quichehound replied to your post “It’s not that I don’t want there to be improvements or that I dislike...”
are there any guesses for why? or is it not as big of a concern because down a kidney is not as lethal as the heart problems?
I don’t know if there’s any guesses to why people are starting to find this outside of that it’s possibly been in the breed for ages and only with modern medicine are we figuring this out. That wouldn’t be too far-fetched a guess as that’s literally how we got into this situation with the hearts- dobes have dropped dead since the start of the breed. It was assumed it was something different- heat, poor feed, etc- and allowed to continue, dogs that dropped dead were not singled out and removed from lineages, and now we have a 50% statistic. Kidney failure and kidney disease is not new to the breed either and having some dogs be missing an entire kidney would certainly point to higher instances in kidney issues as the line progresses. I only found this out when Creed had his monster UTI- his breeder had reached out to a few people behind dogs in his pedigree and we found out that his maternal grandfather was born with a single kidney and no one knew until after he died and was cut open. Thankfully Creed’s issue was not his kidneys and we did an ultrasound to ensure that he did actually have two healthy kidneys in there (he does) but this wasn’t the first I’ve heard of a missing organ in the breed and hasn’t been the last either.
But as to your second question- no, being missing certain organs, especially doubled organs, is not necessarily lethal. Being born without a kidney is also not too uncommon in humans- in fact, a former roommate of mine was born with a single healthy kidney and a smaller, shriveled kidney that began to rot inside her body and needed to be removed when she was a toddler. Outside of needing to pay extra attention to any UTI that she may develop in the future, she lived a normal life and you’d never know if you didn’t see her scar and ask her about it. I also had a kidney issue as a child and nearly needed a transplant, so even though I have two functional kidneys I have to follow the same protocol she does if I ever do get a UTI. You can also have a single kidney removed and return to life as normal once you heal from your surgery, even if that kidney was healthy upon removal (this is common for transplant donors!) provided that, once again, you report any potential urinary issues immediately as that can get very bad very fast.
However as said I do wonder how the stress on the body and the aging process changes when an organ that should be there is... not. Queenie, my last GSD, had her spleen removed after it was crushed and outside of being at higher risk for pancreatitus she would have lived without just fine if she’d recovered well from the surgery (she did not, but there were other complications which killed her, not her missing spleen). A friend in elementary/middle school had about a foot of his intestines removed and, again, outside of needing to take a little extra care in his diet, lived a completely normal life and needed no special considerations. A body without certain pieces can survive for quite some time and be almost indistinguishable from one born “normal”- BUT it does up the chances of something happening being much more dangerous than if the body was “complete”. And without that organ performing its job inside the body, it changes how the rest of your organs work too.
If Creed was discovered to have only had one kidney like his grandfather, that UTI could have been deadly instead of just very annoying and expensive. If my former roommate were to have kidney disease, she would need to be selected for transplant much faster than someone with two. If my friend ate certain foods, he’d definitely be in digestive distress. If Queenie ate certain foods, she would have needed hospitalization and could have died.
And knowing these things makes me wonder how many times dogs are born without an organ and have weird symptoms no one can figure out but aren’t quite “life threatening” status. Dogs that seem to need special diets even though everything else about them seems fine. Dogs that tend to get sick sooner, faster, deadlier. There’s a reason all of the pieces of our bodies are in there and arranged in the way they are, changing even a single piece affects all the others, and how many time is a “huh, weird but okay” issue eventually linked to something that seems way more important than a shrug and a different brand of treats? We don’t see everything that goes on inside of our dogs’ bodies and that’s honestly kind of scary to think about.
Or maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. This is the part of animal biotech and anatomy I always liked when I took those classes, how changing even a single piece can have consequences you’d never even think of. How things can hide until they get so exaggerated that you HAVE to pay attention now.
