---

I know that I have e-mailed you before but I wanted to share some information with you regarding bulldogs. It might be something you want to post on this site for all bulldog owners.

We are the owners of a almost 3 year old bully named Thatcher. She had been diagnosed previously with a partially torn ligament in her right knee and according to one vet had developed arthritis in that knee. However, recently, she has been having a good deal of trouble with it where it had once only flared up in the cold, wet, etc. Just this week, we saw a rapid decrease in her ability to move around and eventually she collapsed. Fearing the worst, we immediately rushed her to our new vet who we chose after we felt our first vet was not being aggressive enough. Our new vet, Dr. Gleaton, has her vet degree from Georgia and has worked with a lot of their bulldogs through the years. They immediately gave her a shot of cortisone and a muscle relaxer. Poor thing- I don't know who was in more pain - Thatcher or us since we could barely watch her suffer. They referred us to a wonderful vet specialist who took some x-rays and pronounced that she had a fusion of 2 vertebrae in her neck and that she had ruptured a disc in the process.

She is now on Prednisone ( a steroid) and a muscle relaxer for the next 3 weeks. In the past 36 hours, she has made a good deal of progress and it looks like she will not have to have surgery after all which is very good news for us considering the complications that surgery would have entailed. The point of this email is that the vet specialist said that it is very common in bulldogs for there to be this "fusion" and that it is better to use harnesses on bulldogs to help prevent this problem.

Just wanted to let all bully owners know this, to help prevent our situation from being repeated!

Marisah Daniels