[Ollieal]

I have a 3 mo old male Havanese puppy. We got him at 8 was old. He was on Life’s Abundance food and stools were soft. Then changed him to Fromm puppy food same soft stool. Vet checked stool 3 times no parasites or giardia. Now on rice and boiled chicken breast and he is better. Need recommendation for dry kibble. Has anyone had this problem. He lives to eat.

 

[LWalks]

I have a 3 mo old male Havanese puppy. We got him at 8 was old. He was on Life’s Abundance food and stools were soft. Then changed him to Fromm puppy food same soft stool. Vet checked stool 3 times no parasites or giardia. Now on rice and boiled chicken breast and he is better. Need recommendation for dry kibble. Has anyone had this problem. He lives to eat.

We had this issue with our puppy when she was little (she’s now almost 10 months) and started adding a little canned (not sweetened or spiced) pumpkin into her food and it helped tremendously. We now have her on kibble (farmina) for breakfast and frozen cooked food (just food for dogs) for dinner, and interestingly don’t seem to need the pumpkin anymore. It will occasionally be a little soft if she has a lot of treats, and we’ll add the pumpkin back in, but mostly good now.

 

[EvaE1izabeth]

Soft stool can also be cyclical because if the stool isn’t hard enough to help properly empty the glands, it can contribute to soft stool again. But I think your vet would have noticed that. This is part of the reason our vet recommended a probiotic for Sundance. I did recently learn that dogs with food allergies can be more prone to “overactive” anal glands, and this is consistent with my experience with Sundance in retrospect. He needed his glands emptied occasionally as a puppy but once the food issues were resolved he didn’t need them emptied anymore. If the vet is confident it’s a food issue and you’ve already changed food, I’d consider allergy testing or whatever the vet recommends to determine the specific food involved. Our vet was going to start Sundance on an elimination diet but we decided to switch to one more food (I’d already purchased it and we picked it because it was close in ingredients to what the breeder fed). We got lucky and the issue resolved, but I still don’t know the culprit ingredient. If I need to change food in the future I wouldn’t dare do it without knowing specifically what food to avoid. Sundance does not like messes and he was just as miserable with soft poop as we were cleaning it up. He also did not do well on grain, and if there was a reason to choose a diet with grain I’d definitely want to know specifically which grains to avoid and which work for him.

Sundance did well on Fromm but his poop is a little bulkier on Stella and Chewy. I prefer this because I’m paranoid about the gland issue, even though my vet said it wasnt the kind of gland issue that would be an ongoing problem requiring manual emptying on a regular basis. The probiotic Sundance takes also seems to make his poop a bit bulkier and it seems better processed, for lack of a better word.

It still makes me laugh how normal it becomes to discuss dog poop in such great detail!

 

[Jbrasier]

What probiotic do you give Sundance?

 

[EvaE1izabeth]

I’m using Purina FortiFlora, which is what the vet recommended. I tried a couple of others and I really do think they helped Sundance but I noticed a subtle improvement when I switched back to FortiFlora. It’s a little more than I intended to spend, it was around $20/month, but the price fluctuates on Amazon and like everything else it seems to have gone up and was $30 this month. I can’t seem to get into the habit of picking it up from the vet (where it’s usually a little less but I have to plan ahead to pick it up during business hours in a location I don’t find myself in often). When I looked for something less expensive I found most with comparable strains and numbers were about the same price. Proviable DC was more the budget I had in mind and worked well for Sundance, I just noticed a difference in Sundance’s stool with FortiFlora that is kind of hard to explain. Proviable’s “RX version” seems to be the same price as FortiFlora.

 

[Jbrasier]

I’m using Purina FortiFlora, which is what the vet recommended. I tried a couple of others and I really do think they helped Sundance but I noticed a subtle improvement when I switched back to FortiFlora. It’s a little more than I intended to spend, it was around $20/month, but the price fluctuates on Amazon and like everything else it seems to have gone up and was $30 this month. I can’t seem to get into the habit of picking it up from the vet (where it’s usually a little less but I have to plan ahead to pick it up during business hours in a location I don’t find myself in often). When I looked for something less expensive I found most with comparable strains and numbers were about the same price. Proviable DC was more the budget I had in mind and worked well for Sundance, I just noticed a difference in Sundance’s stool with FortiFlora that is kind of hard to explain. Proviable’s “RX version” seems to be the same price as FortiFlora.

Thank you. I have had the same experience as Emmy’s vet put her on Fortiflora for sensitive tummy issues. None seem to work for her as well as that although always keepoing my eyes open to alternatives.