Vision Screening for Young Working Dogs

[scott furbeck]

My wife, who is a DVM showed me a little blurb of an article in a trade journal (the article was actually referenced to a real journal) that was talking about vision screening of working dogs. It the study, they took a small number of young FT dogs and let them mark naturally (The marks were about 150 yards... nothing terrible), and then they installed contact lenses with 1.5 (need glasses) and 3.0 (you have terrible vision) diopters and let them run marks again.

The dogs (all labradors) were timed and judged by field trial judges. The handlers and judges did not know which treatment was applied to which dog. Differences in time and FT judge score were significant across all groups.

I just have my own dogs and have no idea how to screen for vision short of running long marks, I'm curious to know how professional trainers screen for visual acuity as marking by itself is more complex than that. Also, as our dogs age, how do we account for changes in their vision. Just like anything important, there are a ton of Genetic x Environmental influences here.

I thought this was a interesting topic... But not interesting enough to stop me from going Pheasant hunting tomorrow.

Scott

[FOM]

Don't know the answer to your question - but would love to read the article - is there a link available?

[scott furbeck]

My wife is at work... I'll try to find it by Sunday... My golden really needs to hunt (I do too)

[mitty]

And how did the contacts affect the marking?

The ACVO vet I saw told me that dogs are far sighted, and that FT dogs even more so. Mine has relatively small eye globes, which makes her even more far sighted.

[scott furbeck]

They took them out after the study each dog had a normal run and a 1.5 and 3.0 run. Each diopter change made things worse for the dogs (they were assuming they had good dogs and the contacts were there to make things worse, not better)

[sixpacklabs]

Don't know the answer to your question - but would love to read the article - is there a link available?

You can find the abstract here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22452502

If you want the full article, you'll need to buy it or have access to the e-journal through a subscribing library.

[HiRollerlabs]

I take my dogs in for annual vision screenings. One of my 10 year olds is getting more farsighted as he ages because his retina is getting flatter. Dr also noted that his eyes are aging, and told me he won't see as well in real bright light or in dim light. So, I hope for good draw numbers so we don't run first thing in the morning or late at night, and that the judges don't set up marks over 500 yds or set things up so he is looking into the sun!

[terrax]

Don't know the answer to your question - but would love to read the article - is there a link available?

I found the following link. You can download the article free.

http://www.researchgate.net/publicat...al_competition

[scott furbeck]

thanks for finding the link

smf