Socks

Hi, don't know if anyone could help with this query but for the past few days my wee Socks has been feeling quite under the weather. She's had diarrhoea for about 4 days now, and it's not really stopped. She's been going a lot more than usual and has even been going through to the living room and sitting by herself at nights when she usually sleeps up on the bed with me. Her dimea er is quite worrying as shes normally quite a, how can I put it, lively dog always wanting attention. She's 7 now going on 8 in June. She has ate some wet food instead if her normal diet of complete food so I'm thinking it could just be that passing through her system, however she has ate wet food before, so I'm quite worried about this. Thank you in advance for any help given.

Hello - its really hard to know what has caused diarrhoea from the outside.  There are hundreds of causes, from different allergens to different bacteria, to different viruses, to different internal diseases such as various types of liver or pancreatic disease, cancers, toxicity etc.   Anybody who professes to make a diagnosis from looking at the diarrhoea from the outside is likely not to be trusted - old vets used to 'diagnose' Parvovirus from the smell, but double-blind trials have shown that this doesn't hold up to testing.   MTF

Clinicians can get a rough idea of which portion of the gasterointestinal tract diarrhoea is likely to originate from, by looking at the quality of it.  However, most of the time the cause is irrelevant because most diarrhoea self resolves.  Vets worry a lot about the cases that dont self-resolve, or do but recurr very quickly and spread around a household or continue for a while in one individual.  In an individual, we call this a chronic case.  The other presentation of diarrhoea - the ones where the diarrhoea is sudden, but can be so bad that it leaves the animal dehydrated, lethargic etc - is acute diarrhoea.  Acute diarrhoea often recurrs by itself but if the animal becomes dehydrated before that happens, they can become very ill and the disease can be life threatening.  It sounds to me as though your dog has had 4 days worth of acute-onset diarrhoea that sounds bad enough to cause dehydration - and they sound to be quite lethrgic.   If this is still the case, we would advise calling the emergency vet in case they need to be assessed for a drip.

YIKES there was a lot of waffle there.  I apologise.  Here is the important part:

It sounds to me as if your dog has had a few days worth of diarrhoea bad enough that they are feeling lethargic, which might mean that they are dehydrated.   At the moment, the main concern will be maintaining their hydration levels (the cause is not always obvious and often comes secondary to this).  Please call your EMERGENCY vet in order that they can be assessed.

My dog also had severe diarrhea. While waiting to call the doctor, we gave him luccozer and he got better. By the time he got to the hospital, luckily he was out of danger.