When the puppy is sick…

… then his human suffers with him. He can usually help himself with not too serious illnesses, so that he gets better quickly. But seeing your pet suffering and not knowing exactly what’s going on can be really unsettling.

When Mowgli recently suddenly quiet and withdrawn and with hanging head crept past his full bowl and curled up rather than enjoy his food, I didn’t think it was an emergency. Dogs aren’t always in the same mood either.

disaster alert

The next day, however, early in the morning, I was woken up by the loud noises caused by the movements of the bowels in his tummy. Then the catastrophe during the first walk: instead of putting down his heap as usual, he left a pool of blood! Alarm!

Was it poisoning? As a precaution, I gave him charcoal tablets… Some poison baits are also riddled with foreign objects that injure the intestines. Although I make sure that he doesn’t pick up anything from the ground, I can’t completely prevent it, because Mowgli can be very fast and, especially in the dark, you can’t always tell if he’s eating something or just sniffing harmlessly. He’s managed to chew and swallow clam shells on the beach. In this case, sauerkraut helped, which I stuffed into his mouth despite his protestations. Sauerkraut wraps up the foreign body, so to speak, and can thus reduce the damage or, in most cases, prevent it.

But sauerkraut was really out of the question now. The only option: vet! The sovereign calm of his vet did us both good. She reassured me: if it were a foreign body, Mowgli’s condition would be very different. She gave him an injection with an antibiotic and recommended tablets against gastrointestinal infections and a bland diet.

Luckily, Mowgli is a low-maintenance patient who doesn’t bitch when he needs pills. He doesn’t like them and will spit them out if he can, but he won’t bite my finger if I open his mouth and shove the pill far down his throat.

For almost a week he was given exclusively cooked bland food before he was visibly better and I was gradually able to mix his usual food with it.

Bland diet for dogs with stomach pain

• First of all, there is Moro’sche carrot soup :
  A pound of peeled carrots is boiled in a quart of water for one to one and a half hours and then mashed. The porridge is again filled up to one liter with water and a level teaspoon of salt is added. After the soup has cooled, you can serve it to the dog.
  It’s important that the carrots actually cook long enough to create oligosaccharides (small sugar molecules) in the carrots. Instead of nesting in the intestinal wall, the bacteria now attach themselves to the sugar molecules and can be excreted.
  Salt is also important to stabilize the electrolyte balance.
• Dead Boiled Rice:
  White rice is cooked until it becomes slimy and the individual grains have almost dissolved. A tablespoon of low-fat quark can be mixed into the cooled porridge.
• Mashed potatoes:
  The mashed potatoes are made from fresh potatoes, which are mashed after cooking, without the addition of milk (!).

As soon as Mowgli felt a little better, I also mixed V-Complete into his food, a supplementary feed with vitamins, minerals and trace elements specially developed for dogs.

healthy dog

Encouraging words of encouragement were particularly good for my sick little dog: “It’ll be fine!/ Everything’s fine!/ Tomorrow you’ll be back to normal!…” With such sentences I also calm and strengthen myself and thereby help the dog, who picks up my mood with his fine antennae. Fear and worry would further weaken and unsettle him.

After the worst was over, things continued to improve from day to day, which could be seen in the nature of his legacies. Unfortunately, there are always piles of other dogs on “his” dog toilet meadow, which their masters and mistresses have “forgotten” to dispose of. When your own dog puts a healthy heap next to it, instead of getting angry about the anti-personnel mines, you are almost inclined to say: “Happiness is like a dog poo – where there is one, there are always more.”