The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall!

Owning a wolfhound is an adventure. Owning a wolfhound with “boobs”
is an entirely different adventure (ok-really, they are hygromas, but we ended up calling them boobs)! Constantly plagued by the question “What are those things on his legs??” we took to calling them boobs. One can only answer the same question so many times before one devises an alternate and mischievous answer! (And hey-some people really had a quizzical look on their face when they were told our dog had boobs…)

How does a dog get boobs/hygromas? All we knew is that they were “something wolfhounds got when they were young and that eventually went away”. We had only seen one dog with a hygroma before the Big Guy walked in with two of them. We have since learned that hygromas are essentially the result of repeat trauma. The swelling protects a joint that has been injured. The trouble is that if that injured joint is never protected from pressure or further injury, it won’t heal. This makes sense if you have a giant dog that has a long way to go to lie down. Those front elbows will bear the full weight when he lies down or flings himself down, as puppies do. Also, giant breeds can be very clumsy and fall down (another thing we did not know). As giant breeds gain their height, they end up having “new” legs after each growth spurt. Sometimes, the front end will gain height during a growth spurt, but the back end does not until later on (or vice versa). In our case, the Big Guy’s rear end has been taller than has shoulders for awhile now (causing some unique balancing on his part when coming down the stairs…)! I know that if I had new legs every few weeks, I’d been a little off balance, too. Falling on an already injured joint certainly does not promote healing and can actually make a hygroma bigger-which we learned after the Big Guy wiped out on some wet grass…

For us, the Big Guy had all of the above going on and the added disadvantage of not having bed before he came to us. One can imagine how much greater the trauma to his joints from directly hitting the floor? tile? concrete? (or whatever surface he was kept on) without the cushioning of a bed. So, we did what we were told to do to help him-we gave him a bed and waited to see what would happen.