When you are a veterinarian living in a swirling haze of disease prevention and treatment, you often forget that most people don’t spend their spare time thinking about disease processes on a regular basis. They are even less likely to spend time comparing canine diseases to illness found in them or in people they know. Therefore, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when my friends, family and clients find it so fascinating and unbelievable when I tell them that dogs inherit and develop many of the same genetic diseases as people. In fact, dogs are well recognized in the scientific community as terrific models for particular diseases in people and have been thoroughly studied to gain information on many conditions. According to the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals (OMIA; http://omia.angis.org.au), as of this writing, there are 343 genetic mutations identified in dogs that are considered to be “potential models for human disease” and the list continues to grow rapidly since mapping of the full canine genome was completed in 2005. The mapped genome of a boxer named Tasha provided a much needed framework for genetic comparison studies ...