Introduction: Animal prosthetics is a small but developing profession in today’s world of prosthetics in veterinary medicine. Because we want to assure the welfare of animals, we must think about how to qualitatively restore animals into their physical state of biomechanics. Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to determine how many cases of amputations and prosthetic care involving dogs have occurred between 2018 and 2019 in Slovenia and five other European countries and whether there should be more specialized prosthetics engineers. Methods: The theoretical part is supported by a review of the literature on the databases Google Scholar, ScienceDirect and PubMed. The survey questionnaires were made with the help of the website 1KA and sent by e-mail to select veterinary institutions. The data was analysed with the IBM SPSS 24 and Microsoft Office Excel 2016. Results: 67,4 % of the veterinary institutions do not know any specialists for animal prosthetics, but 83,7 % believe there should be an increase in the profession. The same percentage would want to cooperate with such a specialist. In the years 2018 and 2019, there were 325 amputations performed on dogs in the selected veterinary institutions; however, only 20 (6,2 %) dogs were fitted with a prosthetic limb. Discussion and conclusion: Based on results, we can conclude that there is a lack of specialists for animal prosthetics. The number of amputations performed on dogs is high, whereas the prosthetics is low. By changing this, we can conclude that the percentage of euthanasia of animals as a result of amputations would decrease, and the animals would regain physiological walking.
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