Labs in the lab to lengthen lives

A pair of chocolate Labradors, named Manny and Brutis, have donated their blood several times as the pets of Mooroopna Veterinary Practice owners Dal Myers and Ben Collie.

On the roster, but not on the payroll (unless you count treats as salary), the four- and five-year-old female and male bounding bundles of energy come to the office every day.

On a regular day, they play together and with another staff member’s puppy in the yard, bail up unsuspecting tradies, and smooch up to visiting News journalists and photographers for pats after pictures.

On a not-so-regular day, they might be called on to save a life.

Though it sounds shocking when Dal explains the dogs must take a large needle straight to the jugular (vein) for blood extraction into a bag, she said they took it all in their zooming strides.

Manny, the female, can sit happily still for the procedure; Brutis, however, wriggles a bit too much.

“Sedation calms them down and makes it a lot easier,” Dal said.

A vet approves a percentage of blood that can be taken safely from any one animal for a donation.

As you’d expect, the dogs are a little fatigued after the ordeal, but Dal, a trained veterinary nurse, said they bounced back pretty quickly with plenty of fluids and quality, nutritious foods.

For an interruption to their days of play that is quite minor, the results are major for a dog on its deathbed.

Take a little eight-week-old malnourished Staffy cross named Red, who received one of Manny’s donations, for example.

“She is now going really well,” Dal said of the thriving puppy.

“If Red didn’t have the transfusion, she would have died.”

While it’s handy for the clinic to have its own fit and healthy lifesavers on hand, dogs can only donate blood about once every six months.

Dal said she and Ben had been lucky during their four years as practice owners to have several willing members of the greyhound community on their donor register.

“Greyhounds have a good blood supply,” Dal said, explaining that any healthy dog could be volunteered to donate; they just need to be up-to-date with their immunisations and worming treatments, and must undergo a health check.

“We wouldn’t be compromising any unhealthy animals.”

It doesn’t cost the donors any money to donate; the owner of the unwell dog foots the bill for the procedure.

As far as receiving the blood goes, it’s not as simple as transferring the extracted fluid from one dog into another.

First, the recipient has a cortisone injection to minimise any possible reaction.

The practice’s vets, of which there are four among the 12 staff, put the patient on a drip, where blood and saline are calculated and pumped through a machine into the animal over time, while its heart rate, colour, temperature and respiratory rate are continuously monitored.

While Manny and Brutis’ roles in this discipline are quite serious, their largely undisciplined nature is so very unserious.

When they’re not saving lives, Manny pulls washing off the line, excavates rubbish bins to unearth well-rested scraps and chews diligently through poly pipe.

Ben says Brutis is more like an old man and doesn’t engage in such behaviour; however, he and Dal have had to fence off the fruit trees at their Mooroopna home after the pair of pooches showed their insatiable appetites for juicy peaches, stones and all.

Luckily, that pastime didn’t land them at the vets.

But equally luckily, they did land at the vets for other reasons.