by Magda Omansky (NTCA Health Chair)

Most of us have been there – soiled dog beds, miserable pooches, that unmistakable acrid smell of dog vomit. Motion sickness is no fun for dogs or their care givers. Luckily, there are things we can do to avoid it.

Most puppies outgrow this unpleasant condition, but some unlucky ones remain affected all their lives. My Holly Bee is one of them. Her motion sickness is both severe and long-term. In dealing with Holly’s car sickness, I developed a number of successful strategies to minimize the condition and to help Holly to cope with it. I hope you find them helpful.

Understanding the mechanism behind motion sickness helped me most in addressing it. I learned that travel sickness is a result of stimulation of the vestibular apparatus located within the inner ear. The most common hypothesis for the cause of it is that it functions as a defense mechanism against poisons. There is a part of the brain, called area postrema, responsible for inducing vomiting when toxins are detected in the body. When a dog feels the motion without seeing the cause of it the brain jumps to a conclusion that the experience is a hallucination due to ingesting neurotoxins. In other words, air sickness occurs when the brain receives conflicting messages from the body affecting balance and equilibrium. Car sickness is more commonly seen in puppies and young dogs, just as it afflicts more children than adults. The ear structures used for balance are not fully developed in puppies and the brain cannot cope with the conflicting messages. Sometimes the problem may be an improperly formed middle ear, but most commonly it is a function of the brain overreacting to the stimulus of moving.

The severity of motion sickness varies from mild, when the dog is only yawning, whining and drooling to severe, which might involve explosive vomiting and diarrhea.

There are some common sense ways to help mitigate motion sickness:

1. Condition your terrier for positive experience. Consider spending some time in a parked car with your dog. Take her for really short and fun trips. Drive around the block and have a fantastic play session afterwards. Go to the car for a doggy massage session or just some one-on-one time, with lots of petting and attention. I spent many, many hours in the car with Holly without the car moving; just sitting in the driveway. I would either read or work on my laptop and Holly eventually learned to settle and not be anxious in the car.
2. Take your dog for a walk before any travel. This is especially important when you plan on travelling far. Make the time for a really long walk. A tired dog is a less anxious dog. The brain will be less reactive.
3. Do not give any food or drink before a car trip. My rule of thumb is 6 hours of no food and little or no water, before any longer trips. The idea is to send messages to the brain that the stomach is empty. There is no poison there to get rid of.
4. One exception to no eating rule is ginger. Give one ginger cookie to settle the stomach about 30 minutes before a trip. Ginger is a traditional remedy for nausea.  I found it especially helpful for puppies.  Puppies should not be kept hungry.
5. When driving, open windows for fresh air or at least lower them a bit.  It is important to lower them on both sides of the car. This helps balance the air pressure inside the car with the air pressure outside, which may help reduce your dog’s nausea and discomfort.
6. Locate the car seat or the crate in a place that allows a view of the far horizon. Again, the idea is to reconcile in the brain the visual stimuli with the feeling of motion. Conversely, if possible avoid the most bouncy parts of the vehicle and those closed off from seeing out the window, like the back of a van.
7. Avoid any food or any products with strong smells in the car, which may stimulate the brain further into thinking that the poison is still there and may agitate the motion sickness.
8. Drive as smooth as possible – avoiding sudden stops, fast turns, bumpy roads.  The less the little terrier body is thrown around the better.  After all, it is all about balance and equilibrium.
9. Make frequent stops to allow a feeling of the solid ground under the paws.

If the above methods are not enough you may want to consider medication.  Pharmacological intervention was my last resort but it worked very well for Holly. For her, none of the natural remedies worked (we tried about a dozen or so), nor any of the over-the counter motion sickness remedies for children that our vet suggested to try.  The good news is that Pfizer came out with Cerenia, the only medicine specifically formulated for canines.  Cerenia, along with other measures I shared above, allows Holly Bee to travel without vomiting.  It is a prescription drug specifically formulated for motion sickness in dogs without causing drowsiness. It is a relatively new medication, so I was hesitant to use it, but it proved incredibly effective for Holly and made our life much happier.

