Cruciate ligament damage in the knee joint is a reasonably frequent injury for the likes of athletes and footballers. What most people however don’t know, is that this kind of injury can also happen in dogs and is in fact a common cause of hind leg lameness in this species.

The proper functioning of a knee joint depends on the five ligaments that hold the femur and the tibia together at their bottom and top ends respectively. The ligaments for this joint all have to be very strong indeed to cop the stress loads they are routinely subjected to. Sometimes they just can’t take it, and then they tear or break.

The anterior cruciate ligament is the one that gets damaged most often because this is the one that carries the greatest stress load. It is a sudden, twisting, stopping action that generally does the damage – the sort of injury that can easily happen when a dog is rushing about with the throttle wide open while it wheels about and changes direction.

Without surgical repair, once the anterior cruciate is broken, the knee joint simply can’t work properly and it becomes progressively more and more seized up by arthritis if it is not fixed as soon as possible. There are various different ways that torn cruciates can be treated and these surgical repair techniques involve a lot of tissue trauma and they can also be rather expensive.

We have developed a new cruciate repair procedure here at WSVC that is giving us very good results and with considerably less expense to the dog owners. It involves threading the path of the (old) ruptured ligament with a new double strand monofilament nylon prosthesis. By anchoring the upper end of the prosthesis to the outside of the femoral condyle with a neat little stainless steel toggle and then securing the bottom with another very neat little stainless steel crimp, the job can be completed more quickly and with less trauma to the tissues.

We started out with this new technique by offering to do the first series of cruciate repairs for free. We easily found those “guinea pig” clients who trusted us enough to give it a try for them and the results were so good that this “toggle” technique is now the only way we do them here. Who knows, perhaps it will one day become one of the routinely accepted methods shown in every good veterinary surgical text book! – we will have to call it the Townsville toggle technique or something like that… Could be famous!