· By Mitch Felderhoff
How Do I Help My Dog's Allergies?
There are so many dogs with so many different allergies now, it’s a lot of work as a pet owner to even know where to start. The first step is to remove all the junk. A lot of dog foods have ingredients that dogs would not naturally eat in the wild like:
- Corn
- Wheat
- Soy
These are not something that your dog is looking for - so their body doesn’t necessarily know how to handle it.
The first thing we try to do is put them on a limited ingredient diet. And by limited ingredient, I mean meat. Our freeze-dried options have done so well in four to five weeks to clear up most issues with dogs. After that, you can slowly start introducing a kibble that works for your dog.
One of the reasons dogs get allergies is because we are rescuing a lot of dogs. Which is a great thing. However, sometimes these dogs that are brought into the shelters aren’t brought in under the ideal conditions. They’ve been taken away from their mother too soon, they weren’t given proper nutrition, or they were rescued from a bad environment. What can happen is that the intestinal wall starts to get a little bit weaker and you have what’s called Leaky Gut. When you have a leaky gut, it allows stuff that’s in the stomach to get into the bloodstream. This can cause an autoimmune response to a specific trigger. So typically whatever the first food that dog eats -- which most of the time is a chicken-based diet will be flagged as an allergy which can manifest itself in:
- Skin irritations
- Itchy paws
- Runny eyes
- Yeast infections in the ears
Since chicken is almost always an allergen, we want to remove chicken from the diet entirely. Next, we want to heal the gut so that that intestinal wall thickens before introducing a new diet. Many of our customers looking to do a "raw" reset - use our freeze-dried products and add some probiotics, apple cider vinegar, and bone broth to the dog’s food. They do this for about a month and once they see significant results we begin to help tailor that food to that dog moving forward.
This is why we created our My Custom Dog Food program -- because every dog is different. Dogs have all gone through different circumstances and we have different supplements and enhancements to help every dog regardless of what their allergy is. If your dog has an allergy to chicken, our Ancient Grains Ocean Fish is one of our most popular foods. A lot of people tend to add bone broth and probiotics to the food to help build gut integrity moving forward. You’re also able to feed less because we’re adding more calories to the outside of the kibble.
If your dog has allergies, you’re not lost. You’re not alone. We see this all the time and we have great options for you. If you have any questions please let us know!