaining favor in recent years. White had a similar road – used to be associated with “bad type”, poor coat, poor temperament (probably due to breeders who put color first, rather than any defect inherent in the color).
Pepper had one litter – I chose a sire who doubled up on her “faulty” large eyes and broad head. No tape or glue on those ears, ever!
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg230/hookedoncollies/isaac_face0.jpg
No, I don’t have sympathy for the Stirling people either – they’ve bred probably hundreds of litters for no purpose other than producing puppies for sale. I do feel bad for the dogs. Hopefully the third white pup found its way into a decent home.
I don’t think we’re going to see a good study because people only pay for studies when they want to use the results to change their behavior. Breeders and breed clubs likely want to get rid of diseases that are unrelated to conformation, but when the disease is solidly linked to a color choice or a conformation fad, do you think they are going to want to give up their freedom in that regard? I don’t.
And on the ethical side, do we need a study to give us percents here to change our behavior? Either you’re ok creating these dogs or you aren’t. Are there really people out there who would be ok if the rate were lower versus higher?
“I’m ok with one defective dog per 20, but 2… now that’s just going too far!”
While I’d love to know the numbers, I don’t really see anyone paying for that information nor do I think they can really change my position on breeding merle to merle.