The Continuing Story

The breeder I got Oak from believes in a more natural way of raising a puppy(as do I). She required we just give him the minimum vaccinations, top quality food and he will not be neutered until he is 2 yrs old. He was on a high quality kibble when he came home, but we have fed our dogs BARF (Biologically Appropriate Raw Foods) for 7 years, so that is what Oak would be fed as well. So I tried changing his food, but his stools were not "perfect". Sometimes they were soft, then sometimes they were solid. They also weren't very regular. Most days he would go 3 times, morning, midday and right before bed, but sometimes he'd miss one or go more often. I thought maybe it was my attempt to change his food, so I stopped and fed him the kibble he had been eating. Then one saturday night about 5:30pm he started having a problem with diarrhea. Puppies are notorious for getting diarrhea easily. I think it is because no matter how hard we try to stop them from eating everything in sight, they always ingest something that upsets their little tummy. He would ask to go out every 15 min. and he went each time he would go poo(very liquidy poo). This went on until about 10 pm, when I decided it was time for a trip to the emergency clinic. He got weighed(20 lbs!), and checked out. He was eating, drinking and alert, so the vet was not too worried. She gave him a shot for his poor tummy and gave me some metronidazole pills to give him. I had to give him 1 every 12 hours starting at 2am. It was also decided he would be fed cooked chicken and rice until his tummy settled down( my hubby complained that Oak was getting better meals then him :) He continued to have to go out until 7:30 am the next morning, when finally we both got to go to sleep! Amazingly, he never had a single accident in the house all night! He's always go to the door and we'd go outside. He was such a good boy. I gave him the pills for the 3 days and his stools never got back to "perfect", so my vet decided we should try another stool sample(we had done one about 10 days earlier). Well, we found round worms in the stool. Finally, a solution to his problem. We gave him the deworming meds and holy crap, alot of worms came out over the next 2 days! I don't remember whether Phoenix had worms as a puppy, but it is highly likely. Puppies are notorious for getting worms, they can catch them very easily from the different things they pick up off the ground! When that happened, I decided to switch his food completely to a premade B.A.R.F. product called Healthy Paws and I'm so glad I did. Of course, we had to deworm the rest of our dogs(nothing showed up in their stools), but since Oak had worms, everyone else could have gotten them too. Puppies can be very stressful!