DISTBMFK& 66 



The preventive measures for the home kennels are avoidance of 

 contact between diseased dogs and your own. Before Introducing a 

 new tenant to your Icennels, place it in quarantine for three weeks. 

 When one or mora dogs are seized with distemper, isolate them from 

 the healthy ones. If one person has to attend to all, let the patients 

 bo visited last ; use washable overclothes, change the boots, and 

 disinfect the hands with Sanitas, Jeyea, or Izal on leaving the 

 diseased dogs. 



General Symptoms. — The symptoms in distemper present very con- 

 siderable variation, according to the particular local complications 

 which are developed ; they are also dependent on the severity of the 

 attack, and the rapidity with which the disease progresses. As a 

 rule, the first observable symptoms are great lassitude and dulness 

 shown in the eyes, in a disinclination to play or exercise, in a decided 

 preference for warmth, the dog creeping into the warmest comer or 

 crouching before the fire, and in the general languor that appears to 

 benumb the dog's energies like the iacubus of a nightmare ; so that 

 the hitherto lively dog, instead of jumping with delight at his 

 master's call, merely replies with a spiritless wag of the tail and a 

 dismal woe-begone look. Loss of appetite is an invariable symptom, 

 and feverishness succeeds, as shown by the hot, dry nose, accom- 

 panied by alternate fits of heat and shivering ; considerable thirst is 

 frequently present, the bowels are generally deranged — sometimes 

 relaxed, sometimes constipated — the urine is scanty and highly 

 coloured, the coat usually rough and staring, retching and vomiting 

 often occur, a thin, watery discharge from the nose and eyes sets in, 

 accompanied by a scarlet hue of the membranes, and the eyes appear 

 unusually sensitive to light. A short, dry husky cough and snift- 

 ing or sneezing occur, especially when the animal is brought into 

 the open air. The discharge from eyes and nose (sometimes the first 

 sign of the disease observed by the owner) gradually becomes more 

 purulent, sticking in the nostrils and glueing the eyelids together, 

 especially in the morning, causing the dog much annoyance in that 

 way, but still more by obstructing respiration, when his constant 

 efforts to clear the nostrils produce that peculiar noise which has 

 earned for the disease the popular name of "snifters." In many 

 cases the eye is seriously affected. A small white speck may be 

 observed, which gradually widens and deepens until an ulcer is 

 formed ; and although the eye may protrude, and the whole appear- 

 ance give the impression that the sight ia lost, yet as the disease sub- 

 sides the eye gradually returns to ii* natural condition. The symp- 

 toms are not in every case so clearly marked, and the disease may 

 have gone on for a few days, or a week, unnoticed, or it may have 

 been mistaken for a common cold. There is, however, one invariable 



