At the tender age of 3 months, a Labrador retriever named Marley had a leg up on a long life as a couch potato.
Descended from a noted line of retrieving Labs, the pup was born with a kneecap dislocation, a disability that certainly would keep him from romping in the field.
“He’s a special little guy. We couldn’t let that happen,” said Stephanie MacLennan, who counts Marley among the 30 or so pups produced this season at Valhalla Kennels in Bennett.
So MacLennan did what she has always done when confronted with a doggie dilemma.
“We work with a couple of vets, but for serious things, we go straight to Alameda East,” she said.
Which is where we found Marley last week, happily splashing in a therapy pool on his way to a full recovery that will launch him toward his first pheasant hunt next fall.
“We cut ligaments on one side and tightened on the other to get him realigned,” said Dr. Robert Taylor, who operates the expansive Alameda East Veterinary Hospital. “We didn’t have to open the knee joint or cut bone. We got him early enough, and now he can fulfill his destiny.”
Thus Marley joins a long line of sporting dogs sent back to work during Taylor’s 35-year career. After growing up a bird hunter in west Texas, he maintains a profound interest in what he terms “dogs that work for a living” – hunters, search and rescue, police, military and service for the handicapped.
These are the athletes of the canine world, which also makes them susceptible to injury, often of a severe nature.
A dozen years ago, Taylor was featured in Sports Illustrated for a procedure in which he placed nine screws in the leg of a famous racing greyhound that returned to its winning ways. Over the years, Taylor has sent hundreds of greyhounds back to the track.
Taylor keeps a keen focus on hunting dogs, primarily Labs, an affinity mirrored both in the fact that he keeps four at home and that the breed is cursed with joint problems.
Taylor’s revolving research delves into matters as complex as animal genetics and the way bones develop.
“Since humans began domesticating the wolf 20,000 years ago, we’ve caused an extreme concentration of genes. Labs have a lot of knee problems, but greyhounds almost never have knee problems,” he said.
As he says this, Taylor wanders through a state-of-the-art, 35,000-square-foot complex at 9770 E. Alameda Ave. A day earlier, he was on a flight to Cody, Wyo., where he performed surgery on a hunting Lab. Now he’s back in the middle of a beehive swirl of a staff of 160 that includes six junior partners.
Quite literally, the hospital stands on the cutting edge of animal health, including an experiment involving the use of stem cells to promote ligament healing.
Taylor leads the way through a maze of equipment that includes a special scanner that measures bone density and body fat; a gate laboratory and force plate to determine degree of lameness; a doggie MRI machine; and a thicket of devices involved with recuperative therapy. Four surgical rooms are maintained in a sterile state, including purified air ventilation.
Among current projects is a study with the Iams Company to determine the caloric intake the average working dog requires to keep fit.
“Dogs today are like people in our society,” he said. “They’re plump for a lot of the same reasons – too much good food and not enough exercise.”
Taylor recalled a situation years ago when several dogs died amid a heat wave during opening weekend of the South Dakota pheasant season.
“One of the reasons was that these dogs weren’t in good shape and prone to heat exhaustion,” said Taylor, who recently supervised a therapy session that reduced the body fat of a Labrador retriever from 60 percent to 24.
The hospital receives injured animals 24 hours a day, a feature that brings particular comfort to Esther McCartney of Wellington, who, with her husband, Ken, runs a number of dogs in national field trials.
Several years ago, McCartney took a dog with a torn cruciate ligament to another veterinary center, only to be told surgery couldn’t be done for six weeks.
“I called Dr. Taylor and he asked me how soon I could be there,” she said. “I wouldn’t take a dog anyplace else for surgery.”
Taylor’s most profound procedure involved a dog badly mutilated in Turkey.
“People in the U.S. military got hold of it. Both its hind legs had been cut off,” he said. “We engineered new legs and inserted them into the stumps. The dog goes into hospitals to demonstrate to patients that there’s life after amputation, that you can have a rich, full life.”
In a far less dramatic circumstance, a little black Lab named Marley surely agrees with that.
Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
