Health
The breed is generally healthy with an average life span of 11 to 12 years. Hip dysplasia, a genetic malformation of the hip joint, may be a concern but because of the breed's compact nature is not often seriously debilitating. Surveys conducted by the Orthopedic Foundation For Animals showed that 41.5% of Sussex Spaniels were affected by Hip Dysplasia, and the breed was ranked 9th worst affected out of 157 breeds.
Another common condition is otitis externa, which is common to a variety of spaniels, including the Cocker Spaniel as the long floppy ears trap moisture, making them prone to recurrent infections rather than dogs with more upright ears. This is the term for outer ear infections, which can be caused by a variety of reasons including mites, ear fungi and generally dirt and germs. Treatment is relatively simple and can range from prescribed antibiotics to over-the-counter ear cleaning liquids.
Whelping sometimes presents difficulties and require caesarean section for successful delivery of the puppies.
Read more about this topic: Sussex Spaniel
Famous quotes containing the word health:
“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 sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“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)