Diverse and distracted
Hellhounds made it through the night–I on the other hand kept jolting awake out of unpleasant dreams–but as soon as they heard me moving around there were small urgent noises followed by a bolt to the kitchen door as soon as I tottered downstairs to swing the crate door open . . . sigh.
But they are better. Darkness is doing his passing-for-normal trick and Chaos . . . well, I’ll spare you the distressing details. But they are better. There was, however, Serious Outrage expressed* about the Sensitive Gut Food . . . their body language was very much mine when I am presented with custard. That’s invalid food. I want steak.** So they didn’t have much lunch, and snarked around restlessly most of the afternoon instead of crashing out like good replete carnivores. If you’re hungry, I said to them, you have only yourselves to blame. Staaaaarving, they moaned. It was almost worth it*** just to see them expressing an interest in food, not one of their long suits usually. But chicken and rice for supper went down in haste. They eat late on Wednesdays because I go bell-ringing; I could barely get back in the door for the press of importunate (starving) hellhounds.
Now we want them to get through tonight and not make small urgent noises tomorrow morning.
R and B writes
Robin- I hesitate to suggest this as I am sure you have thought of this but is there a doggie equivalent of Bach Flower Essence like Rescue Remedy for those emergency moments?
Their first year they got Rescue Remedy before we went anywhere in the car. Well, anywhere longer than ten minutes to drive to a favourite country walk. I’m used to puppies coming home for the first time throwing up, I was not used to half-grown puppies who are in the car every day throwing up. And several years ago when I was trying to convince Holly not to die of the auto-immune haemolytic anaemia that had just killed Hazel I used a lot of Bach as well as a lot of homeopathy.
But the awful truth is I forgot about Rescue Remedy, these last few days. Which is particularly idiotic because they get Crab Apple every day, for fleas. (Or rather, for not fleas.) I tend to get into a Dumb Stoic thing–not that you’d recognise the stoic from recent blog entries–and kind of shut down. I’m capable of forgetting arnica when I’ve just [klutzim alert] dropped a cast iron skillet on my foot because it hurts so much. Duh. I even carry Rescue Remedy around in my knapsack in my little homeopathy bag. . . so, McKinley, what are you carrying it around for? Well, I remember better when it’s somebody else.
Or is plain organic yogurt to soothe the gut
Yogurt has never done a thing for them. Bar putting them off their food, which, since their standard attitude is that food is optional and ask them again tomorrow, I try to avoid situations and substances which provoke this response.
contraindicated? or rice and cheese for diarrhea ?
Cheese aggravates as often as it doesn’t, in my experience, and they don’t like cheese either. I tried the pill-wrapped-in-cheese scam once a long time ago when I was still young and naive and they laughed.
Diane in MN writes:
One of my dogs had a spell of colitis diarrhea for six or eight months–she had bloated, and after surgery the vets wanted her to eat a bland prescription diet of canned meat. She developed the diarrhea problem while she was eating this food. Eventually she stopped eating it–this was Daisy, my first Bad Eater–and I got tired of throwing it away, so I reverted to kibble and cooked chicken, and at that point the diarrhea stopped. My suspicion is that it had something to do with lack of fiber in the diet, but that’s just a suspicion.
Isn’t it diverticulitis that can’t have any fibre? Or Crohn’s disease?† You have to keep stomping around in the diagnostic dark till your groping hands find something you can take back out in daylight and examine.†† At first I thought it was just puppies, and sighthoundishness. And all the vets–well, all the ones I listen to–say that the most useful diagnosis they can offer is some form of ‘bacterial overgrowth’ that we can’t get on top of. And this current, unusually fierce and scary manifestation, is probably the result of their picking up ‘something going round’ that they are super-vulnerable to because they have inflamed guts anyway.
ChrisW:
You may have talked about this before, but have you had the hell hounds tested for food allergies? A friend of mine who is a vet said something in passing about running into a cat that was allergic to or extremely irritated by chicken of all things!
They’re already off beef, wheat, and pork. They don’t much like fish. (Which is the problem with the Sensitive Gut Food, which is fish-based. Fish and tapioca based. No wonder they think it’s invalid food. It is.) We’re running out of options. And despite their protestations to the contrary I don’t think they would thrive on air.
