Dog Drama & Depression
Hello again! The theme of the year so far has been stress, exhaustion, and dog poop. In addition to the horrors of the world on a macro level, the transition of live without a dog to life with a dog has been surprisingly tough. Ian also started a new role at work, which takes up much more of his time and energy than either one of us would like. He was promoted to an official management position at the beginning of the year (as opposed to what he’s been doing - being given managerial responsibilities without the title or the pay). He kind of hates it. The culture in his office is this horrifically toxic boys’ club where these guys pride themselves on being absentee parents, and your value in the workplace is measured by how many hours a day you sit at your desk vs. the actual quality of your work. Joking about missing another kid’s soccer game for a three hour meeting that could have been an email and saying “12 hours is a half day” makes me want to simultaneously barf and punch someone at the same time. Ian obviously does not subscribe to that philosophy, but he’s still stuck living in it 9+ hours a day. It kind of sucks being being a single dog parent from 7 AM - 7 PM most days. Also, with the abysmal snow season and general climate change, Utah is O-U-T out of water. The wildfire season should be more destructive than usual, and all the lakes are dried up, so that’s something to look forward to. Between his new job, navigating new routines and unexpected surprises with the dog, and the entire world being on fire, it has not been the easiest year so far. My mental health is in the toilet, but we’re getting there.
The Dog Poop Saga
I’ll tell you our dog poop saga before I acknowledge the positives of the year. Please feel free to skip this section if you don’t enjoy reading about the consistency of dog poop, which is 90% of all I talk about these days. You can skip to the end for photos.
Poor Rita has been struggling with GI issues pretty much since we got her. Since she was new to us, we didn’t think much of it at first. We thought, “Sure, some dogs just have runnier poop.” She never had great poops on the kibble we inherited from the rescue we got her from. She never had great poops when we switched her to Purina Pro Plan at the recommendation of the vet. Everything was still so new that we didn’t think much of her pooping soft serve (at best) five times a day. Things got to their lowest point, naturally, two days before we were supposed to leave for vacation in April. Explosive diarrhea. Us up several times a night to let her out. Me sleeping on the couch because she’d need to go every two hours like clockwork. It was horrible. To her credit, Rita was amazing at letting us know when she needed to go and never had any accidents in the house.
Like I said, this was the worst it’d ever been right before we were supposed to be on vacation for a week. Cancelling our trip over our dog pooping too much seemed like a bit of an extreme reaction to the situation because the dog was acting totally normal outside of all the pooping. However, we were prepared to do that if that’s what we needed to do. I called our dog trainer, who is an absolute saint and who Rita was slated to be staying with while we went out of town. Our trainer is amazing and was so understanding and ready to feed Rita a bland diet (white rice, canned chicken, and pumpkin) and monitor the situation while we were gone. She said she even had medicine on hand for this. Fantastic! So we drop her off, feel very guilty about leaving the trainer with so much extra hassle and for abandoning our dog during her time of need.
Our trainer did a great job of keeping us updated, and Rita seemed to be getting back to normal after a couple days. At that point, she started getting her kibble back and things took a dark turn once again. The trainer suspected that it was the kibble that was causing all of Rita’s tummy troubles and asked if she could start feeding Rita some raw food. It turns out that’s the best decision we’ve ever made. This dog’s poops were glorious on a raw diet. We came back home, picked her up, stocked up on raw, and upgraded her kibble to a new fancy organic brand that had freeze dried raw in it and all this great stuff. However, once we started transitioning the kibble back into her diet, things started going south again.
We took her to the vet, who wasn’t particularly helpful, because they’re getting kickbacks from Purina to push that food. They gave us some medicine for her diarrhea and a probiotic (also Purina brand). The Purina probiotic made her explosively poop almost immediately after eating, but the Metronidazole has been great to use when she’s really going through it gastrointestinally. So what did we learn from all this? Purina is evil, and our dog maybe has a kibble intolerance?
To make matters worse, we also learned she had giardia. She had been responding so sensitively to all of the dietary changes we were making that an actual parasitic infection wasn’t even on our radar. It also didn’t help that our vet told us she tested positive almost two weeks after our visit. Anyway, we did the round of antibiotics and deep cleaned our entire house. However, because we didn’t have a follow-up clean fecal test, her trainer wouldn’t board her for us to attend Ian’s stepbrother’s wedding in Denver over Memorial Day weekend. We are not mad or upset at the trainer at all for this. We felt so stupid for not thinking to tell her about it once we found out, and spent several days beating ourselves up over that and hoping she wouldn’t cast us away forever (she did not). I’m just grateful this wasn’t happening in March during Katie’s wedding because I would have lost my sh*t.
In an effort to supplement the raw food with something slightly more cost effective that also takes us less of our freezer space, we started adding dehydrated Honest Kitchen to her meals. Honest Kitchen is another high-quality brand that takes all the good stuff that would go into a raw patty and dehydrates it. You add warm water and it makes basically savory dog oatmeal. Rita did well on that for about a week, but it was making her poop 5+ times a day vs 2-3 on raw alone. These were HUGE poops, softer but still solid. After about a week, she started getting increasingly gassy. The volume and stank factor of this dog’s farts got pretty intense, and then came the diarrhea and more sleepless nights. Credit to Rita, she still hasn’t had an accident in the house. I guess I’d rather wake up every couple hours to let her outside than wake up to dog diarrhea all over the house in the morning.
All that to say, this whole GI saga has been an absolute nightmare. We are so tired of taking one step forward just to take two steps back. Our current theory is that she might be allergic to beef since that’s the primary protein in the Honest Kitchen that made her explode, and also one of the proteins in the kibble that she only tolerated for about a week as well. To add insult to injury, now something’s wrong with her blue eye. She already had pink eye a couple months ago, but this time it looks more like she scratched her eye. So back to the vet we go. Getting a dog was supposed to be easier than having a human baby! Being awake all night dealing with poop plus chronic eye infections is not what we planned for.
In other news, she’s gained almost 15 pounds since we first got her and she was super underweight. As of yesterday, she’s a whopping 96 pounds. She still looks and acts healthy as a horse. She’s the cutest. We got her doggie DNA results back too.
52% Great Dane (duh)
19% Pit Bull - she’s tall like a Dane but has stockier musculature like a Pit with her thick turkey legs
16% German Shepherd - makes no sense except for when she feels like she needs to protect our house from the neighbors
13% Husky - this tracks between the heterochromia and her constantly having a song in her heart that she needs to sing
We’re two weeks into a five-week training class to get her AKC Good Citizen certificate. Basically good dog manners 101. She has to pass the test first, but I’m optimistic. There’s definitely been a huge learning curve in being pet parents, but so far her GI issues are our biggest pain point. Fortunately, she seems unphased by it all. No major behavioral changes, lethargy, loss of appetite, or anything like that. She may have the world’s most sensitive stomach, but she’s the absolute sweetest goofball. Despite all the stress she brings (directly or indirectly), we got pretty lucky with Rita. She’s the biggest daddy’s girl and is absolutely obsessed with Ian. I’m chopped liver when he’s around.
If you made it this far, congratulations. Please enjoy this inundation of dog photos. I’m going to do a separate post about everything else that’s happened outside of the dog next. Thanks for your patience between posts, and thanks for reading!
