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Pet's info: Dog | Labrador Retriever | Female | spayed | 8 months and 23 days old | 75 lbs
8 month old lab, seems to have constant diahrea, on a lamb/rice for sensitive skin & stomach, it's been so hard to find a food and stick with it
2 Answers

Answered By Amber Da Silva, DVM
Veterinarian
Published on August 21st, 2017
Answered By Kevin Sanada, DVM
Veterinarian
That is rather young for a dog to have an adversity to so much food. I wander if there is a disease process that has gone undiagnosed. If I were your veterinarian, I would want to be sure that the feces has been tested for parasites and bacteria that could lead to long-standing diarrhea like this. Some bugs like giardia could keep your dog continually having loose stool.
I would also want to make sure that he does not have any other problems with his pancreas or liver, since these can also lead to diarrhea.
Food intolerance is generally considered a rule-out diagnosis - meaning that we've ruled out all other causes of diarrhea. The only other way to definitively diagnose the problem is to have an intestinal biopsy done, but we usually test for other things first.
A good way to test if it's a diet issue, is to just feed her chicken and rice for a week. If that helps, then you can do a diet elimination trial with your veterinarian to try and identify the exact ingredient that is causing the diarrhea.
Sometimes, the diarrhea (or loose stool rather) is due to overfeeding. Make sure that Hatty is only getting the recommended amount on the bag. If he's getting more, getting treats, or getting table scraps, then those should be accounted for.
You can also try to add in some probiotics to the food. There are products for dogs at the pet store and can help in some cases to form-up the stool.
Here is a link to a short article that has a bit more info:
https://www.petcoach.co/article/most-common-causes-of-diarrhea-in-dogs/
I hope that helps and you get this under control soon.
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