They haven’t been tested for food allergies yet, no. Which could explain the weakness in the system that let the bacterial overgrowth (if that’s what it is) take hold in the first place. After what’s been going on lately, I’m making a list. And formal allergy-testing is on it.
I have the opposite problem with my min pin. She will eat anything including a tube of zinc oxide (yes… all of the zinc oxide plus a bit of the plastic cap and some of the metal tube)and a large tassel off a carpet to name a few things. She’s very thoughtful and always vomits at the foot of the bed to let me know she’s not feeling well.
I panicked about the zinc oxide and rushed her to the emergency vet. There she tried to eat some unknown biological substance off the floor. The vet thought this was very funny. Sigh.
This reminds me of the time that Rowan ate slug pellets. This happened in London, and after hours–of course. It took us half an hour to find an emergency vet service–at home in Hampshire we’d've just rung our vets and been seen immediately by the person on duty–and another twenty minutes or so to get there. And we were in London because Peter had some important professional thingummy to go to–something like the Carnegie award ceremony, something big. So he dropped me at the vet’s–he was already late–and ran. And the vet ambled out, and then sauntered into his office with me trembling and snivelling in his wake and trying to explain that time is an issue, and he said thoughtfully, now, what can I give her to make her throw up? And then he just stood there, thinking about it . . . while Rowan, nothing daunted, went cruising for stuff I wouldn’t want her to get into, and Holly and Hazel plaited their leads around my legs.
He eventually gave her ipecac, she threw up, and she was fine.
Ebullient:
If you do a quick google for “dog colitis”, it does seem that there are a few different potential causes, allergies being one of them! (And allergies would be persistent the way a bacteria isn’t.. )
Yes. I have asked about this, but–so far–the vets have favoured the bacterial overgrowth scenario.
So I like the suggestion of the hypo-allergenic food, as a new approach.
I would like it too if they’d eat it. And even if it’s not an allergic problem, their guts at present are badly inflamed, and a nice super hypo allergenic food sounds like a good idea anyway. If they’d eat it.
I assume you’re already doing the good dog-mom thing and being extra thorough about cleaning up any messes (in case it is a bug..).
It’s a little tricky with the yellow squirts, so what I’m doing instead is the heavy bleach routine, and am beginning to wonder what I’m doing to the local ground water. But I did ask my vet what he used and he said Fairy liquid††† and bleach.
Mrs Redboots:
The parents’ dogs always get their pills in a tiny scrap of butter, occasionally bread/toast and butter – in fact, because one dog was on long-term homeopathic medication and had a dose every morning after breakfast (and possibly at bedtime, too), it became routine for the dogs to gather while the last piece of toast was being buttered, and for it to be shared out among them, with or without a tablet, depending on dog.
This puzzles me because you want to give homeopathic remedies in a clean mouth. You also don’t swallow them–you stick them under your tongue and let them dissolve, or, in the case of critters, you grind the pills between two spoons or in a piece of clean paper and tip the powder into their mouths to connect with the mucous membranes. Homeopathic pills are also sweet: you don’t need to disguise the flavour: a lot of critters will accept one if it’s offered as if it’s a treat. Not mine, of course. But they don’t struggle when I tip it in.
But you’re also falling into the common error of thinking of mine as dogs. Dogs eat. Hellhounds, because they can’t read, spend their insomniac hours thinking up new reasons not to eat and new ways of presenting this to the attendant human. I think the answer is to teach them to read and then keep them well provided with novels.
Reading Angel
On a different note, I love that you quote Yeats in your footnotes. You say they’re not scholarly, mere ramblings – psh!
My first reaction to this was, Yeats isn’t scholarly! He’s a poet! –And then I thought, Oh. But I’m an old English major. We can’t really help ourselves.
