With high-bred / high performance dogs you have to be ready for anything. The ultra-refinement of breeder's attempts to align the DNA loci as close to perfection as possible for optimum reproductive performance as well as that in the field can lead to some real nightmares.
My second Lab, a purebred black female whom I got at 7 weeks per "the norm", was fine up until the time she was 12-14 months old, at which time she started having epileptic-like seizures. We would be out training, retrieving dummies and working on hand signals, when she would suddenly go "off the grid" - shaking from side to side, unsteady on her feet, salivating excessively, then eventually flopping on the ground and shaking violently. She would slowly come out of these attacks confused and disoriented, staring at those around her, as she slowly struggled to recall who we were.
I took her to the vet who gave her phenobarbital as an adjunctive drug, that is, in the absence of any definitive diagnostic conclusion (she was not positively epidemic, etc.), would act as a screen or masking effect to whatever specific neurological disturbance she was experience. Basic testing battery had shown no classically distinct condition(s), so she was treated "idiopathically" as in affected by up to 75 distinctly different pathologic conditions, none of which could be positively singularly identified.
For the next 8 months or so I kept a log of when she had these onsets, what the physical conditions manifest were, and how long the duration of the episode lasted. I would report these findings to the vet every month; he continued to prescribe a phenobarbital compound throughout the periods of affectation.
At 2 yrs. of age we stopped the application of a phenobarbital compound as a "test period" of 3 months. At the end of that period she showed no more signs of periodic seisures or accompanying symptoms. They disappeared as suddenly as they had come.
It was a very strange and alarming experience.
"Cricket" lived until she was 12 years old and was a wonderful companion and a great retriever. She died on the way west to South Dakota on what was to be our last great venture together. I miss her severely to this very day.
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