The search for a food for Nala continues. After about 2 months on the Blue Buffalo Lamb & Rice, Nala’s back to having soft runny and now mucousy poops. Since everything else about Nala looks normal, the only suggestion the vet could offer was that Nala had a sensitive or irritable bowel (large bowel issues) that wasn’t agreeing with one or more of the ingredients in her food. Rats. She was looking really good on the Blue Buffalo food too.
So now it’s back to searching for another food. In the meantime the vet suggested we put her on some Science Diet i/d for a while. He says it’s a very digestible food for dogs with sensitive tummies.
This time I’m going to take a more methodical approach to finding a food with a thorough ingredients comparison. I know that when she was on Diamond LB Lamb & Rice everything was fine. It wasn’t until the beginning of the year when we started switching her to adult foods that the soft poop problem started.
- Premium Edge Skin & Coat formula: soft poop after a month.
- Wellness Fish & Sweet Potato: still soft poop.
- Blue Buffalo Lamb & Rice: Poop firmed right back up. Soft runny poop again after about 6 weeks.
So breaking out the trusty spreadsheet, I put all the ingredients for each food in and see what’s in the Premium Edge, Wellness and Blue Buffalo that’s not in the Diamond. Since they’re all so different, filtering out what’s in one and not in the other is easier than it sounds, but at a first iteration, the Premium Edge, Wellness and even Blue Buffalo have some kind of fish or fish meal in them. More noticable is that they also all have some form of barley, which the Diamond doesn’t have. So maybe it’s the barley Nala’s reacting to. Neither the Diamond or Nutro lamb & rice have barley or corn in them, so those are two possibilities for us to try. Diamond does have fish meal in it though, so if Nala has problems with fish too, Nutro might be the one to go with.
Anybody want a 30lb bag of Blue Buffalo lamb & rice to try?
Discover more from Imablog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
You’re a freak Eugene. Really. CSI: Dog Food? When Bailey had these problems, we just experiment with different foods. When we found one that worked we stuck with it. No spreadsheets to isolate common ingredients.
I think you need to visit Houston again. 🙂
“. . . one or more of the ingredients in her food. Rats.”
Maybe the RATS are the problem! 🙂
The last two attempts with Wellness and Blue Buffalo were experiments to see if they’d work with Nala. Unfortunately they didn’t so I figured rather than waste time and money on multiple iterations with different foods, the logical thing to do was a methodical comparison of the ingredients in each one we tried to see what was in the others that wasn’t in the Diamond. Putting the ingredient lists in a spreadsheet was the easiest way to do the comparison.
I think we all need to visit Houston again. 🙂
is that the teacher in you coming out Sandi? 🙂
I don’t think your a freak with the table. I’ve had the same problem with my German Shepherd, Chillie. I’ve tried them all and I mean all the expensive ones too. Want to here what the only food that gives her a normal poop is? It’s the WalMart brand called Ole Roy! Go figure. My Chillie has other probmes but the stomach and poop issues are done with.
Stay on Blue Buffalo, just add a little cooked brown rice for a while (This works for the poops no matter what food they are on)Make a batch of rice and refrigerate.
Science Diet is BAD BAD BAD
http://www.dogfoodproject.com/