When the Norwich terrier breed was created, understandably motion sickness was not in the realm of even the most remote consideration. And so, unfortunately, car sickness seems to be relatively common in this breed, especially in puppyhood. I hope you will enjoy quality time with your Norwich in a parked car, and on a long walk, and then you set off on a smooth ride.

Originally appeared in the NTCA News · Spring 2010

With the NNTC joining CHIC database (Canine Health Information Center) we have really seen a great shift in the health testing awareness. CHIC is a joint venture between AKC and OFA that is a goldmine of information for breeders, for puppy buyers, and for the researchers.  As the database grows to include multiple generations of dogs and vertical pedigrees (siblings and half-siblings), breeders have a tool to evaluate genetic risks of their planned breedings.   The buyers have an objective source of information on both the breed statistics telling them what health issues to be prepared for in a given breed, and also on the chances of individual puppies to develop a particular inheritable disease. The probability that a puppy will develop an inherited disease is reduced when its ancestry has been tested normal. Finally, with aggregate information on multiple generations of dogs, CHIC database will also be useful for researchers, especially epidemiological studies.

But why test Norwich for eye problems, luxating patella and hip dysplasia when these are not our main health concerns? Let me explain why. Or better yet, let the facts do the talking.

The OFA and CHIC database is organized based on the birth year of the dogs.  Norwich terriers born between the years 2000 and 2002 and entered into OFA showed 15.7% of hip dysplasia among 121 dogs tested.  Just in the next couple of years that number dropped to 8.2%, based on 97 dogs tested. I know that many breeding decisions were influenced by what we could learn in OFA database. Speaking from personal experience, I was taking into consideration hip rating when one of my bitches tested “fair” and her sibling dysplastic in one hip (never bred). Was it the only consideration? Of course not, but I was glad to have OFA database as a useful tool in finding “excellent” rated stud that also suited my bitch phenotypically.  I know of a number of Norwich terrier breeders that intelligently bred away from the problem, armed with the knowledge that OFA database gave them.

Breeds like Akita, Belgian Malinois, , Bernese Mountain Dog, Brittany, English Setter, Komondor and many others dropped the rate of hip dysplasia by more than half in 20 years. That is an incredible trend, and all attributed to the knowledge that OFA provided. There were thousands of dogs tested in each of these breeds.  Akita showed 61% improvement from dogs born before 1980 as compared to dogs born in 2003-04.  Before you think that the numbers of tested dogs before 1980 were insignificant let me dispel that with the exact number: 2047 Akitas born before 1980 had been evaluated. In Golden Retrievers dysplasia dropped by 30% in 20 years based on over 50,000 (!) dogs evaluated. In Old English Sheepdogs bad hips are reduced by half, and excellent ones doubled based on roughly 6,000 evaluations. To stick to terriers, Kerry Blue doubled the number of excellent evaluations and reduced dysplasia by 67%.

Just the way the breeds with high numbers of tests performed improved their hip rating, those with dropping numbers of tests performed suffered negative consequences.  Bearded Collie is an example.  There were 9% of dysplastic Beardies based on almost 500 dogs born before 1980, then 20 years later dogs born after 2000 had less than 3% hip dysplasia.  Whether the breeders relaxed, and dropped their guard, or whatever else was their reason the numbers of dogs tested fell dramatically, and by 2003 the OFA registrations in Beardies dropped to almost half the previous numbers. The result was statistically astounding. Dysplastic numbers almost doubled in dogs born after 2003 compared to the dogs born before 2000!

Interestingly, the dogs now ranked as the worse are mostly medium and small sized breeds. The fact that hip dysplasia in smaller dogs is less debilitating is a two-edge sword.  The breeders of small dogs tend to be more nonchalant about hip dysplasia and these are the breeds with the trend upward in numbers of dysplastic hip evaluations. 50% of Bassett Hounds in the OFA database are dysplastic, and that breed is experiencing much more debilitating degree of the disease than just a few years ago.  Predictably, there were hardly any tests done on Basset Hounds before 1980. The breed that is currently ranking as the worse among AKC dogs is Bulldog (English) with 74% dysplasia based on 443 evaluations. Our sister breed Norfolk shows 33% of hip dysplasia, roughly one in three dogs!  To those who say that hip dysplasia in a small dog is not that bad, don’t bank on it!

