Better!

Riley's paw is better and he's finally almost done with the antibiotics.  The weather has cooled down a bit (only in the high 80s!) so that we may actually go to flyball again tonight.  The training school is in an converted warehouse and it's not air-conditioned, so it's rather awful in there when it's hot out, even at 7 pm.

Speaking of antibiotics, one of my friend's dogs had the runs for the past week or so, and it wouldn't stop.  As my poor pup had ongoing diarrhea (he had colitis) for almost a year, I figured out a four-prong approach that almost always gets rid of diarrhea in dogs (unless the dog has worms or a parasite or something).  I figured I'd share this in the hopes that it helps someone else out.

Doggie Diarrhea Solution

• cook ground turkey (frozen bullet packs) and mix it with cooked white rice.  Feed this for several days with no dog food
• add a teaspoon or two of canned pumpkin (check label - must be 100% pumpkin, not the pie filling) to each meal
• grind up a probiotic tablet and add half to the dog's meal.  You can use doggie probiotics but they are harder to find and are more expensive
• get slippery elm capsules and empty the contents of one capsule or more per meal into the dog's food.  Slippery elm bark coats the bowel and works in humans of all ages, including babies, and for cats and dogs as well.  It has very few side effects (one, actually, that I've read: inhibits vitamin absorption if taken incessantly over weeks) and helps in cases of nausea, acid reflux, colitis, Crohn's, IBS, and most other stomach complaints.  You can find it here on Amazon.  That's the brand I use.  You can read more about it here at Alternative Healthzine.

Rice binds, turkey is low in fat and grease, pumpkin is fiberous and absorbs moisture, slippery elm coats the GI tract, and the probiotic restores good gut health.

I eventually switched my dog and cats off kibble entirely, which helped out a lot, but occasionally when my dog eats, say, a dead mouse out in the field, this helps.  Your dog should be better within three or four days, if not by the next few meals.


If you're interested in this and would like to read more, I wrote a HubPage about it here:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Guide-to-Stopping-Dog-Diarrhea-in-Four-Highly-Effective-Steps

In the last few days, I made a whole set of new designs for my zazzle t-shirt shop.  Most of them included dog photos that I altered using the free program paint . net, mostly because it's free and easier for me to figure out than the professional programs that cost a bunch.  Here are some of the designs.