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Medical Scribblings - 17 March 2009

Samuel Pepys complained bitterly to his wife that her new lapdog had “pissed in his bed”. He was obliged to let her keep it because she loved it so much despite the fact that he had to sleep in a rather smelly bed. They were, in those days, accustomed to quite a lot of unpleasant odours about the house. It was highly fashionable to have your pet dog living with you literally, at this time – as you may recall Charles II would have several Spaniels sitting in bed with him as he conducted the business of the realm. (we really should reintroduce this practice to government )

This idea was a whole new departure as most families could only afford animals that worked for them. Your average dog was a sort of Heinz 47 variety who was expected to hunt rabbits, see off the neighbours, round up the sheep etc and only as a second thought was a friend and companion. How the world has changed, we now have hundreds of pure bred varieties to choose from and their main functions are to be petted, groomed and to be made to look beautiful in our eyes. They fulfil a much needed role in our life of allowing us to relax, soothing our minds and making us go out for a walk every day.

You may have noticed that there has been no Crufts on the TV this year. The reason is that the BBC has come to blows with the Kennel Club over a programme about the inbreeding of dogs to such a point that they have illnesses bred into them. If you are a gardener you will see packets of seeds that say F1 Hybrids. This means that the mother and father plants were different types and so the flowers or vegetables that you grow are very vigorous and resistant to attach by infections. The problem with modern dogs is that we breed them just to look attractive to us without regard to whether the animal can function properly. There is a tendency in all human activities to push things to the absolute limit. (I shudder at the problems being created by all those girls walking around in 6 inch heels.) The thing we tend to like in animals is to “humanise” them, that is, to make them behave and appear like children. Thus you will see dogs with round flat faces and big eyes rather like babies. They stimulate in us “caring behaviour” by coming up to us looking very pleased to see us after a busy day at work and standing there to be stroked.

A strange benefit of all this breeding has been that, as the DNA of dogs and humans is not that different, scientists are starting to try and work out from the dog structure where to look for clues as to similar illnesses in humans. There has been interest in some breeds that develop arthritis at a young age and an area that offers great promise is that of certain types of cancer. It has also been noticed that some breeds have what would appear to be mental abnormalities which could give us ideas as to why we also suffer from these afflictions.

I should not forget to mention that having pets seems to reduce the risk of allergies in children. It looks as though our immune system needs to be stimulated at an early age to stop it over-reacting to viruses etc later on.

John Schofield