Health
Pembrokes have an average life expectancy of 11-12 years. Like people, every animal can be susceptible to certain physical problems as they get older. Pembroke owners must not indulge their dogs by feeding them too much, which can be a hard task to accomplish. Other health problems may include degenerative myelopathy, hip dysplasia, and Von Willebrand's disease if their parents suffered from the same problems. Other top genetic disorders are progressive retinal atrophy, retinal folds, persistent pupillary membranes, cataracts, cancer and autoimmune system problems, uterine inertia during whelping, and sterility in males. A responsible breeder will have tested the parents for hips, eyes and vWD, all of which can be verified by checking the parents on the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals (OFA) site at www.offa.org.
Many domestic Pembrokes are prone to obesity and gradual weight gain, and some have problems with chronic seizures.
Pembrokes descend from the line that is the northern spitz-type dog (examples include that of the Siberian Husky).
Read more about this topic: Pembroke Welsh Corgi
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“The community and family networks which helped sustain earlier generations have become scarcer for growing numbers of young parents. Those who lack links to these traditional sources of support are hard-pressed to find other resources, given the emphasis in our society on providing treatment services, rather than preventive services and support for health maintenance and well-being.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)
“O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The years when we are parenting teenagers are the high point, the crest when everything seems to be in bright colors and in ten-foot letters.”
—Jean Jacobs Speizer. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Collective, ch. 4 (1978)