Tanzi's itchy skin journey
My husband and I are lucky enough to have two doggies; Tanzi & Leo. You can read all about the fun we had with overcoming Leo’s separation anxiety in another blog but this time, I want to share with you the itchy skin journey we have been through with our girl, Tanzi.
At this stage we had started feeding Tanzi specific, skin sensitive diets; I was working at a vet clinic at this point so I had access to information regarding skin diets and veterinary knowledge of skin and ear issues. Food trials with dog biscuits are hard as most of the time we couldn’t see the effects (if any) the food had until 12 weeks down the track, which unfortunately meant trialling many very expensive diets, just to discover we were no better off than the last one. We made our way through every grain free, veterinary and prescription diet and we still weren’t at a place where Tanzi’s itch had been relieved. We found that with some diets, her skin was still itchy but her ears were much clearer, and vice versa but nothing really made her feel good all over.
The only thing that helped was steriods; prednisone to be exact. Those little pink tablets seemed to be the miracle cure. All itching stopped and everything seemed great. We initially had her on them for just spring and summer, but then, what we thought to be seasonal, environment allergies just never ended and the three monthly prednisone doses turned into all year around. It was after she had been on them for about a year that we began to notice her weight gain and her temperament changing slightly. Upon more research, we discovered that this magical little pink pill actually comes with major side effects, if given ongoing. The thing with the prednisone is that it suppresses EVERYTHING; the things you want to suppress (i.e. the itchy, scratchy) but also the systems that keep the body fighting the bad stuff (i.e. immune system & organs).
It was time to find another solution. So at this point we believed we had tried every diet so we looked into other pharmaceutical options. There was a brand new medication out, designed for dogs and cats with skin sensitivities. We tried it, it worked great. The thing with that though was that with Tanzi being around 27kg at that point, she was right in between doses for mg/kg so we were needing to give her two pills every morning and every night which sounds do-able, right? Until you learn that each tablet costs a little over $2….
With many more years of life ahead of her, to be entirely honest, we simply couldn’t sustain that.
While we were wallowing in our defeat, my husband shoulder tapped me and said “please can we give this raw feeding thing a go”. Most of you will think, ‘yeah, okay – no biggie at all’ but for me, who went through Vet Nursing school being taught raw feeding should never be dabbled in and that this taboo had a huge black cross next to it, this was a big step. Now, I don’t recommend googling raw feeding for dogs as it is very overwhelming!! After doing just this, I enlisted in the help of a friend who was also doing raw feeding for her two doggies. She was a huge help and we got started on our raw feeding journey for Tanzi and Leo just got to enjoy the ride.
To cut a long story short, we started by neutralising (good old smelly tripe!) and then started adding in different proteins to see which worked well (and which didn’t) for Tanzi. They both loooooooved it (we couldn’t feed one dog one thing and the other something different so Leo joined the raw feeding journey too) and we very quickly found their coats were immensely shinier and as we fine-tuned the proteins, there was no more itching and her hair started to grow back on her belly and groin!! Not to mention we knew within a week if a protein was agreeing or disagreeing with her, rather than the 12 weeks as we had previously experienced. We now feed her a sole raw-food diet and find she does best on a duck, heart & tripe diet. We are careful with the treats we give her but try and go as simple as possible, with only one protein source per treat.
2 Responses
We have 2 toy poddles that have allergies, biting their feet, scratches themselves and ear aches. We have tried different foods etc, medicines but nothing seems to work. We give them Jimbo beef and lamb raw meat but I have not tried tripe or duck before. Love to give it a try
Thanks for your post
Thanks for your post. We have one poodle who bites her feet and gets ear ache. We have tried different foods too but she mainly has Jimbo beef and lamb. Thanks for your suggestions