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Posted by Deerhounds on February 03, 2003 at 00:31:00:

In Reply to: Switched foods, 1yr lab very gassy/somewhat loose stool posted by nopey23 on January 31, 2003 at 12:22:23:

If allergies are suspected, generally it's not enough to just switch foods. They have too many ingredients, so the process of figuring out which was the offending one can be incredibly time consuming.

I have a severely allergic dog I bought, and I took her to a specialist who put her on a true allergy elmination diet. In her case, she ate nothing but salmon (a novel protein, ie, something she'd never eaten before) and nothing else - no vitamins, nothing - for 90 days. Her symptoms did indeed go away after that.

We then started adding other foods, one at a time, a week apart. If she reacted to the food, we excluded it from the diet. If she didn't, we kept it in. The first thing we added was calcium, of course, to try to get the diet balanced with that most cruciual nutrient ASAP. We used chelated calcium and fortunately she tolerated it fine. I no longer recall the exact sequence of things we tried, but eventually we came up with a reasonably varies, balanced diet that she could handle.

People who feed commercial diets typically use this information to then try to find a commercial food that will fit this profile. In most cases it's a "prescription" diet such as IVD, as at least according to the DVM nutritionist I consulted, there are no regular commercial diets that match an extremely limited ingredient profile.

Since I feed all my dogs a homemade diet anyway, that doesn't matter to me.

Good luck!

Christie Keith
Caber Feidh Scottish Deerhounds
Holistic Husbandry since 1986
http://www.caberfeidh.com

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