Our Child: Sagan

I thought I would do a post about Sagan, as several interesting things have happened in regards to him recently. 

First, oddly enough, Sagan’s picture has become the Facebook profile picture of a Vet’s office in Richmond, Midlothian Animal Clinic!  The picture was taken by my good friend Luci while her and Ricky were out here visiting. You may remember reading about our journey into the wilderness of theOlympic National Park. Luci does photography work for this Vet and submitted this picture of Sagan to them and now he is FAMOUS.... and he doesn’t even know!  Sagan never checks Facebook….

Sagan is the Posterchild for a Richmond, VA area Vet!

Second, we had a biopsy done on a re-occurring lesion that shows up on the roof of his mouth (towards the back of his throat). We had spoken to some Vets about it previously, and the consensus was that it was Eosinophilic Granuloma Complex, which they believe is caused by an allergic reaction, presumably to food. It is common in cats, but not too much with dogs. Apparently it can be common in Huskies, which is weird b/c the Craigslist post (where we got him from) mentioned he was part Husky, however we wrote that off, as he grew up to have no Husky-like traits. He has been on a special restricted diet for 1.5 years, since we first noticed it.

The lesion came back again, this time about the size of nickel, so we had a biopsy done. The results came back confirming the allergy hypothesis, showing it is Eosinophilic and Neutrophilic Stomatitis, aka… he probably has an allergy. It's NOT cancer…yeah!  So basically we may end up doing nothing, and see if it goes away naturally, or maybe switch his food again in an attempt to find a protein/grain that doesn’t affect him.

Third, a Vet technician mentioned that Sagan looks like a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. I had never heard of it, but I think she may be RIGHT! Upon reading up on it, I think that Sagan is part NSDTR and part Golden Retriever. 

Sagan is gold in color, whereas they are usually are more “red”, and he is slightly bigger/heavier, but other than that, he looks just like them, including the EXACT same white markings, fits the description, and has very similar mannerisms (based on the videos I have seen about them). 

A Google search for “NSDTR” will return some pictures that look very similar to Sagan. It is so cool have some idea what he is!

Here is a drawing I found of a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever that looks EXACTLY like sagan!