It’s a long story but I’ll sum it up as best I can. If you want to read all of the details, click on the above tab Alaska Akitas after you read this abbreviated version. Ronin was purchased from Alaska Akitas but both of his parents (and the rest of this breeder’s dogs) came from Royalty Akitas in Lincoln, California. We purchased Ronin in March of 2016.
He arrived to us with bowed and enlarged joints in both front legs. Ronin got very sick at 14 weeks old, and was shortly thereafter diagnosed with Addison’s Disease. He recovered over time responding to the Addison’s treatment. The breeder at Alaska Akitas was concerned about our sick puppy and offered a replacement and/or to take our puppy back. We refused, having already fallen in love with Ronin. Soon after Ronin gets better from his “Addisonian” crisis, he then starts to have other symptoms and problems, i.e. a joint infection, various skin lesions; his front legs continue to look malformed. Ronin was not growing at a normal rate; he had rough teeth, aggression issues, fearfulness, his biggest problem was severe ataxia in his hind end. The breeder doubts the Addison’s diagnosis and no longer responds to updates or makes inquiries about our puppy’s health. The breeder does not notify the other littermates’ owners that a sibling had been diagnosed with a genetic disease. Ronin’s ataxia gets better over time and for a month or so our puppy is happy, able to play and seems to be headed in the right direction. He still is unable to jump, climb up on anything, and can’t go for walks.
He also responds aggressively when we try to help him and does not like to be touched anywhere except on his head. We assume he is always in some form of pain, but we have no way of knowing; pain pills don’t seem to make a difference one way or the other. In order to address growing aggression issues, neutering is scheduled, as well as x-rays and skin scrapes on his infected areas. Ronin’s neutering goes well; his x-rays reveal mild hip dysplasia, malformed leg, and skin tests reveal a number of different bacteria. Our puppy is put on 3 different antibiotics in order to get rid of the infections hopefully once and for all. A week after the procedure Ronin starts acting up again…has diarrhea, is acting depressed, lethargic, ataxia is back and increasingly his front leg is starting to bend at a 45 degree angle. One week later, our puppy is even worse and whining in pain and barely doing anything besides sleeping. He cannot get himself up, cannot sit, and needs assistance to walk. After a few days of this we made the difficult decision to put our puppy to sleep. He was 8 ½ months old; he had been sick for 6 months of his life. In the end, he had been diagnosed with two genetic diseases, and had many other problems that were not diagnosable as anything specific. We spent $10,000 on medical care for our puppy. After the breeder’s initial concern, he quickly became unresponsive and when confronted on Facebook, placed the blame on us. We have come to find out, this breeder does not do health testing on his dogs, he is uneducated about breeding, and has significant misrepresentations on his website. He uses his contractual clause to replace the puppy as justification to not perform health tests on his dogs. He also purchases his dogs from one of the most notorious Akita backyard breeders in CA—Royalty Akitas, who also does not tell the truth about his dogs. Once the breeder became aware of our puppy’s passing, he again blamed us and called us murderers!
