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Homemade Dog Food: Food Allergies and Pancreatitis

March 15th, 2011

This is the third post in our series of Dog Food Dish Q&As with people who make their own pet food. KB and her dogs “K” and “R” are best known for their mountain biking and hiking adventures in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Thanks to motion-activated wildlife cameras, good hands-on photography, and wilderness sleuthing, their blog Romping and Rolling in the Rockies also features incredible wildlife images.

What’s most intriguing about this homemade pet food story is that in the case of K … it’s truly a life-and-death situation. From puppyhood, this now 7-year-old, purebred, chocolate lab has suffered terrible dog food allergies. Then, she developed pancreatitis after eating (and getting poisoned by) wild mushrooms.

A second pancreatitis emergency changed EVERYTHING about how this active, smart, sensitive dog will eat for the rest of her life.

K is also famous for only having three toes on one of her front feet. A a virulent bone infection in 2010 required amputation. She is doing great now.

KB and K live with another purebred lab, R, who is 3 years old now. (He eats kibble.)

"K," photo borrowed from Romping and Rolling in the Rockies (a life with dogs and wildlife blog)

QUESTION: Why and when did you switch to homemade dog food?
It was somewhere in her first year of life. As a puppy, K  had diarrhea that we just could not get rid of. It just went on, and on, and on, and on. And, we tried a whole lot of different kinds of foods, and very gradually put it together that she was having a lot of difficulty with digesting grains.

I found a couple of foods … back then there were not as many commercial options, good commercial options, as there are now. I found a couple of foods that were at least low grain, if not grain free, but it seemed as if she would start out OK on them but then get sick again.

So, basically I had this puppy who wasn’t gaining any weight like she was supposed to, and I was getting more and more frustrated with it. My vet had been saying quietly over many months, “You might try a homemade diet.” She would say it very quietly, sort of inserted it into my brain. And, I’d think, “That would be a lot of work. Let’s try to find another commercial food.”

We kept trying and trying, and she finally sat me down and said, “I’ve seen cases like this before. We don’t really know for sure what’s in every one of the commercial foods that you’ve tried. If you feed her a homemade diet, we will know exactly what she’s eating. We can manipulate it, and we can figure out what she can handle and what she can’t handle.” And, that was how I started.

QUESTION: Did you work with a veterinary nutritionist?
Not at that point. At that point, I worked with my vet, and we figured out a diet that worked K her based on my vet’s guidelines. My vet had us feeding certain supplements to make sure K got the right nutritional balance, and I don’t remember exactly what those supplements were now.

I believe bone meal powder was a big part of it because we needed to make sure she was getting enough calcium, and that’s something that’s supplemented in commercial dog foods.

So, K was doing great. We got her on this homemade food. She was just doing awesome, and then she had a big insult to her pancreas when she got mushroom poisoning. We thought it was a one-time thing. We thought she was all better after the poisoning was over, and she was out of the woods … until about two years ago, when we went on vacation, and my vet said, “You should be fine feeding a commercial food for a couple of weeks while you’re on vacation so that you don’t have to be hauling around all this homemade food with you.”

And, while K was on the commercial food, and we were away on vacation, I started to notice that her belly seemed really sore. In fact, I pressed on her belly once, and she bit me, and you know K.

[Readers, I actually know K personally. I can tell you, K would NEVER lash out at anyone, unless she was in pain.]

So, we got home, and she ended up in the hospital about a week later with a really bad case of pancreatitis.

QUESTION: How did the second bout with pancreatitis change things?
It was at that point that my vet said, “You know, this is getting out of my league. There is this board certified veterinary nutritionist at Angell Memorial hospital who does telephone consults. I’ll fax her all of K’s records, and you’ll have some phone consultations and figure out a diet for K.”

Essentially my vet suspected that over all those years between the mushroom poisoning and the next pancreatitis episode, K had actually had “smoldering pancreatitis” – they call it – so it had actually been there, but we just hadn’t been seeing the symptoms.

So, that’s when I went to the Angell Memorial vet, who formulated a diet that K has done really great on. She has been on that diet for about a year and a half now.

QUESTION: So what’s in this special homemade dog food K eats?
It’s three things:

1. The vast majority is yams.
2. And, then the next biggest ingredient is oatmeal.
3. Then she only gets a teeny bit of meat per day – 60 grams a day split over two meals.

QUESTION: What kind of protein do you feed?
I feed beef that’s raised by my next-door neighbor, so it’s grass-fed, not certified organic, but I see these cows out there all the time. I know they’re not being injected with hormones and all that kind of stuff. It’s very low-fat beef. Apparently grass-fed beef is similar to venison in fat levels.

