Please help us help our dog adjust to her new food. It's been over a month.

October 17, 2008 7:22 PM

My dog isn't adjusting to her new food, and it's been over a month. We know she has a sensitive stomach, but we had hoped that she'd be adjusted by now. Aside from food vigilance, what else can we do to help her?

We changed food for both our dogs about a month and a half ago and while one dog has adjusted just fine, the other vacillates between semi-okay poop and out-and-out diarrhea.

Raisin is a 2.5 year old Border Terrier. She has a sensitive stomach in general -- we have to be careful with giving her treats, as she will usually have some gastric distress. Out other dog, Willy, is a 4 year old terrier mix. The problem is that we've been changing foods for both dogs due to some allergy issues with Willy, who has a thin white coat and sensitive skin. Raisin did okay with the first switch but has not adjusted to the second switch. Here are the specifics:

When she came to us year ago, her breeder had been feeding her VeRUS Life Advantage dry food.

In spring of this year, we switched both dogs to Hill's Prescription Diet z/d Low Allergen dry food (not the Ultra Low, just the Low version). Raisin took a few weeks to adjust to it, but both she and Willy had good poop habits with it.

We have come to believe that Willy's issues are not a food allergy, and decided to switch the dogs to a "regular" food. After some research and a friend's recommendation that Blue Buffalo helped her dog with skin sensitivity, we chose Chicken & Brown Rice recipe dry food.

Unfortunately we didn't have enough of the z/d on hand to do the transition properly. We did what we could to transition with the few cups of z/d that we had, and we made the switch. After about a week, Willy was fine. (And in fact we do think that his coat has improved -- Blue Buffalo does seem to be a pretty good food, if Dog Food Analysis is to be believed.)

But it's been a month and Raisin just hasn't settled down. At first it was bad, as we expected. But then we'd see some improvement. And then the next day, back to bad. It's not uncontrollable-- she's not having accidents in the house -- but it's just what we call, for lack of a better term, "soft-serv."

We haven't taken her to the vet. Her energy is fine, she eats fine, and she drinks a lot of water. In fact, she seems to have gained some weight, her coat looks nice, and she seems to be doing pretty well. About once or twice a week she will wake us up in the middle of the night to go out with some urgency, but she can hold it for the minutes it takes us to get up and get dressed and take her out.

We're realizing that nature isn't taking its course here, and we're going to remove ALL treats and become hyper vigilant about what goes into her body. I know we should have done this from the start, but we kept thinking she was getting better, and what with the time lag between eating and the reaction, it was hard to tell whether it was THIS treat or THAT treat or ALL treats or the food itself... (And we're not talking bizarro treats here. Avoderm dog bicscuits, Blue Buffalo dog biscuits, and some Charlee treats for training are all we have in the house.) Anyway, I know that food vigilance is the obvious solution, and we're going to do that.

But it occurs to me that there might be some other options.

Should we consider adding something to her diet to help get her GI system sorted out? I've seen discussions here about using yogurt for this purpose. I reviewed the Blue Buffalo ingredients list and it looked to me like the last few items were beneficial bacteria; would yogurt help or hinder this?

Should we switch foods again? We know the z/d worked for both dogs. But I'm not sure z/d is the right solution for them, long-term. Would switching foods yet again do more harm than good? How would you choose a different food?

posted by woot to pets & animals (9 comments total)

You might want to talk to the vet or call the 800 number for the food - it could be that "soft-serve" is completely normal for some dogs on this food.

If she's had Charlee Bear and Avoderm and the others all along, they're probably not a problem. (Especially those Charlee Bear puffs.)

If the Avoderm treats are new, they may be too oily for her.

What I have to ask is, can you pick it up in a bag? If she's otherwise healthy and you can pick up after her, I'm thinking this is just the way her little belly handles the food.

If that's the case, and the other dog needs the food, maybe you could change feeding time to avoid going out at night.

Or, if you're feeding once a day, try twice.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 9:47 PM on October 17, 2008

There's a lot of different things you can try...but make sure you only try one at a time so you know what is working and what isn't.

Yogurt can be very beneficial to your dog's constitution. It needs to be a good yogurt that is not pasteurized and contains live cultures. A good pet store will sell Probiotics such as Solid Gold Dzymes or Ark Naturals Gentle Digest which accomplish the same thing.

You can mix a good fiber in with their food such as baked potato or canned pumpkin (not pie filling).

You need to consider the fact that perhaps your two dogs cannot be on the same food as their needs are different. Having all dogs in the household on the same food is convenient for you but not always in the best interest of the animals.

