Introduction
Staphylococcus pseudintermedius (S. pseudintermedius) is a gram-positive and facultative anaerobic conditional pathogen and survives in the skin or mucosa of dogs as a common symbiotic bacterial (Bannoehr and Guardabassi, 2012). Due to the decline of the dog’s resistance, it can cause severe inflammation, dysfunctions, ulcer in some organs such as skin, external otitis, urinary tract, etc(Windahl et al., 2012; Somayaji et al, 2016). Before 2005, the classification ofS. pseudintermedius had been confused and any non-pigmented hemolytic coagulase positive staphylococci isolated from dogs was often referred to as S. intermedius (Sasaki et al., 2007). In 2005, it was finally defined as S. pseudintermedius by phenotypic characterization and molecular reclassification (Devriese et al., 2005). In the past decade, most cases caused by it occurred in companion dogs (Bannoehr and Guardabassi, 2012; Moodley et al., 2014), and a few in other animals (Iwata et al., 2018), even in human (Van Hoovels et al., 2006; Somayaji et al., 2016a), but few in raccoon dogs.
Raccoon dog is a wild canine animal, and is widely raised as a valuable fur animal all over the world (Ahola et al. 2007). About 20 million raccoon dogs are sold in every year and 29.9% of them are from (Li et al., 2018). Of course, some famous raccoon dog species such as Local Wusuli raccoon dogs and Red raccoons have been developed in this area and bring remarkable economic benefit to the local farmers(Sun et al., 2012; Ma et al., 2018b). However, with the expansion of breeding scale, diseases caused by pathogenic microbes have become an important potent risk for raccoon dog development and some new diseases accidently occurred (Shao et al., 2014; Feng et al., 2014; Xu et al., 2016; Yu et al, 2018; Nie et al., 2019). This study focuses a new outbreak disease caused by Staphylococcus pseudintermedius in raccoon dogs and can help for its diagnosis, treatment and prevention in clinics.