QUESTION: You cook the homemade dog food, yes?
We cook it, yes. We start by preparing the beef. Even though the beef is very low fat, because of K’s pancreatitis, we have to prepare it in such a way that we burn off as much of the fat as we can and are left with as pure a protein as we can get.

We kind of roast it, and the fat falls down below this grill on the bottom. We lift the remaining beef out. We prepare big batches of beef that way and then freeze it. So we have all these little containers of beef in the freezer.

When we’re ready to make a batch of dog food, we pull out one of those frozen containers.

QUESTION: Are you a big home cook, or is this a big deal for you?
I’m actually not a cook at all. At all. [My husband] does all of the cooking. I hate cooking. It’s part of why when the vet would say, “You can do a homemade diet,” that I would say, “No, we’ve got to find another option.”

QUESTION: Describe your time commitment to making homemade dog food.
In terms of time, we split up the cooking of K’s food because I can no longer lift the pot. With 22 pounds of yams in it, it’s more than I’m allowed to lift.

[KB has had several spinal surgeries over the years to manage a degenerative condition.]

We do peel the yams because they are not organic. My husband is super fast with it. He does that part.

I spend maybe 45 minutes a week preparing the beef. The beef is my part, and he spends maybe 45 minutes a week preparing the food, like putting it all together.

We kind of mash it all up. We found that previously when we didn’t mash up the yams, and sometimes we wouldn’t cook them enough, and K would throw up entire chunks of yams, so we made the rule that we mash them and that way we know they are cooked well enough that she doesn’t throw them up.

QUESTION: How much do you spend on your homemade dog food ingredients?
We buy a whole cow once a year.

I don’t know what our steady-state is now, but we probably use a half a cow a year, and these are not full-sized cows. They are one year old. I think we spent about $3 a pound, so about $500 this year.

We just get the yams at the grocery store. We’ll ask them to go back and get us a case, a box, and when they go on sale, we go wild. As long as they are down in the basement, and there isn’t one bad one in the batch, they keep really well. We go through them to check for bad ones.

As for the oatmeal, we know we would save money if we went to [a grocery warehouse], but we just have this shopping reaction. Both of us do. We can’t deal. We look at each other like, “Please!” And, we run to the car.

So, we just buy the largest oatmeal containers they have at the regular grocery store.

QUESTION: Are they any mistakes you’d caution people about or any advice you’d give to others?
I think it would be incredibly stupid to try and formulate a diet on your own. I didn’t do that. However, I didn’t have any clue when I started what does a dog need. I mean, who knows? My vet knew what a normal dog needs. My regular vet didn’t even know what a dog like K needs, so I had to go higher up.

QUESTION:  You come from a scientific background, yes?
Yes, I do. Physiological sciences.

QUESTION: Are there any books you’d recommend?
No, I tried to find some, and they were all really “out there.” I’m a physiologist, and I read these books, and I believed that the authors didn’t have any idea what they were talking about. So, I put no faith in them.

There may be better books now. Since I consulted the nutritionist, I have paid absolutely no attention to what’s out there.

QUESTION: What kind of kibble does your other dog eat?
He eats Natural Balance Limited Ingredient. What we wanted to do was to choose a high-quality food for R that would not make K extremely sick if she happened to get some of it. So, in his case, we feed him I believe it’s venison and sweet potato kibble, and so it’s definitely more fat and protein than K can have on a regular basis, but if she gets a little bit of his kibble, it’s no big deal.

QUESTION: Did you ever figure out what K is allergic to?
No, we figured out that she cannot digest certain grains, and one of the ones she cannot digest is rice. It goes right through her undigested, which was very odd because every time she got diarrhea my vet would say, “Give her chicken and rice.” And, so when she was a puppy, we were actually perpetuating the situation. Apparently, it’s extremely rare.

QUESTION: How serious, how important, is it that you stick to this specific homemade dog food diet?
The nutritionist really laid down the law that K could die from this [pancreatitis], and I needed to follow her rules … all the vets were saying to me … That we were now at a point where I needed to consider this to be life or death.

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Tags: beef, dog allergies, dog food allergies, grain allergies, home-cooked dog food, homemade dog food, homemade pet food, low-fat dog food, low-protein dog food, medically necessary, oatmeal, pancreatitis, veterinary nutritionist, yams
Posted in Dog Food Basics, Dog Food Debates, Dog Food News, K9 Nutrition | 3 Comments »

Weird Symptoms: Pet Food Allergies

September 1st, 2010

After the dog food I had been feeding my two dogs scored an F on K9Cuisine.com’s Dog Food Rating Tool, I found another / new line of food from the same maker that scored an A+. As I mentioned in the post Dog Food Rating Tool – Explained, everything seemed terrific … until it wasn’t.

