Continued from last week
Symptoms
The clinical signs associated with this disease are variable. In fact, my experience has been that many of the X-ray pictures showing terribly dysplastic joints do not correlate with the expected degree of lameness. Dogs compensate beautifully (some of you might have seen the film footage on a ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not‘ TV show, in which a dog having only two legs – on the same side – outran a car).
The main sign of hip joint dysplasia (HJD) is lameness and an expression of pain when the animal rises from a supine (sitting or lying) position or has to use the stairs or walk some long distance. If no exercise is involved, the lameness could be mild, moderate or severe,