Dr. Anndrea Kapke's Page

Greenwood Animal Clinic
502 N. Madison Ave.
Greenwood, IN 46142
(317) 881-4300
www.GreenwoodAnimalClinic.com

Bald, Smelly, Mutated-She’ll Fit Right In

By Dr. Anndrea Kapke




Our kids have the luck of having two veterinarians for parents. They share our household with an ever evolving, unique, zoo of pets. We feel like the Kapke Home for Inbred Pure Bred Pets. The diseases affecting our current motley crew reads like the index of a Merck Veterinary Manual.
1. Allergies to cats, storage mites, dust mites and mold
2. Estrogen-responsive urinary incontinence
3. Feline aggression so severe that a lion tamer would hesitate to vaccinate
4. Hip dysplasia
5. Irrational, incapacitating fear of slick floor surfaces
6. Mental illness (of the pets, really)
We weren’t planning on adopting another dog, but she is an inbred purebred with so many faults as to be unsellable by the breeder; right up our alley.
Guinevere is a three month old Boston Terrier with the smashed face and bulging eyes typical of that breed. She is also bald as a cue ball. And the smell…well, I’ve smelled one hundred and twenty pound Rottweilers with necrotizing abscesses that smelled better than this three pound mite. She has generalized demodetic mange; a non-contagious, generally treatable disease, most often seen in pure bred puppies. Additionally, she was born with a deformed right front foot. Two of her toes and half of her wrist bones are missing. Her dewclaw is so overdeveloped that she uses it almost like an opposable thumb. My husband called me when she came into our clinic. Perhaps he felt a kinship with the poor lame thing. He is an amputee. He lost half of his right foot in a lawn mower accident when he was a child. I foresee the two of them curled up on the couch in front of the fire on cold winter nights gimping about their arthritis and commiserating about being follicularly challenged. But Eric doesn’t stink.
Another one of Guinevere’s litter mates is missing some of his chest bones, leading us to suspect that their parents were first cousins or maybe her mother was exposed to a toxin during her pregnancy.
We are treating Guinevere’s skin condition and each day she smells a little less foul and eventually she’ll grow hair (sorry, Eric.) Since she is now one of our pets, I am fully expecting to soon discover that she is a few cards short of a full deck, allergic to cats, Boston Terriers, left handed children and laminate flooring, and may develop an irrational fear of Wednesdays.
She’ll fit right in.