Dog Days of Summer: A Whole New Meaning

July was a rough month at my house with veterinary bills totaling more than all our other monthly bills combined. Ginko’s third knee surgery in 10 years cost us FOUR times the initial estimate.

He is mostly recovered now, after two major rounds of antibiotics to deal with the massive infection they found tunneling its way through his right knee.

Ginko was none to happy to wear the collar that kept him from licking his surgery leg, after last month's knee surgery.

But, in the process of healing, Ginko suddenly developed an unquenchable thirst, which of course led to lots of peeing and very little sleep for anyone at our house.

He would literally stand at the empty water bowl and CRY, after having just slurped down the entire thing.

Weird Symptoms: Pet Food Allergies

During one of his post-op appointments, where they drew blood samples and did some urinalysis (and found nothing of concern), our veterinarian concluded that the change in dog food was to blame.

How’d she know?

Oddly enough, she had recently switched her dogs to the exact same food, and they too had become “water mongers.”

Other Possible Causes

Now, with Ginko having just come through a tough 2+-hour surgery, and with the massive antibiotics he was taking, it was easy to think that perhaps those things had something to do with his sudden water issues.

Dog Food Switch: Take 2

But, just to be sure, we switched him from the salmon and sweet potato formula to the turkey and sweet potato formula.

My worried, skeptical husband really wanted to switch Ginko back to the old food … F grade or not, but I convinced him to that we’d just try another protein source in the A+ line instead.

He begrudgingly agreed, saying, “Let’s hope it isn’t the sweet potato that’s the problem.”

Problem Solved

After just one week, Ginko’s thirst issues vanished. He is completely normal again.

I’m not saying that Ginko is “allergic” to the salmon, but I believe there is some dog food intolerance or dog food sensitivity there. I cannot imagine that all that thirst and drinking and peeing doesn’t wear a dog down, so I’m glad we switched, and I’m glad he is doing better.

While we could have just returned what was left of the salmon food, I’ve continued to feed it to Lilly (my border collie, the canine heroine of our blog Champion of My Heart) … because she is doing great on the new food. I’ll just switch her over to the turkey when we run out of salmon.

This experience makes me VERY leery of moving them to a dog food rotation schedule … because, frankly, my budget can’t take many more expensive veterinary scares right now.

Trading Ills

Alas, the salmon-based food virtually made Ginko’s “gas” problem disappear, so now that he is back on the turkey (grain-free, gluten-free) formula … the gas has returned.

I’m also a bit stumped that we haven’t seen a great reduction in stool quantity from either dog.

Because Ginko was on strict house rest during his recovery, I supervised every trip to the dog pen for him to potty for several weeks, and I’ve got to say … what’s coming out the other end is NOT less than it was on the old food.

So, either the old food wasn’t all that bad, in terms of fillers, or there is a goodly amount of sweet potatoes, peas and such in the new food.

It’s been a long, long time since I fed so-called “grocery store” brands. Perhaps I just don’t remember stool quantities from the old days.

What Weird Symptoms?

So, beyond the typical symptoms veterinarians see in dogs with food allergies, what crazy things have you seen when a food didn’t agree with your pet?

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Tags: allergy symptoms, animal protein, dog, dog allergies, dog food, dog food allergies, Dog Food Dish, food sensitivity, hydrolysate, K9Cuisine.com, novel protein
Posted in Dog Allergies, K9 Nutrition | 14 Comments »

Are Gourmet Dog Food and Treats Hampering Dog Allergies?

June 30th, 2010

Last week, we talked about the usefulness of “novel” proteins in the diagnosis and management of dog food allergies. Today, I’m going to ask a potentially loaded question: Are gourmet dog food and treats hampering our dog allergy efforts?

I ask because once upon a time LAMB was considered a novel protein that veterinarians could use to test dogs with dog food sensitivities. If Fido ate a beef- or chicken-based dog food at home, then lamb (which he’d never eaten before) would be a good option.

Then, lamb ended up in more mainstream dog foods and dog treats, and it could no longer be used in that way.

I’m no ogre. I’m no naysayer. Personally, I LOVE buying my dogs fancy dog treats made from pumpkin, cranberry, blueberry, and other ooh-la-la ingredients. I like giving them some variety in their diet.

Whole oats here. Sweet potatoes there. A little rabbit nibble today. A dried duck treat tomorrow.

You know the drill because you do the same thing. Right?

So, I ask this question in part because I wonder if in all our attempts to improve our dogs’ lives we might be sensitizing them to more and more things.

And, dogs with allergies must first be SENSITIZED before an allergy develops. That’s how the process goes:

• Exposure
• Sensitize
• Immune Reaction

But, I also ask in the wake of a New York Times article (The Truth About Dog and Cat Food) published earlier this month that essentially panned premium foods as expensive gimmicks. (Personally, I think otherwise, but …)

Think about it. As we broaden our dog’s food horizons, we greatly shorten the list of truly novel proteins that can be used to diagnose and treat dog food allergies.

