HANDS-ON HEALING
As the weather cools, injuries increase. Physiotherapy may help heal your dog, as Ian Mason reports
Ian Mason looks at how physiotherapy can help your dog.
Nobody wants to see their Labrador or spaniel injured – especially during the shooting season. Unfortunately, the demand made of working dogs at this time of year drastically increases the risk of strains, sprains or worse.
I was pondering this while sitting in a hospital physiotherapy unit, awaiting treatment for a neck problem exacerbated by too much shooting. The physio was working wonders on my neck. I asked her if physiotherapy could help an injured dog. I was surprised to learn that physiotherapy is a growing speciality in veterinary medicine. Indeed several therapists offer treatments specifically tailored for working dogs.
One such specialist is Dr Gail Williams – a qualified veterinary physiotherapist. Gail’s chief expertise is farm animals, horses and gundogs. She knows gundogs inside out. When she’s not treating them, she’s working or training them. She beats on a large estate shoot and picks-up on a smaller syndicate shoot with her team of springer and cocker spaniels.
Labrador injuries
She likens hard working gundogs to elite athletes: “They suffer the sort of injuries you might expect any athlete to get; muscle strains, ligament sprains, muscle tears, wounds.” The injuries she typically treats depend on the breed of gundog and the type of work it is doing.
“Working Labradors are long, lean and fast. They tend to suffer jumping injuries when they have slipped or not quite cleared the top of a fence. Setters tend to range quite far and turn amazingly quickly to the whistle. They spin around, get their foot caught and injure the cruciate ligament in their knee – the typical footballer’s injury – their foot is stuck, the knee twists and the cruciate ligament snaps.”
Spaniel injuries
“Springer and cocker spaniels are prone to a variety of injuries, depending on whether they are beating or picking-up. Among the most common problems are shoulder injuries. The spaniel has been water retrieving, perhaps with a heavy duck in its mouth. The dog tries to lever itself up a slippery bank with its front feet wide apart. The feet slip on the mud and they damage their pectoral or shoulder muscles. It’s a common injury for smaller dogs that retrieve.”
As the season progresses, Gail tends
to see more injured dogs, especially towards the end of the season when fatigue injuries become common. “This is particularly true for dogs that do a lot of work. I don’t like to work my dogs two days running because I think it’s too much for them. Many of the dogs I see with chronic fatigue type injuries are dogs that are doing a lot of work during the shooting season and are being taken out two or three days without a break.
“My spaniels go out at 8am in the morning and do six hours of hard beating – a lot of work for a dog, because they never stop. I like to give them a day off, otherwise it depletes their energy resources and makes their musculo-skeletal system
“There are few things that can’t be treated, given time, patience and cooperation”
more prone to injury. A great advantage of having more than one dog is that you can rotate them and rest one.
“As any owner knows, a spaniel will work until it drops. A break enables the dog’s glucose stores to recover. My old springer always knew when it was a shooting day. He got so excited he would not eat breakfast, then he’d do six hours beating and then be too tired to eat dinner. A lot of spaniels are like that. They just run on adrenaline.”
treatment
My experience of physiotherapy is that although it helped my neck, it was quite unpleasant and at times painful. My physiotherapist had warned me in advance that it might hurt – but how do you warn a dog?
“With people you can say, this is going to hurt a bit whilst I get deep into this tissue,” says Gail. “You can’t say that to a dog. But I find that even if I am doing something that I know must hurt, dogs are quite happy to let me do it, because they seem to know that I am helping them.”
She claims success at treating most musculo-skeletal problems providing the dog’s owner is on board. “There are few things that can’t be treated, given time, patience and cooperation from the
owner. They have to stick to the exercise program to ensure the dog takes the right amount of rest. Even congenital problems such as hip dysplasia can be helped by using physiotherapy and special exercises to strengthen the muscles that help hold the dog’s hips in place.”
Given the work involved, the cost seems reasonable. Gail charges £35 to £40 for an initial assessment. A back muscle strain – which is fairly common in gundogs – will take about three treatments and cost a maximum of £100. Physiotherapy is usually covered by dog insurance policies.
Physiotherapy may involve manual therapy, electrotherapy and remedial exercise. Usually it takes a combination of all three to completely rehabilitate an injured dog. Manual therapy includes massage, joint mobilisation or manipulation and soft tissue passive stretching. “Animals respond extremely well to touch. This is why we pat them or stroke them when we want to communicate,” says Gail. Electrotherapies pass some form of electrical or light energy into the tissues to produce a specific physiological effect. Remedial exercises are an important part of therapy because injury may have been caused by a dog’s poor posture. Unless rectified by skilful physiotherapeutic exercises, relapse is likely.
How to avoid injury
Gail’s best advice is warmth. “When the Guns and beaters break for lunch, make sure you keep your dog warm – especially if it’s raining. A hot, wet dog put into the back of a Land Rover will get cold very quickly. The dog’s muscles go into spasm and when you take them out to work again they are at high risk of a soft tissue injury.”
“Always keep your dog warm if you break at all. I carry a small fleece with me and if there is a long wait I can pop this on my dog until we are ready to go again. This is particularly important if your dog lives indoors because it will have a thinner coat than a kennelled dog.”
Gail is based near Stratford-on-Avon and treats dogs from 60 to 70 miles away. If your dog has suffered an injury and you feel that physiotherapy might help, your vet will likely know a therapist. In fact, all dogs needing physiotherapy must first be seen by a vet, who may then refer the dog for physiotherapy
(a legal requirement under the 1966 Veterinary Surgeons Act).