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If your dog has had any illnesses or ailments, you can tell us about them at any time without having to complete the rest of the questionnaire. Simply login to your dog's profile by visiting www.dogslife.ac.uk and click on the link underneath your dog's graph.
Labradors at work: Detector dogs
Zoonoses
Are you thinking of breeding your dog?
Moving on Pup!
Labradors at work: Detector dogs
If you have been abroad, you may have noticed one of the UK Border Agency’s 67 detector dogs (also known as ‘sniffer dogs’) at work on your return to the UK. Since 1978, the UK Border Agency has used dogs to detect smuggled goods at freight and passenger entry points at sea ports, airports, postal depots and international rail stations.
Usually gundogs such as Labrador Retrievers or Springer Spaniels are used as detector dogs. This is because of their eagerness to please, natural retrieving skills, their excellent scent detection ability and friendly temperament. Dogs are also used because they are agile and can search large cargos quickly and get into places that would otherwise be difficult to reach. Some of the scents that detector dogs are trained to find include: drugs, cash, firearms, tobacco, animal-based products, and people. Detector dogs are trained to sit and stare to indicate when they have located a scent so as to remain un-intrusive and not to cause alarm. Once they have located a scent, dogs are rewarded by their handler, usually by playing with a ball.
Detector dogs are recruited from various sources (for example, rescue centres, the public, and the police), and begin training at around one year of age. Many dogs are trained by the Metropolitan Police, but some are trained by a regional UK Border Agency dog inspector. Training starts with an eight week course where dogs are taught how to pinpoint a specific scent. The following five weeks of training are carried out at the place where the dog is intended to work, and the number of scents they are trained to detect increases.
The UK Border Agency’s dogs live in kennels at their place of work or close to it. On average, detector dogs work for around eight years. When dogs retire, the handler is given the opportunity to keep the dog themselves if they wish, or find an alternative good home for them.
To find out more about the UK Border Agency’s detector dogs please click here.
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Zoonoses
Zoonses are diseases which can be transmitted from animals to people, or from people to animals. There are many different zooneses, which vary with geographical location and species. We avoid catching zoonosis from our pets by worming them regularily and observing good hygeine procedures. Some are common and some are very rare. Examples of zoonoses we should be aware of as dog owners include:
- Hydatic disease (Echinococcosis) which is caused by infection of the dog tapeworm (Echinococcus granulosus). The tapeworm is usually transmitted from dogs to sheep, but humans can also become infected if they ingest the eggs excreted in the faeces of infected dogs. Hydatid disease is found mainly in the sheep farming areas of Herefordshire, mid-Wales, and the Western Isles of Scotland.
- Pasteurellosis is a infection caused by bacteria normally found in the oral and respiratory tract of dogs (and many other animals). The most common cause of pasteurellosis in people is skin infections following dog or cat bites and scratches.
- Rabies is a potentially fatal viral infection which can be caught by people bitten by infected dogs. The World Health Organization has estimate that over 55,000 human deaths are caused by rabies worldwide each year, with the majority occurting in developing countries, particularly in South and South East Asia. Only four cases have been recorded in people in the UK since 2000, all of which were aquired from dog bites sustained abroad. Vaccination of dogs traveling to and from other countries from the UK is fundamental to prevent the spread of the disease, which is why rabies vaccination is mandatory for dogs traveling abroad.
- Toxocariasis is caused by a parasitic roundworms (nematodes) called Toxocara canis. People can become infected with the worms if they ingest faeces of dogs infected with them, although in most people they are assymptomatic. In rare cases, the roundworm larvae infect organs such as the liver, lungs, eyes or brain and cause severe symptoms.
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Are you thinking of breeding your dog?
If you are thinking of breeding your dog, you may be interested to hear more about The Kennel Club’s Mate Select service.
Mate Select has been set up to help dog breeders manage inbreeding, which is an unavoidable process in “closed” populations of animals, such as pedigree dogs. Breeding dogs that are closely related can result in the puppies inheriting diseases (for example, hip and elbow dysplasia) if the related dogs both carry the deleterious genes which may cause these diseases and pass them on to their puppies.
The mate select service has the facility for breeders to find out a dog’s inbreeding coefficient (a measure of inbreeding). This is measured as a percentage, for example, an inbreeding coefficient of 10% means that there is a 1 in 10 chance that a dog will inherit the same copies of genes from the dog related to both its dam and sire. The higher the inbreeding coefficient, the greater the chance of puppies inheriting the same copies of genes from their parents. As well as individual dogs, Mate Select can also give an average inbreeding coefficient for every breed recognised by the Kennel Club. In Labrador Retrievers, the inbreeding coefficient is 6%.
With these inbreeding coefficients in mind, breeders can use Mate Select to predict the inbreeding coefficients of puppies when entering details of a hypothetical mating. For example, breeders looking to breed their bitch can select potential sires and predict the inbreeding coefficient of the resulting puppies. In choosing dogs that will produce puppies with inbreeding coefficients that are less than the breed’s average inbreeding coefficient, the risk of the puppies developing disease can be reduced.
Mate Select also offers the facility to find out about any health test results dogs registered on the Kennel Clubs’ Breed Register may have. By entering the Kennel Club registered name or Kennel Club registered number (or stud book number) of a dog, any results from a British Veterinary Association/Kennel Club (BVA/KC) health scheme or an official Kennel Club DNA testing scheme can be viewed. The public availability of this information is why Dogslife already knows if your dog has been screened, and so we do not ask for your dog’s health test results in the questionnaire.
Mate Select helps owners and breeders to find out more about the health of dogs, and the effect potential matings would have on future generations, helping to breed puppies that are less likely to develop disease in the future.
For more information on Mate Select and its services please click here.
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Moving on Pup!
In the next stage of the Dogslife project, we are looking to measure the movement of dogs participating in the study to see how this affects their health. At present we ask what dogs are doing through the questionnaire, but we would like to supplement this information by recruiting a group of dogs to obtain more detailed recordings of their normal daily movement.
We have purchased a number of tiny devices called “accelerometers”, which can be attached to dogs’ collars. The accelerometer picks up movement of the collar and records how it changes as the dog moves. When the monitor is returned to us (after seven days of the dog wearing it), we will be able to identify specific patterns of movement from the recordings, helping us build a picture of the movement of different dogs taking part in the study. We hope to start sending the devices out shortly, and are aiming to recruit 100 dogs over the next year to help us collect this information. If you are interested in participating with your dog, please contact us at info@dogslife.ac.uk.
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