If you go to the OFA database to view the breed statistics you will see that Norwich are rated with 13.1% abnormal results.  But, as I already mentioned, this is an aggregate number of all evaluations ever done.  Our most recent few years show the downward trend that now stands at 8.2% from 15.7% when the numbers of evaluations started to be significant. The 13.1% is a historical average, not the current number. We can be truly proud! A dog that is pain free and has full mobility is a happy dog.

When we test our dogs we might be thinking of our own breeding programs but that is much less important than the influence our aggregate testing does for the breed. Health testing is more than a pedigree mapping tool. It is an ethical obligation we have to the breed.

As we are working fervently to avail tests for the more pressing health problems for our breed let us not forget to use the tools we do have. We hope to have a genetic test for epilepsy one day, and we are working right now on a screening protocol for Upper Airway Syndrome.  Meanwhile, let us not fall victim to false logic that screening for hip dysplasia, luxating patella and inheritable eye diseases is not important.  When I hear people say that screening for hips or eyes will not help their dog with a breathing problem I ask them if they tell their doctor that screening for breast cancer will not help them with their heart problem.  Are you going to advise a friend to stop going for mammograms because they won’t help her heart?

I am very happy to know that the majority of Norwich terrier breeders who are club members understand the value of health screening. My hat is off to you!

Magda Omansky (NTCA Health Chair)

NT health test statistics at a glance: Hips- 413 dogs evaluated (13.1% abnormal results).  Cardiac – 92 dogs evaluated (0% abnormal). Patellae- 222 Norwich in the database (4.5% abnormal). Eyes- 347 dogs evaluated (2% abnormal). 29 dogs tested for other conditions (no statistics).

• Norwich Upper Airway Syndrome: A Multi-Pronged Issue
• Anatomy of Upper Airway Syndrome

Donna Housley, a postdoctoral research associate with Dr. Patrick Venta, a geneticist at Michigan State University, has found the key. After the publication of the dog genome sequence in 2005, Dr. Housley was casting about for a project when she came across a shelved study in Dr. Venta’s lab. It had to do with the genetic factors governing hair length in dogs. She was intrigued.

“Many of the hair cycle genes have been identified and studied, just not in dogs.” And that’s how she made an important discovery. In examining the sequences, she found that the gene FGF5 (Fibroblast Growth Factor 5) is responsible for whether a dog has a long (rough or fluffy) coat or a short, smooth coat. “Elimination of FGF5 was known to cause long hair in mice (angoras), so it was a perfect candidate to test for its association with long hair in dogs.” It is a recessive allele, an ancient mutation “that’s probably been around for hundreds of years.” It appears in a number of breeds including Dachshunds, German Shepherds and most notably in Corgis, where her conclusive research was centered.

Last year Dr. Housley expanded the study to include both Norwich and Norfolk and has found the same genetic marker. “All the fluffs and none of the normals had two copies of the longhair mutation (or allele). Although a small number of dogs were genotyped, the results are statistically significant and consistent with the association of this allele with fluffy terriers.” Since Corgis have the same marker, this means that a test is now in place to determine if your Norwich or Norfolk is a carrier.

It’s a convenient non-invasive cheek swab test, sent by regular mail to the lab. And it can be conducted at any age. Along with other genetic testing labs, DDC Veterinary offers the test. According to the DDC website, the “DNA Fluffy Test,” yields a diagnosis of 3 possible genotypes:

1. N/N Clear (those having 2 copies of the normal short-hair allele (N)
2. N/F Carrier (those having 1 copy of the normal allele (N) and 1 copy of the long-hair mutation (F)
3. F/F Affected “Fluffy” (those having 2 copies of the long-hair mutation)

“Fluffy is an autosomal recessive trait; therefore dogs that are carriers of the long hair mutation will appear to be normal but will likely pass on the … “fluffy” mutation 50% of the time.” Autosomal recessive means that two copies of an abnormal gene must be present in order for the trait (or disease) to develop. Genes come in pairs. Recessive inheritance means BOTH genes in a pair must carry the mutation in order for it to appear. Carriers have just one of the defective genes which they can pass to their offspring.