Blue is a decent food...but anecdotally many of my customers report the same experiences.

You might consider grain-free foods such as EVO, Orijen, or First Mate. Most dog allergies can be traced to grains, not proteins. From your detailed history it doesn't appear that you have tried completely grain-free foods yet.

Good luck, keep trying to fix this through diet, but if it takes a bad food to firm up the stools then you've traded a long-term bigger problem for the short-term fix of firm poops.
posted by vito90 at 11:07 PM on October 17, 2008

Take her to the vet. Waking you up in the middle of the night with urgency is a signal that the GI tract is not behaving the way it should. This may have nothing to do with food. Could be a bacteria like giardia or lepto, or could be something like a polyp. Chronic diarrhea needs to be treated by a vet to, at the very least, rule out the most common causes. Changing food time and again without getting some bloodwork done is missing the forest for the trees.
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 4:16 AM on October 18, 2008

Thank you so much for your thoughtful responses.

Lesser Shrew, her poop ranges from good to fair to not even worth trying to pick up at all. That's been the problem-- it varies so much. We feel like bad dog owners for living with this problem for so long, but hey, sometimes she's fine.

vito90, I've considered moving to a grain-free food, but I've also heard that high-protein foods can cause some difficulties for dogs. According to Dog Food Analysis, the VeRUS food has grains and beet pulp, and the z/d prescription food is rated very low for nutrition (sigh). The Blue Buffalo isn't totally grain-free but it certainly has less grain and more protein than what the dogs have had before. Could the switch to a richer food be causing some of Raisin's issues? Would moving to a yet higher-protein dog food exacerbate that?

ImproviseOrDie, thanks for the reminder about the vet. We're going to give it four days on vigilant mode and if we don't see some kind of stabilization we'll take her in.
posted by woot at 5:51 AM on October 18, 2008

The best food in the world is not guaranteed to agree with every dog. After a month, the problem is in all likelihood the food, not your dog. I do not agree with adding things to her diet to try and get her to accept this food, soft serve is not normal dog poop, either something in the food does not agree with her (in which case anything added to the food is just a band-aid and not actually addressing the issue that this is not the right food for her), or there is a secondary possibility that you are feeding too much (sometimes loose stool comes from overfeeding). It's not about "rich", it's about ingredients.
posted by biscotti at 7:57 AM on October 18, 2008

woot...switching to one of those grain-free foods may or may not fix the problem...biscotti is right that you never know how an individual dog will respond to a specific food, no matter how high quality it is. Finding the right food is a journey and can take some experimentation. Practically all of the high end foods are guaranteed, or you can get samples. But a food really needs to feed for a couple weeks to give you a good sense of whether or not it's the right one for the dog's specific digestion. I tell people not to overthink it. Feed a good high quality food with no glutens, no corn, wheat or soy, and all the meats identified by type (i.e. no "poultry", or "fish" in the ingredients, but "beef" or "venison" or "chicken"). If it doesn't work then try a different one, confident in the knowledge that even if the poops aren't as firm as you'd like you are feeding a nutritious complete diet.

When I mentioned adding pumpkin or baked potato to the diet for fiber, that is meant as a band-aid to get temporarily get through soft poops.
posted by vito90 at 9:35 AM on October 18, 2008

Our pup had giardia twice, which the vet said left him with a sensitive stomach. While figuring out exactly what he was sensitive to (wheat, in our case), we'd sprinkle some psylium powder on his food to firm things up a bit.
posted by dws at 9:07 PM on October 18, 2008

Epilogue: We've been restricting Raisin to only food, no treats, and her poops have firmed up a bit. (She will have usually one, and possible two, Charlee Bear treats -- about the size of a dime -- each day for training.) She hasn't gotten us up in the middle of the night for over a week now. I think this is probably the best we can expect for her on the Blue Buffalo.

Longer-term, we're going to try a different food. I am inclined to try Orijen, a totally grain-free food. We'll do the transition more gradually this time, I promise.

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with suggestions. I am very grateful.
posted by woot at 5:20 AM on October 25, 2008

Epilogue part deux: We switched to Orijen and the improvement began quickly. Raisin's poops are much, much better and it's clear her little system is very compatible with the food. I know anecdotal "this dog food is great" stories are only somewhat helpful, because dogs react so differently to foods, but for what it's worth, this dog food is great.

I'm happy that Raisin is clearly feeling so much better but I'm also a little sad that I let her suffer for so long. We try to be low-anxiety dog parents but it makes me feel bad that we put her through a good two months of distress. If only I had known.
posted by woot at 4:12 AM on November 18, 2008