im really curious to know why a puppy being born with its eyes open is bad, i had no idea that was even possible! same with the cleft palate thing, what sort of problems would both these things cause as the puppy grows?
The reason puppies and kittens are born with their eyes closed is because the eyes aren’t fully formed yet. This pup’s corneas were clouded and sunken and *dried* because she couldn’t produce tears yet. Had she survived she would have 100% been blind, not itself a deal breaker. The palate separates your nasal sinuses from your mouth. It’s what allows them to breathe while nursing. If there’s a hole, when they breathe they inhale the milk. If they inhale the milk, they get aspiration pneumonia and that’s a killer. A puppy or kitten with a cleft palate needs to be tube fed until they are large enough to have the palate repaired. Her cleft was quite narrow, but nearly the full length of her palate. She already had congestion and a weird ‘clicking’ when I was ausculting her. She also appeared to have hydrocephalus but no open fontanelle. You can tell in the side-by-side photos that her head was not shaped right compared to her siblings. Hydrocephalus can cause blindness, deafness, general impairment, developmental delays, and seizures.
As this puppy had 3 things that very clearly didn’t form right while she was developing, it makes you wonder what else was going on. Sometimes when eyes don’t form right, you discover the heart also didn’t form right (kittens with anophthalmia often have terrible congenital heart disease). Did she make her liver and kidneys correctly? Who knows, but chances were pretty high that there were things wrong we couldn’t see.
