Wagger.co.uk

German researchers used high-tech infrared cameras to record the movements of dogs missing a fore limb or hind limb as they walked and ran on a treadmill. The tests revealed that the dogs used different coping methods, depending on which limb was missing.

Adjusting to a missing fore limb is more difficult for a dog than dealing with a missing hind limb, for example. Fore limb amputation requires the remaining limbs to undergo careful adaptation to coordinate with each other, a process called "gait compensation." In the case of a hind-limb amputation, the fore limbs continue to act as they normally would in a four-legged dog, so there is little or no compensation strategy.

The difference in compensation strategies may be due to the fact that a dog’s fore limbs carry more body weight than the hind limbs.

The research is slated to be presented Thursday at the Society for Experimental Biology’s annual meeting in Prague.

Update on World’s Ugliest Dog contest:

LOS ANGELES — Princess Abby is missing one eye and a lot of fur. She’s got rabbit ears, a camel’s back and a kangaroo hop. She has mismatched legs, an inverted floppy front foot and a twisted tail.

Add a pile of personality and some unusual dance moves and the 6-pound Chihuahua easily won the title of World’s Ugliest Dog at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma over the weekend. For those very same reasons, she also claimed the heart of owner Kathleen Francis.

"To other people she is ugly, and kids in the neighborhood in the beginning were kind of scared of her," said Francis, 67, who lives in Clearlake, about 110 miles north of San Francisco. "But I think she is beautiful through and through."

Well ,beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.