Dingo's Breeds:

• Australian Shepherd

Dingo is an 11-year old, blue eyed, multicolored Australian Shepherd mix. We adopted Dingo at about 18 months of age from a local shelter in the metro Denver area who had rescued him from a kill shelter. He is extremely active and “crazy”, but also very loving and sweet. About 2 months after we brought him home, he aspirated in his pen while we were at work, and we ended up at the 24-hr emergency room. We subsequently discovered that he had seizures that we weren’t aware of, so our Vet started him on potassium bromide, hoping that he would grow out of them. Unfortunately, this did not happen; the seizures kept getting worse and more frequent. Since I had heard that cannabis helps human children with seizures, I asked my Vet if he knew anything about its use in dogs. He told me about Canna-pet, but said he didn’t have much info on how it worked. He thought it might be worth a try, though, so I started Dingo on the recommended dosage. This was approximately 2 years ago. His seizures either stopped completely or were much less severe, as he had just 2 minor episodes the entire first year. He then became quite lethargic, so I cut back to just one dose per day. He had no seizures for 6 months, and then had a major one. My Vet was ok with this as long as he was down to 2-3 per year, but I was devastated, because he had been doing so well. He had progressively worse seizures EVERY month for 3 months, so I decided to give him the full dose again. It has now been 2 months seizure free, but lethargy has set in again, so I am ordering the 30mg to give him once a day and the 60mg with the other meal rather than just cutting his dose in half this time. It will be great when cannabis is mainstream enough that there are routine blood tests that can be done to verify appropriate therapeutic levels. Thanks to Canna-pet he is not having severe seizures every month. We have worried that a bad one could change his personality or worse.