Cosequin and My Old Lab: A Farm Owner's Story

Duchess is nine now, a yellow Lab on a twenty-acre place outside Kalamazoo, and she is the reason I pay attention to how a dog gets up off a floor. For years she came out of the pole barn at a trot. Then, right around her seventh birthday, she started rocking forward twice before her back end came up off the concrete. Same dog, same floor, same cold morning. Just slower, and a good deal more careful about it.

I am not a vet. I repair small tractors and implements for neighbors out of a pole barn, and that is the whole of my medical training. But I have been around worn bearings long enough to hear a problem before it quits entirely, and this had that same feel. My wife noticed it too, on the three steps up to the back porch. So we put Duchess in the back seat of the crew cab and had our vet look at her. He took x-rays, showed me both hip sockets, and said it out loud: hip dysplasia, with early arthritis in both hips. She was seven. His first suggestion was Cosequin Maximum Strength, from Nutramax Laboratories.

The rest of his list mattered just as much. Keep her weight down. Keep her moving, short and often, not one long hard run. And give it time, because nothing about a joint changes overnight. I ordered the tablets that week on Amazon and I have bought them ever since. Nobody sent me a sample and nobody is paying me to write this. Our vet does not sell the stuff out of his office either.

Cosequin Maximum Strength comes from Nutramax Laboratories as a chewable tablet with glucosamine hydrochloride, sodium chondroitin sulfate, MSM and hyaluronic acid in it, which is a longer list than I can evaluate on my own and I will not pretend otherwise. What I can tell you is what I do. Every morning, the number of tablets the label lists for her weight, handed to her by the coffee maker. She takes them like a treat. The bottle lives on the kitchen counter next to the coffee can, because if it lives anywhere else I forget it.

The first change came at about six weeks, and it was small. She got up off the barn floor with less rocking. Not no rocking. Less. I had been watching that same get-up every morning for months, so I trust my own eyes on it. That was the whole of the change, and it was enough that I kept buying.

At about six weeks she got up off the barn floor with less rocking. Not no rocking. Less. I had been watching that same get-up every morning for months, so I trust my own eyes on it.

Two years on, the routine has grown around it. About a year ago our vet suggested a salmon oil, so she gets a pump of that on her evening kibble now, and her coat came up glossier inside a month. I am honest enough to say I cannot separate what the oil is doing for her joints from what the Cosequin is doing. Anyone who claims they can tell is guessing.

The bigger changes were not supplements. About fourteen months ago I bought her an orthopedic bed, thick foam with a washable cover, and put it in the living room next to the woodstove. She sleeps there every night now instead of on the hardwood. In the pole barn she still lies on an old folded moving blanket, because that is where I am working and that is where she wants to be, joints or no joints.

Last January, on an icy morning, she could not get her back legs up the three porch steps. That got a rear support sling, which hangs on a hook by the back door and comes out on the bad mornings. In March I added a folding ramp for the truck, after a couple of months of lifting sixty-four pounds into the back seat while my own back filed complaints. It took her about two weeks of short sessions with treats before she walked it on her own.

Here is the part I will not dress up. She is nine. She is slower than she was at seven, and there are cold mornings when the sling comes off the hook before she has even tried the steps. The tablets did not reverse anything. What they did, as near as I can tell from two years of watching one dog, is make the getting-up easier and keep her willing to follow me out to the barn.

Our vet sees her twice a year now, hands on both hips, and tells me to keep her lean. He also told me something I will pass along. If she ever yelps or refuses to put weight on a leg, that is a phone call, not a supplement question. A bad hip and a torn ligament can look like the same thing from across a barnyard, and they are not.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to get the diagnosis first. X-rays, from a vet, before you buy anything, because hip dysplasia, arthritis and a soft tissue injury all look like a slow dog from twenty feet away. I would tell you to take the extra weight off her, since every pound is load those hips carry all day. And I would tell you that the tablet is the cheapest and simplest part of the whole routine, which is exactly why it is the part I never skip. The bed, the sling and the ramp did more for her bad days. The tablet is the one thing that happens every single morning without fail.

And I would tell you not to take my story as your dog's story. One dog, one farm, one vet who knows her hips. Cosequin from Nutramax Laboratories is what he named first for a nine-year-old Labrador with dysplasia on both sides, and it is what she has taken ever since. Your dog might be a different shape, a different age, a different answer. Ask him.