Best Laid Plans....

[not_hathor]

*Mope*

Yesterday. Took Bel to the vet for the remainder of her annual shots --
mentioned to vet the way Bel's been favoring her left hind leg. Vet felt her up (to the tune of an extra 40+ buckaroos, since that's considered 'an exam') and gave the opinion that at some point over the past 6 months Bel tore a ligament in her knee joint. But the only way to know for certain and to properly treat would be X-rays... and most likely treatment would consist of surgery.

Cr*p.

There goes what's left of the money Mom gave me for our Anniversary. I HAD hoped I could use it for a little mid-July cammping trip in Minnesota that PlanetgalJess has been organizing (provided I could manipulate my work schedule to accomodate).

Poor Bel. Not her fault, my sweet and sassy PrettyBel....

ETA:
Y'know, NONE of the books I've read over the years about Chows ever said ANYTHING about Chows being 'jumpers' or 'climbers', and yet, I've had three of them now! And Kahvi was so good with her Obedience training that our Trainer was talking about the possibility of taking her to Trials before she died. Makes me wonder about the competance of those book-writing experts, sometimes.

Comments

Part Two...

[reziac.livejournal.com]

As to the distilled water -- you're imagining things. From what you say about her coat, previously she simply was blowing coat, or had an immature coat, and now has a full/mature coat, so it's sheer coincidence of timing. (Most dogs of ANY breed don't get a fully mature coat until they are 3-4 years old, and in some breeds not before age 6.) If anything, using distilled water DEPRIVES the dog of normal and necessary minerals that are found in tap water. In particular, you can wind up with deficiencies of iron, copper, magnesium, calcium, and various other trace metals too numerous to mention, some of which are naturally in ground/river water, and some that are picked up from metal pipes. Minerals in the water is a GOOD thing; it's where most people and animals get the trace elements they require!! (People who live in houses with all-plastic pipes often have iron deficiency; since I moved into a house with mostly plastic pipes, I sometimes have to take iron supplements! And in this area, we have so much calcium in the ground water that humpbacked senior citizens are almost never seen, because NO ONE who drinks the local water has a calcium deficiency.)

As to matted fur -- well, I think there is SOMETHING in Chows now that wasn't there before (witness the smashed-in faces that are new in the last couple decades, and matting coat is sure as hell new too!) If there are imports in her pedigree -- there's no telling *what* was really used, particularly in dogs from Britain and Scandinavia, and a Kees is quite likely. There was a LOT of undocumented crossbreeding during and after WW2, as during the war, Europeans were forced to put down breeding stock due to the lack of meat to feed them, and many people bred their remaining bitches to literally ANYTHING to keep their line going. (And sometimes it was deliberately done to quickly change type in a line. This happened several times in Labs that I *know* about, which is why the modern English show type is so different from the original type. It can take several *decades* for such a crossbreeding to come back and bite you with radical changes of type across the breed as a whole, but it usually does happen, eventually.)

As to 'holistic' anything -- when I see that word, I'm warned that the Tinfoil Hat Brigade is on the march. (Not quite as far out as homeopathy, but getting close.) It's essentially belief in magic, which people are prone to do when they have absolutely no background in a topic and therefore no way to even start understanding it. When something from the Tinfoil Troops "works" it's usually because of coincidence, or a partial change where ANY change would be progress, and not an actual improvement due to their recommended methods -- much as changing from any strict diet to any other strict diet may fix one deficiency, but can in turn generate new deficiencies (which usually takes a few months to manifest, and then it's back to the Holistic Doctor for another revenue stream review!)