And, if whatever has caused allergies, in general, to increase significantly in the last 60 years (in both people and pets) continues, then might we someday face a situation where dogs with allergies have fewer and fewer viable food options.

What next? Turtle meat, rattlesnake meat, emu?

I’m not going to change my shopping or feeding habits, but I thought I should pause and ask a bigger question.

Flawed logic? Slippery slope paranoia? Think so? Let me know.

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Tags: dog food, dog food allergies, Dog Food Dish, dog treats, gourmet dog food, gourmet pet treats, K9Cuisine, lamb, novel proteins
Posted in Dog Allergies, Dog Food Debates, Dog Food News, K9 Nutrition | 9 Comments »

Dog Allergy Basics: Dog Food Allergies

June 23rd, 2010

Once upon a time, I felt terrible about my eldest dog needing surgery on both his knees at age 3. He just had another knee surgery earlier this month, after nearly 7 years relatively pain-free. That’s my orthopedic sob story.

Yet, I once spent a weekend in Palm Springs, California, with the top veterinary dermatologists and veterinary allergists from the around world. The things they shared about their work snapped me right out of it because I learned:

• How hard dog allergies are to diagnose
• How hard certain dog allergies can be to treat
• What role LIFE-LONG management plays in canine comfort

Suddenly, those surgeries, even with recovery periods stretching many months, didn’t seem so bad.

So, let me say this … If your pet suffers from any kind of allergy, you have my unequivocal sympathy. Really.

The Proteins Do It

It’s the proteins, kids. The proteins that usually lead to dog food sensitivity or dog food allergies in our canine pals. This includes proteins that come from plant sources and even things we think of as carbohydrates.

In very simple terms, it takes a BIG molecule to trigger a dog’s immune system to overreact. That’s all an allergy is really.  It’s a normally helpful body system that goes overboard.

And, proteins are big enough to get the Let’s-Make-the-Immune-System-Freakout job done.

Most Common Allergy-Causing Proteins

• Beef
• Dairy products, like milk
• Chicken
• Eggs
• Corn
• Wheat
• Soybean

Dog Food Allergy Symptoms

Remember, since these allergens get absorbed in digestion, symptoms include:

• Gas
• Bloating
• Diarrhea
• Vomiting
• Itchy paws, skin, ears

Some in the dog training world also believe that dog food allergies or sensitivities can lead to fear and aggression issues in certain dogs.

Food Elimination Trials

If veterinarians suspect a food allergy, they’ll likely recommend food elimination trials or a bigger food switch — lasting at least 8 weeks — that cuts out all of the most common dog food allergens.

Everyone in the family or in your dog circle needs to be on board with this. No sneaking Fido forbidden snacks. No cheating.

Often this means using a food with a “novel” protein. In other words, a protein your dog has never been exposed to before. Things like rabbit, duck, and kangaroo are used as novel proteins.

Lamb actually was once used as a novel protein until it made it’s way into mainstream dog foods.

You can make novel protein food at home, or you can buy it from places like K9Cuisine.com (this blog’s sponsor) or through veterinary channels.

There is another option, though. Veterinarians can prescribe diets that use “hydrolysate” proteins, which are essentially common sources of protein (like chicken), but the protein has been broken up into such tiny pieces that the dog’s body no longer sees it as an allergen.

Proving Feeding Trial Results

If a dog does NOT improve on the new strict diet, then doctors rule out food allergies.

If a dog does improve, then veterinarians will usually recommend “challenging” the patient with the previously fed diet to see if symptoms return.

Adding Foods Back In

Because it’s usually more than one protein causing the issue, it can be hard to figure out which ones might be OK.

BUT, once a dog is doing well on a new diet, you can carefully reintroduce certain kinds of food or treats in two- or three-week intervals to see how well the dog tolerates them.

You may find that your dog isn’t as stuck in food and treat choices as I’m sure it first feels when the dog food allergy diagnosis is first made.

What Worked For You?

Have you been through this dog food allergy process? What foods or treats ended up working well for your dog? We’d love to know.

Shout Out Any Cautions Too!

For example, Karen from the OPDogBlog posted a comment to Dog Allergy Basics: 3 Common Triggers that explained how a dog food formula change  threw her dog for a loop that’s taken months to unravel. Her advice? Check every label, every time.

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Tags: allergy symptoms, animal protein, dog, dog allergies, dog food, dog food allergies, Dog Food Dish, food sensitivity, hydrolysate, K9Cuisine.com, novel protein, plant protein
Posted in Dog Allergies, Dog Health, K9 Health, K9 Nutrition | 2 Comments »