Animals with Allergies
Animals, like people can be allergic to many things. But unlike people who sneeze, and wheeze, animals usually express their allergy symptoms by scratching, licking, chewing and rubbing themselves on objects. This itchy-ness can cause skin infections, swelling, and hair loss that can make you pet nearly bald.
Allergies to grass is the common cause of a dog chewing its paws constantly. Allergies to fleas cause biting at the tail and often “hot spots”. Food allergies cause a number of symptoms that are hard to pin down sometimes. Only a veterinarian with a special interest in allergies can reach a diagnosis and then a treatment for your pet.
And the diagnosis isn’t cheap. With contact allergies, the pet needs to be patch tested, which is very similar to allergy testing in humans. With dietary allergens, a program of food deletion and reintroduction is done for several months until the allergen can be narrowed down. All of this takes the dedication of both your vet and your family to persevere until the source allergen can be isolated.
But once identified, treatment is pretty simple. Avoiding the allergen and getting “allergy” shots to desensitize the animal are both used to make the pet more comfortable. Unless, of course the pet is allergic to many things all at once……then only suppression of the immune system can allow the pet to live a relatively normal life. Allergic to cats? Don’t laugh, they can be allergic to you!
August 31st, 2007 at 9:37 am
My dog Buster has some kind of food allergy. I assume it’s to beef. I don’t feed him beef and he is okay so thus far we haven’t had to do the extensive allergy testing. (Thank God) But when we first got him and didn’t realize that dogs generally don’t eat beef in the wild and so probably shouldn’t feed it to them in their food he would chew his paws till they would bleed. It was terrible. He had to wear one of those funny looking lamp shade collars. LOL and we’d have to wrap up his paws with ace bandage type tape. I’m very happy we were able to figure out just by not feeding him beef we could avoid it.
September 2nd, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Congrats on being watchful and taking the steps to fix the problem. Some allergies are pretty easy (like flea allergies) and others are really hard to pin point.