I'm almost sure that you have been through at least one incident of dog diarrhea, but if you haven't, you can be sure that sooner or later you will.
Knowing before hands the steps to take when your dog has diarrhea will give you peace of mind when the time comes.
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In this article you'll learn the main causes, symptoms and treatments you can apply if your dog has diarrhea.
Causes
If a dog has diarrhea it could have been caused by different reasons:
- The most frequent event is called dietary indiscretion which occurs when a dog eats something it shouldn't be consuming. This could typically happen on holiday seasons when a lot of cooking goes on and dogs are exposed to ingestion of new foods which they haven't consumed before.
- Oftentimes the ingestion of leftovers causes an upset GI. Sometimes a dog's owner won't notice when it has been digging into the trash eating up all the leftovers. Other times dogs eat things they find around the yard, which provokes diarrhea.
- A sudden change in dogs' regular food, allergies to certain foods and poor quality dog foods could be other causes.
- Parasites like giardia can also cause intermittent diarrhea. This microscopic parasite causes a fluctuating wax and wane diarrhea that happens suddenly.
- Viral and bacterial infections in the digestive tract can also cause diarrhea, as well as certain medications.
- Another common reason is stress, which can bring an episode of sudden diarrhea in dogs and puppies.
Symptoms
- The clearest sign of diarrhea when your dog gets anxious at the front or back door is that there is urgency and often times they would pass lose watery stools. Although there are times when the dog will not urge you, you'll find some watery stool on the floor at some time during the day, which would typically indicate that they have diarrhea.
- A less obvious and sometimes confusing sign of diarrhea is when the dog seems to be straining. Sometimes it rely looks like constipation instead of diarrhea. Diarrhea upsets the normal rhythm of the muscles contraction in the dog's GI tract.
- Other symptoms are fever, lethargy, malaise or discomfort, loss of appetite and dehydration.
How to treat it?
Most healthy dogs experience that occasional episode of loose stool and just simply overcome it normally. In these cases, the issue was likely caused by something that it ate which it shouldn't or by a stressful situation.
However, any dog may become ill due to chronically diarrhea. Puppies, small dogs and seniors are at higher risk of dehydration after one round of diarrhea; so it's important that your pet has access to fresh and clean drinking water at all times, and you should also encourage them to drink water.
If the dog seems to be fine after a bout of diarrhea, just keep an eye on it, but if you notice sluggishness or fever or any changing behavior, then you should contact your veterinary.
If you see blood in your pet's stool, or it seems to be week or have other signs of weakening along with the diarrhea you should also contact your vet.
If it seems to be fine, but continue to have bouts of diarrhea, you should then make an appointment to have the vet check the causes.
When going to the vet, you should bring along a stool sample, even if it is watery. This will help the vet to correctly diagnose and identify the problem.
If your pet is an adult, is healthy and behaving normally, but has diarrhea, I recommend you not to feed it for 12 hours. During this time the dog should continue drinking water.
After 12 hours you can feed the dog with a bland fat - free diet, like ground turkey with 100 % pure pumpkin or fresh cooked pumpkin. You'll be cooking the turkey to remove all the grease or extra fat it may have.
You could also feed your pet with cooked sweet potatoes or even instant mashed potatoes as a replacement to pumpkins. I know you've heard about ground beef and rice before, but even lean ground beef contains a lot of fat which can exacerbate diarrhea. Also, even though rice is bland it is very fermentable, and you'd want to avoid having fermented rice in the dog's GI to avoid gasses.
Whenever a dog has diarrhea it will absorb pure pumpkin or sweet potatoes much better. Just mix the cook turkey and the pumpkin or sweet potatoes 50/50 and feed 2 - 3 small meals a day until their stool looks normal, which regularly occurs within 72 hours.
What To Do When You Dog Has Diarrhea?
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