Did you see that bit in the clip where Faith drinks out of her water bowl? She squats down a little on her hind legs, then arches her body so that she can get her tongue in the bowl. From this I surmise that she can squat enough to eliminate: many dogs, especially females, squat to urinate, though Faith won’t be able to acheive quite this posture.
That’s a generalization that’s pretty hard to back up. Case in point, my friend who just died at 85. When he was a boy an accident destroyed his pelvic socket. He was told he’d never walk again. Over a period of months, at first only when his family was out of the house, he got himself out of bed and fought to walk again. At first, he couldn’t even put full weight on the bad hip due to the excruciating pain. He forced himself through the pain over a period of months to increase the time he could stand, then to walk longer and longer. Later xrays and medical examination showed that he had ground a new hip socket. He ended up with one leg much shorter than the other, but he served on a ship’s engineering crew in the merchant marine during most of WWII and became an excellent golfer.
According to Faith’s owner in the video, she would not have learned to walk without the training program and support of the owner.
One of the cats who used to live with my mom had all four legs, but no bones in her back two (rendering them essentially useless). She learned to walk (on her own: She was already doing it when we found her as a stray) on her front two legs, with her butt balanced in the air. There was a video making the rounds a while back of funny cats; one of them was a black cat walking in exactly that way. I would think it was her, except I don’t recognize the background, and I don’t think we ever got her on tape. She was able to do everything our other cats could, including climbing trees and jumping from the second floor (this was the cats’ own idea, not ours). She ended up living long enough to vote for Bush or Kerry (unfortunately, she didn’t… Cats are a sorely underrepresented demographic in Ohio).
It is. It’s just us pansy humans who always have to learn how to handle new situations and cope mentally with the hand that we’ve been dealt. A dog that loses a leg is just as happy with three as it was with four and hops along with no bother. A human that loses a leg - therapy. Anguish. Silliness, I say!
Gilda Radner ends her book “It’s Always Something” with the story of her cousin’s dog whose two hind legs were chopped off in an accident. The dog was pregnant, and the vet said the puppies were fine, and sewed up the wounds. The dog learned to walk by moving her two front feet and moving her rear end up.
She gave birth to normal puppies, nursed and weaned them. And they all learned to walk like her.