Winston

I found out on Tuesday that Winston the Great Dane had passed away. His owner came to the park to let a couple of othe Great Dane owners know that he had passed away from bloat on Sunday after being at the park Saturday evening. I wasn't there on Saturday, but Shelby and her owner were there and apparently had a conversation about bloat, and that she didn't know what it was. So Winston's owner wanted to stop by and let us know, and to also give a bit of a description of what happened and what the telltale signs are of bloat.

For those of you who don't know, bloat is similar to colic in horses, where the stomach gets blocked and distended and then twists to the point where the bloodflow to certain areas of the tissue is cut off causing those areas to rapidly deteriorate.

Great Danes are very suseptible to bloat due to the deep narrow chest cavity that is normally a a prerequisite for bloat. We had a bloat scare several months ago with Dasha. She appeared to be really uncomfortable, drooling profusely, and had dry-heaved a couple of times, but her stomach wasn't distended, which is one of the symptoms that we found on the internet somewhere. She finally laid down and fell asleep, and woke up the next morning feeling much better. We think she might have eaten a big piece of one of her rawhide bones that she loves so much and gave her a severe upset stomach. But after talking with Winston's owner, he said that his stomach wasn't all that swollen or distended. Yikes!!! I guess I'll have to keep that in mind in case Dasha has another bloat scare.

While reading about bloat on Wikipedia.org today, it mentioned that they've seen some correlation between bloat in dogs with so called "happy" personalities versus dogs with "fearful" personalities. Winston had been abused by his original owners when he was a puppy and was still dealing with it at 4 yrs of age, after being with his current owner for about 3 of those years. He had just started to feel comfortable at the park and was starting to appear to enjoy the interaction with the other dogs. It looks like this may have playing a role in his development of bloat.

His owner went into great detail while telling us all about it. It almost made me start crying. A little embarrassing, but what am I gonna do? I feel so bad for him.