Now that breeders have a conclusive test for this trait, we can make informed decisions about future matings. However, is it really in the interest of the gene pool to only breed clear to clear? An otherwise terrific dog may be a carrier. This is not an inherited disease, but rather a charming anomaly. So I would caution breeders to test breeding stock, find out if there is a problem and make wise decisions accordingly. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater however.

NB: Dr.Housley is looking to expand her data base to other breeds. Contact her at housleyd@cvm.msu.edu

— Leandra Little, AKC Gazette Breed Columnist

© AKC Gazette, November 2007 · Norwich & Norfolk Terrier Breed Column · Reprinted with permission.

Mazie is 11 years old; Razzi nearly 7.  Dr. Schultz wanted full blood panels done on the older girls pre-op.  Superchem/CBC profiles/heartworm-lyme-erlichia totaled $334.42.  The girls were each in turn, lightly anesthetized and then examined with a laryngoscope.  Dr. Schultz was kind enough to let me stay in the OR as an observer.   So I was able to see quite vividly the degree each had been affected via his state-of-the-art video-otoscope. 

The procedure is straightforward.  Dr. Schultz first “challenges”  the saccules, lightly touches them in a gag reflex test, and if they appear and expand he can tell the degree to which his patient is affected.  Keri had small tissue filled saccules.  After administering additional anesthesia (sevoflourane), Dr. Schultz was able to excise those in under 4 minutes.  Razzi’s were much larger and fluid filled.  They were still fairly dense but they completely occluded her vocal folds.  Dr. Schultz was able to remove the laryngeal saccule tissue with his laser in under 7 minutes.

Mazie, however had huge saccules as well as a very mild elongated soft palate.  I stood in the OR in shock, seeing the visual proof of the burden under which she has been laboring for most of her life.  Within a quarter of an hour, Dr. Schultz’s laser had vaporized the tissue. 

The total cost to me was $1403.17.  The benefit to Mazie/Razzi/Keri — priceless.  Afterwards, they were all placed on antibiotics to ward off infection.  Since there is a risk of swelling, steroids are a post-op must as well.  Recovery is short.  Their barks were all affected however-somewhat akin to laryngitis, but their voices returned within a few weeks. If I had to do it again, I probably would not have done Keri as she is totally asymptomatic.  Mazie is vastly improved.  She still snores but the struggle for breath is a memory.  Razzi had to return in September to have more tissue removed.  The saccules may have multiple layers.

Dr. Schultz categorically states that our breed universally has ELS.  “If you have your Norwich Terrier examined, plan on having the surgery too.”  Now it is up to us to recognize this widespread problem and take action through scoping, cooperation with the club, a push for grant funding from the CHF to sponsor research, selective breeding and informing practitioners.  

Sue Lawrence is chairing the NNTC Health and Genetics Sub-Committee for Research on Upper Airway Syndrome in the Norwich Terrier.  Having had her own terrible experience with ELS, she has stepped up to the plate to help our breeds fight this threat.  she hopes that we as breeders can work with the veterinary profession to get the word out.  “Some of these professionals might need to be informed of what is normal for our breed.” According to Sue, it is normal in Norwich to have a slightly longer soft palate than most other breeds of their size.  They also have more tissue in the upper airway and a slightly smaller trachea than other breeds.  The Committee has issued a call for pedigrees both of affected and clear NT’s.  To participate, please contact Sue at (248) 356-8250 or at bluwaterterriers@sbcglobal.net.

Twelve years ago, Fraya Katz took her little girl Ariel Pinkrose to vet after vet searching for the cause of Rosie’s breathing problem. “I got diagnoses of long soft palate(she doesn’t have one) allergies, sinus problems, paralyzed larynx—everything but the right diagnosis.”  She finally found a vet, Cheryl Mehlhaff Schunk, DVM, ACVS, who scoped, recognized ELS and operated.  Ariel Pinkrose is now 17 years old.

— Leandra Little, AKC Gazette Breed Columnist

© AKC Gazette, February 2007 · Norwich & Norfolk Terrier Breed Column · Reprinted with permission.