Stressed with dog’s skin/food

[Blossominthesky2021]

Hi, I need some advice as am feeling very confused at the moment and not sure what I’m doing.

I have an 8 month cockapoo. He’s lovely bright little chap. Very sweet and clever. He’s been on a raw diet with me since 8 weeks. Although I also feed him a bit of kibble as treats / for training when out - mainly as I had two free bags from the breeder.

Since he arrived almost he used to itch a lot and sometimes whimper. Took him to the vets a few times, said all was fine and just that some dogs were very itchy.

Meanwhile, he went off the raw food he was on (Nutriment) so I swapped to another (Paleo Ridge/Natural instinct ) and although he doesn’t seem overjoyed about his food, he does eat it. I also noticed he stopped itching so much.

Then about two weeks ago, we had a bout of diarrhoea and there was blood in it. Went back to the vets, they said down to straining. And put him on bland diet of chicken and rice which I did. They were very disapproving of raw. Each time they told me to take him off it.

Ive put him on chicken and rice last week and he did love it. However in the last three days ive noticed his body under the fur is covered in little scabs, slightly crusty. I also found a lump on one side. Took him to the vets today and they said he might have an allergy. Have given me some tablets and a shampoo and basically said just to come back if it gets worse. They did take a sample of the lump which they think is unrelated to be sent off.

Im just wondering if any one can help. I’m wondering if the chicken I gave him last week contributed to this. Whether I should just ditch the raw altogether and give him Kibble.

Help please.

Allergies can be hard to sort out.

Lots of dogs are allergic to chicken.

One advantage of raw is that it is much easier to work out the food a dog may be allergic to than using kibble. You can stick to the same protein source and then gently add in other foods when you are sure there is no reaction.

Many vets do not recommend raw food so you do need to decide if this is the way you want to feed, do you research and be prepared for negativity from some vets.

Using kibble may make it harder to find the food if that is causing the issue. However if you have a highly allergic dog you may end up having to use a hypoallergenic or hydrolyzed dog food.

Thank you! What is hypoallergenic and hydrolysed dog food?

I have bought attu puppy kibble which 85% salmon and the rest appears to be berries and veg. He loves it and I’ve been giving him some.

I do also have a lot of raw left in the freezer.

I’m very confused about what to do. I feel very bad he has all these scabs.

Could be a grass allergy. Are his paws and underbelly raw and itchy.

We had awful problems with my first dog and allergies. (Chewing parts of her paws off of unsupervised.) We did blood tests with the vets. These can be unreliable we were told. But on cutting out chicken and beef from her diet she recovered. No itchy feet. No more ear infections.
I also feed raw. That way I know that if I feed her a turkey food then it’s JUST turkey and nothing she can react to.

Yes, I might try and cut out chicken and beef. Interestingly he’s not keen on beef stuff I give him.

I did wonder if he has a grass allergy. It’s hard to see if his skin is raw as he’s got so much fluff but you can feel these scabby little things underneath. They are on his chest near and just above his front legs, also on his legs and I felt some small ones on his head behind his ears too.

We have tried 2 vets to help with our dogs allergies. She gets itchy ears, paws and anal gland issues. Quite common in allergic dogs apparently.
We have ended up narrowing it down by a process of elimination to chicken, eggs, dairy and tripe. I think there is an environmental aspect too just for added fun.
She currently has a piriton twice a day but this will be reducing to 1 a day soon. She is on grain free salmon based kibble with wet food without any of the above. Harder than you would think!
We have seen a huge improvement until someone (not mentioning any names DH) gave her a dried treat that was actually tripe. We had a bad few days again but I think it confirms the allergy.
We use Stinky Stuff in her ears a few times a week which seems to help and a paw wash twice a month from the vets.
It's just about finding the culprit. Good luck.

My last Yorkie was allergic to pollen so used to spend around March to September taking a low dose of steroids as we found this was the only thing that sorted the itching.

My figs skin was hugely improved on James Wellbeloved, especially the fish variety. They specifically formulated it to avoid well known allergens and it was recommended by my friend who is a vet I trust.
When I dog sadly passed away (aged 16) I gave what was left to my parents for their cocker spaniel, without any prompting from me they both commented on how great it made her skin and coat, so I think the food played a big role in my dogs skin health

Yes. I’m trying to think what has set this off. He’s always been itchy but these scabs seem to have appeared very quickly. I’m sure they weren’t there a week ago. I know that last weekend I cooked him chicken and he had a lot of chicken over 3-4 days. Could that really have resulted in these scabs just a few days later?

It's amazing how quickly something she eats makes my dog react. I'd say we noticed the tripe had caused a reaction within 12/24 hours. Within 48 hours she was scratching her ears until she cried.
It must be bloody miserable for them.

