Left to right are:
Snafu aka Prairie Fauna Situation Normal At Duality (13 months)
Mando aka Lighthouse This Is The Way Of Duality SH WDX (6 years)
Yolo aka Duality Memento Mori (22 months)
This last fall Snafu was just a wee baby and stayed home to grow up, but will be coming to hunt with us and learn about field trial stuff this year.
Mando and Yolo both had foxtails that have me worried about hunting pheasants in MN again. Yolo was behaving totally normally until he suddenly whined when he jumped or extended his right hip. Assuming he overdid it I rested him and gave him Carprofen. 12 hours later his abdomen was tight and he was more painful so I took him to the emergency vet. We did x-rays, bloodwork and urine and started antibiotics under the impression he had a really painful UTI. Under 24 hours later I was back because he was somehow more painful, so he was hospitalized with a constant infusion of medication for pain and a CT scan. His first CT showed he had an abscess in his iliopsoas muscle (a spinal support and hip flexor muscle) and left lung that required three CTs and 10 weeks of antibiotics to resolve, with a total around $18,000
Mando's was significantly more extensive. He had been acting totally normal, until he went outside for a last potty break before bed and when he came in he looked stressed and was panting. Initially I thought he was a just excited, but when I let him he felt warm. This was 2/8/26 around 930pm. I took his temp and he had a fever, so I brought him to the emergency vet. What happened next is what my nightmares are made of. His chest was more infection than lung on x-ray. They stabilized him overnight in oxygen, and the next morning he had a CT and went directly into a surgery where they cut straight down the center of his ribcage, opened him up, removed two lung lobes and some other tissue, flushed the chest and closed him back up. While in recovery, he stopped breathing and they had to re-intubate and breathe for him for over an hour before he started to breathe on his own. With complications, collapsed lungs, a second surgery three weeks later, antibiotic resistant infection, and all the other challenges he faced we were not out of the woods until the beginning of April with a bill over $85,000. There's a good chance hunting is not something his lungs will be capable of again.
My dogs all have insurance which is the only reason this was possible, but I am concerned about the potential that something happens that there isn't an amount of money that will fix it. After Mando's first surgery I was convinced he was not going to make it. How do you protect your dogs while hunting to minimize the risk of foxtails?