Elli's Been on This Forum!

[LyonsFamily]

I decided to look for info from Stella's first home rather than go to sleep. Who needs sleep anyway. I've been trying to get more info on the kennel Elli came from and actually found a post about her on here from a year ago. Just like Odin was on this forum before I had him, she was too!

Not sure if any of the older members remember this, but she was the diarrhea girl. I remember reading that post last year, but never commented. http://www.dutchshepherdforum.com/viewt ... lla#p22142

[johninny]

Stephanie, good research.
do you know how her intestinal health evolved from that post to her arrival with you? what the problem and/or the solution was? from our discussion of fish oil, i am assuming she was much better [?], though i know still sensitive.

[LyonsFamily]

Quite honestly, her problem was that she was never fully potty trained. Putting her in the basement with the door open just taught her that going outside to potty wasn't that special of a thing. She was also very stressed in her first home. She doesn't have separation anxiety at all here. I took her to a 2 day seminar and she was kenneled in another room in between runs and there wasn't any problems with barking, spinning, or pooping.

Her foster mom put her on a prescription diet and carefully monitored her bathroom breaks. With the regularity the prescription cans gave her, it was easy to just read her BM schedule and take her out when it was due. I don't think that completely potty trained her either as she never had to learn to hold it and go when the schedule was off. The prescription did make her solid, but she was pooping 4 times a day which is way too much for me.

She does have some sensitivity that can cause diarrhea, I blame the French mals in her pedigree. Every mal from the same lines I've met was a poop spinner. Putting her on a raw diet with a little more bone than usual has fixed that right up. I have canned pumpkin, metronydazole, and Tylan Powder in storage just in case we get a little soft, but it's been a while since there was a problem with diarrhea. I'm working on the potty training still. She has had 2-3 accidents in her crate since we got her, but I've taught her a command for potty now, and we have a routine for going outside. She likes to play while we're outside instead of doing what she's supposed to, so I have to do structured obedience, release her to potty, and then play like crazy when she's done.

I still can't get over the imagery of her outside of the church though. I had to wake my husband up last night to read that part to him and we all laughed for a while after.

[Sugars Mom]

Wow, its a small world...but I guess in the DS world, its smaller then usual, lol.

Glad to hear that crappy problem is being sorted out

[johninny]

Elli is a very lucky girl.
that thread about her as Stella was written before i joined, but i read it 2 months after written and thought to myself at the time that her troubles sounded like a tropical disease that does not show up on the broad-spectrum tests vets run - too rare to date, even in the urban areas to which it is mostly confined. the virulent persistence and the church imagery in particular suggested that.
a 30 day course of metronidazole would deal with the majority of these tropical bugs [ sometimes this in combo with another is necessary]. but these 'new' tropical bugs can be elusive, migrating to other parts of the body if not treated promptly and then becoming more difficult to treat, not less diagnose.

it sounds like the foster was great and that, naturally, you have things very much under control [ and Elli probably got a course of high-powered antibiotics somewhere along the line ], but i mention the above as something to consider just in case the current stability gives way and/or other subtle indicators emerge.

i think Stella's story was one of the most worrisome i have come across here. it is so good to know that Stella found a good new life as Elli with you and Odin.

[LyonsFamily]

Interesting thoughts about the antibiotics. A few months before I got her, her foster found a small infection in the skin of her back that spread all along the skin above the spine. I know she was antibotics for at least a month. I'm not sure if there were any times she was on it before that, but that would've been enough to cure most things along with the metronydazole.

I have a 20-30 page vet record file on everything she's gone through and what medication she's been on, but it's hard to read some of the doctor's notes and shorthand. One of the perks of having a Vet Tech foster her is that she was able to pull everything for me in case my vet needed it.

[Stacy_R]

Putting her on a raw diet with a little more bone than usual has fixed that right up.

This is one of the many reasons why I love the raw diet. You can tailor it to each dog's individual needs.

[johninny]

if i was right about the tropical bug [ personally not aware of anything else that would live up to the descriptions in 1st Stella thread ], then the antibiotic course probably did cure it, but cannot take that [ a cure ] for granted. these bugs migrate, hide, pop up, come back in a different way. hopefully/probably not the case with Elli. but even when cured, the gastrointestinal system seldom recovers 100% from such a traumatic experience, so lots of probiotics and exactly what you are doing necessary to make it as good as it is going to get.

[Raven]

Stephanie, I'm interested in your comment about Elli having been pooping four times a day being too much for you. Too much for Elli at the time you adopted her because of her past or...? I read it to mean that four poops a day is too much for any dog.

My take on elimination is (barring loose, hard, soft, bloody, infrequent stools) that: 1) a poor diet in a dog (grocery store kibble, for example) is likely to produce more stools; 2) exercise will produce bowel movements, regardless of food; 3) the more efficiently the system is working (based on quality of food intake), the larger the stool and easier to pass, but individuality dictates the frequency.

I am very interested in your comment for the welfare of my own dog(s). Elimination doesn't happen four times a day, but sometimes three, though usually two. With a good diet, I thought it was normal. (Kind of like with humans and other beasts, if all things are "good," it's normal for the particular individual.)

Hope I made my inquiry clear.

[LyonsFamily]

Stephanie, I'm interested in your comment about Elli having been pooping four times a day being too much for you. Too much for Elli at the time you adopted her because of her past or...? I read it to mean that four poops a day is too much for any dog.

I've never seen "good" poop coming out 4 times a day. If a dog is healthy and on a good diet and everything looks great, then maybe the metabolism or digestive track is normal for that dog or they only pass a little at a time. I wouldn't say that's normal for dogs as a whole and it would certainly be an alarm to make sure there weren't other signs indicating a problem. If everything was completely ok size, texture, the amount reflected what was ingested, and the dog wasn't in distress over the frequency, I'd chalk it up to the individual dog being "different". I would say there are more undiscovered problems that the poop should be telling owners compared to the number of dogs that are just naturally frequent pooping individuals. For the more frequent individuals, the amount coming out should still equal that of a 1 a day dog if added up over an equal period of time. If you know your dogs well and what you should be looking for, I wouldn't be too concerned about 2 a day, sometimes 3. In Elli's case it was usually 4 a day, but it could go up.

Working dogs might produce more because of the high amounts of food required to maintain body weight. The waste would go up at the same rate as the amount of food goes up.

My main concern is the amount coming out and what it indicates. In Elli's case, each of the 4 piles were very large. In this situation, that indicated to me that a whole lot of something wasn't getting digested.

Larger poops typically mean that there's a large amount of food passing through unused, especially if it's larger compared to another dog eating the same amount. That's why poor quality food creates more waste. The amount of waste should be in relation to the amount of food consumed. For Elli, she was expelling almost as much as was going in. She was only 40lbs coming in and Odin is around 72 and she was expelling 4X as much waste as him.

Whether it was a grain or something that dogs can't process, or an allergy or intolerance, clearly her body wasn't absorbing enough. The other concern was that these were immediate, I have to go poops, yet they weren't runny.

I feed raw most of the time. I have from time to time used kibble to add carb weight or travel with, but the majority of my dog's diet is raw. With the raw diet, I usually get 1 BMs a day, sometimes none at all, some days 2 if it was a heavier bone diet. Odin will skip some days, but he's never had any problems being solid. A raw fed dog will have smaller poops because everything is better digested as meat is in its truest form and there aren't any undigestable fillers.

[Raven]

For anyone interested, "The Bark" magazine (current issue) has an article on how to identify health conditions by the appearance of droppings.