And now for the links I promised you:
from Maren:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHsb__t14iE
This is so cute and funny. Love the ears. And reminds me that us dog people feel we might be able to get the hang of an Oriental cat when your ordinary street moggie is waaaay beyond us.
from Black Bear ;
Sign Win
Alphabetizing Fail
LOL. This is definitely a tea-coming-out-of-your-nose site. May I also recommend, as further examples of good reasons to waste a lot of time:
http://failblog.org/2008/10/26/car-fail-3/
http://failblog.org/2008/10/26/restroom-fail/
As a dog person, I’m probably not allowed to find this one funny:
http://failblog.org/2008/10/28/packaging-fail-8/
But I do anyway. Snrksnrksnrk.
And this is just amazing. Oh dear! ***Literary envy.*** Surreal is hard. Not to mention political satire surreal.
Blue Rose posts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnsWQ4kNG-w
. . . And now I want to write a story about the poor lonely unloved camel who only wanted a friend, and all the other camels shunned it because that’s not how camels are, camels groan and spit and are uncooperative ‡ and don’t need friends and then this nice person came along and gave it a scratch wherever it is that camels like to be scratched and said hey, I have an idea, let’s learn to do stuff, let me tell you about flying changes. . . .
I already posted on the forum about this: that I started out wanting to say something lip-curly about that being the worst case of half-pass banana-neck I’ve ever seen–and Connie and I have done some pretty rubbery half passing–but I’m not sure that camel necks can not look like bananas or the plumbing under your sink, and those legs are really crossing. And the flying changes, again, I started off thinking oh please, any sensible animal will change legs when it changes direction–unless it’s been deliberately taught countercanter, or is really so spectacularly stiff in one direction it prefers to stay on the wrong lead–but no, this camel is going down the centre line and changing legs. And the bow at the end is darling. One has the impression that the camel is so busy being dazzled it–he? She?–is failing to notice its rider saying, Yo, Saralinda (or Oscar), listen up! Bow, you beggar! They love you! -Hurrah for the camel. Hurrah for whoever the person is who taught a camel to do this stuff! ‡‡
Susan from Athens:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/may/20/highereducation.art sandhumanities
and I’ve seen the artifact in question, and Jodi it was a knitted sock! You can recognise the stitches.
I’m so glad there’s an ancient precedent. Did the Romans invent pocket protectors too? I wanted ‘geek’ to be a Latin derivation, but I guess not: http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2004/08/whats-the-etymology-of-geek.html
Fiveforsilver
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE .
I got the second one–for reasons I will not elaborate on here, to let everyone else have an opportunity to fall on their faces unassisted–which then made me suspicious enough to catch the rest. Mind you, I wouldn’t've if you hadn’t warned me.
. . . and then if you want to go straight to the source: http://www.quirkology.com/UK/index.shtml
I completely blew The Prediction. Obviously I’m too dumb to follow simple directions.
And let’s finish with food. Well, sort of food:
B_twin_1 sent:
This is the world of cakes…… (oh and there is a car involved)
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=NwBE1l6QexU
This is adorable.
and how they did it!
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=rb3tlVlJhgY
. . . but I found this pretty maddening! It reminds me of all those idiotic documentaries that are mostly blither and shots of people running up steps to libraries and almost nothing at all about what you tuned in for! One of the scintillating questions on my mind is why didn’t the weight of all those cake layers squish the bottom ones???
* * *
* The flashing eye, the rigid tail, the look of utter disbelief
** Or chocolate
*** I said ALMOST
† I’ve just been having a rapid cruise about this and all the description of ‘treatment’ and ‘management’ is about drugs, and surgery. Yes, this was only a quick look, and I’m sure the info is out there, but it makes me nuts that the bias is so strong that you’re going to have to hunt for useful info about what you can do, beyond putting your body entirely in the hands of doctors. I know I have a bad attitude toward doctors but for pity’s sake at least include the person who has the problem in the discussion about what to do.
†† In the context of bowel disorders, this is probably not an ideal metaphor.
††† The standard, not to say totemic, washing-up liquid over here
‡ Actually I rode a very nice camel once. Maybe it was on drugs
‡‡ I am now braced for huffy remarks from camel supporters who will tell me that dressage camels are not rare, they are only not popular with clueless first world anglo capitalist book geeks.
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