Getting Sick Dog To Eat

[Guest anneh]

My little sick non grey is home altho still has a fever but thank God is drinking fluids. I have to administer meds with food and she doesn't want to eat. I have offered cooked chicken/canned Wellness lamb/canned Merrick but she is not interested. I managed to get a little Wellness in her with the meds (maybe a tsp) but obviously don't want to force food into her and have her aspirate it. If anyone has any ideas please let me know.This little one has a fever of unknown origin and developed pneumonia temporarily but other than spiking fever no other symptoms, she was in ER for 6 days. Extensive bloodwork has been done altho waiting on some results like TBD etc but they went ahead and put her on doxy plus another antibiotic. Next step will be bone marrow test. Thank God her fever has not risen high like it did originally (106) but has stayed around 104+. They had her on an anti-inflammatory but caused GI bleeding :

anneh

[ZoomDoggy]

You can try offering various things like boiled beef with brown rice, boiled turkey, baby food, etc. (you'll find many suggestions on novel foods here, no doubt)

 

But if nothing else works...

 

Having all-too-recently been through the not-eating thing with my Marla, I can tell you that if no foods can tempt your pup, and you don't want to shove food down her throat, syringe-feeding is not as bad as you might fear. Your pharmacist can give you an oral syringe, and you can puree the dogfood in a processor or blender with chicken broth until it's a nice smooth liquid. Then, one syringe-full at a time, slowly squirt the food into the side of her mouth, between her teeth. With Marla, once the liquid food hit her tongue, she started just licking and swallowing. I adjusted the speed of my syringe-plunging to accord with the speed of her swallowing. She didn't seem to mind being fed this way at all, even though there was no food left on earth that she would eat on her own.

 

The advantage I found to doing this rather than continuing to scour the earth for more novel foods for her to reject (after four weeks, you run out of ideas), was that this way I could return her to the consistent diet that worked well for her, and it cleared up the diarrhea she got from eating so much weird stuff all the time. The downside is that it is time consuming, and it takes a lot of syringe-fulls to equal the amount of food a dog must eat daily in order to maintain weight. Many small meals daily, is what I did.

 

Good luck.

[Batmom]

Glad your little one is home! For getting some food in to go with the meds, try something like a graham cracker or a piece of bread with a little peanutbutter or cream cheese on it. Cinnamon bread if you have it. Sometimes these things are more appealing if *you* take a bite first. Other good things: warm scrambled egg, room temp vanilla pudding or yogurt, or tapioca pudding, braunschweiger (aka liver sausage), lunch meat (it's a little salty so more appealing than our lovely cooked chicken breasts, KWIM?).

 

Sometimes just warming it a bit helps.

 

Hugs and luck!

[GeorgeofNE]

Cat food!

 

It's way stinkier than dog food, and most dogs LOVE it. I mean canned.

 

The short answer is when your dog is ill and won't eat, feed her ANYTHING she'll eat. Don't worry if it isn't the tops in nutrition.

 

I second the post on syringe feeding if necessary. I had a cat once that would NOT eat, and the breeder told me he would die if he didn't (he was a kitten) and she told me how to do it. Three days later he woke me up in the middle of the night hollering for his feeding!

 

Good luck!

[FountainLady]

I second what Batmom said about scrambled eggs .... scramble them up with pieces of bacon & cheese added in. When my Pup was on the last few weeks of his life with his Osteo & didn't want to eat --- the scrambled eggs worked like magic. I also was able to sneak in a little kibble scrambled up with the bacon & cheese in the eggs.

[RobinM]

I agree with the cat food, meat baby food and try the EVO wet foods, they are high in calorie and VERY STINKY.