Sick Pup - Page 2

I appreciate the replies so much! Thank you.

CzechDDR Lover - he tested negative for coccidia and giardia but the vet put him on 14 days of metronidazole to cover all bases. That did nothing. He had loose stools before, during and after treatment. She feels his poop eating is because of malnutrition. I do try to keep the yard clean but he will sometimes find a small piece or even on walks, he will find some in the park or grass before I can react. I like your idea of probiotics and I will try that. I have not heard of MDR1 gene but I can say this all began on his first day with us when he had just received worm medication from the breeder. Not sure if connection or not but I will ask the vet to run the test.

Dip- He tested negative for EPI but do you think enzymes would help him anyway?

Hexe- bland diet was of no help

NansGSD - will try probiotics and perhaps enzymes.

There isn’t much more room for experimentation with the dog; he is losing ground with his weight. This is another concern with the exploratory surgery; not only the expense and that it may not help diagnose him, but that he might not recover from it. He is running around playing as if nothing is wrong - just breaking our hearts. I will try the probiotics and send for enzymes. Thanks all of you’

Metronidazole doesn't do squat to get rid of coccidia. For that you need Albon or ponazuril.

Pancreatic enzymes are often useful if the dog has chronic diarrhea even without EPI because it breaks the food down and makes it more digestible.

Poop eating is a normal healthy thing for a dog to do. Eating poop from a healthy dog gives your dog the best probiotic supplement there is.

Exploratory surgery is nuts in a case like this. You need a better vet.

Your pup may have inflammatory bowel disease and need prednisone to get it under control.

The only way to get a diagnosis and find out how to fix your pup is to have the pup's GI tract scoped and biopsied by a smart internal medicine specialist. This won't be cheap but it's a lot less than 2 grand. And it's unlikely to kill your pup, which exploratory surgery might.

What part of the country are you located in?

This place will analyze your dog's gut bacteria:

https://www.animalbiome.com/

Cost is $99 and it is non-invasive.

Did your vet check for Pancreatitis?

I’m in SE Wisconsin USA- Milwaukee-Chicago Area. No, he doesn’t have pancreatitis according to the blood work. The enzymes sound like a good idea and worth a try. I appreciate the explanation of why they work because this is all new to me. These ideas are really helpful and I’m going to keep fighting for his health!

Cornsilk, just sent you a PM. There's a great specialist not too far from you.

My last shepherd had loose stools from about 16 weeks to over 2 years of age. Often full blown diarrhea. I was very frustrated and tried everything.
Graphic alert: Often the diarrhea was so severe that I would have to take him out middle of the night because he would be whining... and the liquid poop came out, squirting out I should say, with incredible force horizontally.
No vets could help. I went from one vet to the next to no avail. Out of pure frustration, when he was around 2 1/2, I switched him to real human grade food from previously feeding him a so called high-grade kibble. It was about 11 years ago, before there was a lot of info on dog food or feeding on line. Once I did that, his diarrhea completely cleared up.
I started with just a few ingredients to try to isolate any issues and get the diarrhea under control. At the time, I gave him organic air chilled chicken without skin (not normal chicken that is soaked in antimicrobial baths and has 4 percent water- check labels) or full cuts of beef (not too fat, not ground chuck) and organic canned pumpkin. After 2 days, his diarrhea had cleared up for the first time in months. Do not feed white rice as it pulls water from intestines creating more issues.
After trial and error, I isolated every item that he was sensitive to, and the main culprit was corn products and hydrolized anything which is in almost all kibble, even high quality ones, but especially hydrolized corn which is almost all genetically modified.
Anytime he got anything with this in it, the diarrhea was instant and furious again.
After researching human grade food for dogs, I honed his diet to mostly raw, and organic chicken backs for 10% raw bone content. The raw bone will bind water and firm up stool faster than anything. Always check stool, if too loose, add more raw bone, if too hard, add more organ meat like liver or kidney.
Personally, I will not use kibble again for meals for my dogs. I realize for kennels or multi big dog households this can be tough to do and takes a lot of initial research to do this right, but it has helped me enormously.

I think (particularly from what I've been hearing lately about US food production ) that the key there was Jesse using organic, human grade meat, with the fatty skin removed. A bland diet, properly constituted, and kept up for a good length of time (I've found a tendency in owners to try it for a week, two max, and then give up thinking it isn't working) and preferably with some probiotic supplementation ( to help the biome) really is the way to go with GSD who have weak digestive systems / IBS. As long as other problems (giardia, pancreatitis, etc) have been tested for and eliminated.

Doing this until the diorrhea has definitely stopped, I have then found that I could resume feeding (a good UK produced) kibble without further problems.

Has a diarrhea panel PCR been done? Often, you really have to push vets to do this. Not sure why. They want to prescribe and represcribe metro rather than finding the cause. I'd urge you to do this. I had a pup (not mine, but bred by me) with not constant, but recurring diarrhea. Owner was doing everything right, more or less. I told her to push the vet to do the PCR. Vet was resistant (I really don't understand why this is the case so often) but lo and behold...the dog had more than one cause. This is a dog that trains in many venues and was always in different places full of different dogs- a prime candidate for the ailments that were found. Once the cause is found, treatment becomes a bit more than a stab in the dark. Be warned, though, in a case where it's been going on this long, you may never have 100% cure, but you can surely improve things from where they are now. There are certain protozoa that can cause permanent damage to the intestines if they are not discovered and taken care of immediately.

Have you asked the breeder or other puppy owners if anyone else is experiencing this?

Agreed Hundmutter. If everything else has been checked and all comes out neg., then it may well be a sensitivity to food ingredients. It is important then to do an elimination diet to try to get a handle on what is causing issues.
Once the offending foods or substances are removed from the diet, the diarrhea will resolve rather quickly, often just a few days. The gut lining is made with cells that reproduce themselves very fast...within a few days a dog can have a complete new gut lining.
Someone suggested a fecal transplant. I agree, it might be in order especially if he has had a lot of antibiotics in his young life. I do not like the way antibiotics are handed out to dogs, way too often and I believe they cause more harm than good more often than not. (Yes, they are amazing when really needed)
My current vet does fecal transplants...they are not super scientific, and they are easy. They simply collect the fecal matter from a dog that is healthy, usually always a dog owned by someone working in the vets office. It is then quickly liquified and injected anally to repopulate the biome. It is thought this is why animals eat other animals poop. Have read some amazing accounts of betterment with this method, also in humans, but I personally have not reasearched it in lots of depth.