BBHerbal do an intolerance test for 50 quid.

It's not allergies but intolerances. We tailored DDogs raw food to exclude everything on the results list and he's stopped scratching and his skin has healed.

I think reactions can be quite quick. The poi explosion in Ddog from tripe (hadn’t noticed I’d picked up the wrong tins) was pretty quick and this week DH bought the wrong tins and it had duck in which resulted in instant puking everywhere!
Generally speaking we always go with Millies Wolfheart 50% salmon the rest is just made up of veg. No grain, rice or potato.

Was she straining a lot when she pooed?
One advantage I find about raw is the smaller harder poos but I do notice when he has been having too much bone & is perhaps finding it more difficult one day to do a poo, so I then reduce his bone %.
If she'd been so constipated she was bleeding you would have noticed in her poos and her behaviour.
I suspect chicken protein allergy.

Our dog was like this, itchy for years on various food. Then we tried Tails as it is tailored to your dog and he's not been itchy since. Been on tails for about 3 years now. When you order you select any issues your dog has, eg upset stomach regularly, itchy skin etc and then they send out the dry biscuit with a measure specific to your dog. He still has an upset stomach on occasion but no more itching!

Do not bother with food intolerance/allergy testing. It is not accurate enough to be worth it.

The scabs you talk of sound exactly like the ones my dog had when continually exposed to a food ingredient he was intolerant of - it was what pushed me to stop faffing about with commercial dog foods that were meant to be hypoallergenic and even those that were hydrolysed and recommended by the dermatologist. They clearly were not suiting him.

He is scab free now and we did it like this....

1. I looked for a meat that was healthy, I could get easily enough and that he had never eaten before. Sadly that is horse as he had eaten almost every other type you can get. I could also find pure horse training treats so knew he could still have treats. I also looked for a carb he'd never eaten before and chose quinoa as it's easy to get, easy to cook and high in vits and minerals.

1. I cooked the mince and quinoa (50/50) and he only ate that for 6 weeks. That and horse treats. Literally nothing else. No oral medication, no scrabs from the table, nothing. Within 2 weeks the scabs were gone. By the end of 6 weeks, all the symptoms were gone: fur loss, runny poo, wind, itching, dry skin.

So I then knew I had a food he could eat - albeit one that was not nutrionally complete. But something he wasn't allergic to.

1. I looked at the ingredients of a hundred commercial foods to find one that had minimum ingredients, thus making it as quick as possible to test all the ingredients first before moving him onto it. I chose Skinners Turkey and Rice because it also had a salmon and a duck version. So if he ended up being fine with all the ingredients except turkey, it was easy to test another meat.

1. I added one ingredient at a time to his cooked food. e.g. he ate horse, quinoa and rice. Then he ate horse, quinoa, rice and oats. Then he ate horse, quinoa, rice, otas and peas.

1. We kept going, giving each ingredient at least 2 weeks to check he did not react. I kept a list up on the fridge and every time I saw him itch or scratch or he farted - I recorded it so that I could see if he got worse without it having to be as bad as the scabs.

1. In the end he reacted to turkey. So, we cut out turkey from the home cooked food and went back a step for a few weeks until his reactions calmed down again. Then tried salmon - which he was fine with. Having tested all the individual ingredients for Skinners Salmon and Rice we could then feed him that food and see what happened - no reaction. Hurrah! One complete food we could feed him.

1. We are now at the stage of testing other ingredients by added them as toppers to his kibble (e.g. minced beef to test beef). So that we can try and widen the range of things he can eat.

It's been a long slog and sounds like hard work but it's been worth it and a 1000% easier than watching him suffer and never knowing if we were making it worse every time we fed him.

Happy to answer more questions but conscious I have probably typed too much already and have a thousand typos as I have been typing too fast .

@SpringersLoveSofas the intolerance test made the world of difference. It told us which proteins and grains he struggled with and since cutting them out everything has stopped. The itching, the flecking, the sore skin

[quote TheCuttySharp]@SpringersLoveSofas the intolerance test made the world of difference. It told us which proteins and grains he struggled with and since cutting them out everything has stopped. The itching, the flecking, the sore skin[/quote]
I'm glad it helped. At one point we saw a top dermatologist and he would not entertain it. He would (and did) do blood tests for environmental allergies but not for food. Anything I then read up on allergies pretty much confirmed the same thing. I guess it's one of those things that you might get lucky with but for many people it's expensive and does not give them the answers.

A friend of mine just did two lots with two different companies and the results were so contradictory that she cannot use them to help her with her dog.

But I am genuinely glad they helped you and your dog. It's such a tricky thing to deal with - when the food you give them is making them sick