Food Suggestions for Senior with digestive issues and allergies

 Bless you for taking on this puppa with his issues, and best wishes helping him eat and be comfortable!

Freedom

 Bless you for taking on this puppa with his issues, and best wishes helping him eat and be comfortable!

  Ditto; he is very fortunate to be under your care. Jessie has just turned 14 and is mostly German Shepherd. As you probably know, the breed is prone to digestive issues. She has had chronic pancreatitis for 3 years, many food allergies since she was about 2 years old, and has now developed an intolerance to certain foods, which could be IBD or IBS. We haven't had her scoped, but an attempt to transition her to a simple cooked diet of egg and rice in February put her in the hospital. She needs a low fat diet and does best on a food that has a moderate amount of fiber (4%) and has beet pulp and oatmeal. She was on Nutro Natural Choice Venison and Whole Brown Rice for 3 years. They recently increased the fat to 14%, so we changed her to a product by Natural Life called Lamaderm; 

   NLPP - Lamaderm

  She is hypersensitive to any changes in her diet and we were worried but fortunately, she's doing very well on this. She has baked turkey cutlets added to her food daily, but allergies to potatoes and barley prevent us from feeding her commercial foods with turkey. Blue Buffalo makes 3 products with turkey as the protein source. For all dogs;

      BLUE Basics — Turkey dog food, a limited ingredient diet

      a senior version; 

      BLUE Basics Senior Turkey dog food, a limited ingredient diet

      and a low fat version;

     BLUE Basics — Healthy Weight dog food, a limited ingredient diet

    Monica Segal may be able to help you;

    Adult Dog Consultation

    She formulates diets for dogs with many different health problems and has had a dog with IBD. Good luck; I hope you're successful in finding a diet with better ingredients that he can tolerate.

Thanks for the suggestions and good wishes.

The Avoderm turkey is a bit higher in fat than I wanted to go, but in checking their website, they have a Salmon formula that seems very good and is a bit lower in fat. I'm also considering trying NB's Alpha King with chicken and turkey. I'll see what the local feed store has, if any and go from there. If I have to buy elsewhere, so be it, it never hurts to start at the place closest to home.

Monty is a very nice dog and I think just a victim of a bad economy.

I'm not sure what symptoms you've been seeing but when we adopted Shane several months ago, he had loose stools constantly. I tried adding pumpkin, greek yogurt, changing to NB allergy formula and nothing seemed to help. I even had him rechecked for parasites and all was fine. The vet sent us home with some pricey probiotics and it still didn't help. I finally came across some glowing reviews for a product called Healthy Select Digestive Enzymes and Probiotics and decided to give that a try. From the very 1st day, his stools firmed up and we've never had a problem since. I mentioned it to the TCVM vet and she said it's a good product and suggested continuing with it. I ordered it online through PetCo (I think) and buy several bottles at a time. I give him one with each meal.

Good luck with your new boy and thanks for helping him have a better life.

Cakana, that supplement sounds great. I'll look into it. Even if it doesn't work for Monty, I have a 13  year old chow mix and her digestive system is becoming a bit delicate. I buy a very good yogurt with many more strains than most, but she's decided she doesn't really like yogurt any more, so I've been putting a pill into her food.

Jessie'smom. Congratulations on the 14th birthday. I'm sure it wouldn't have happened without a lot of love and excellent care. I ended up buying the Blue Basics. I'm not crazy about the brown rice but we'll see how it goes. So far, adding 1/4 cup seems OK. I'm also doing three meals per day for him, to try to make things a bit easier on the digestive system. I also made a vat of chicken broth and refrigerated it to remove any fat, added some chicken breast and he was a very happy dog. Plus all three dogs can eat that as a topper.

I don't believe in scoping if it won't change the treatment. It's expensive and traumatic for the dog. He did have an ultrasound which they were able to do without sedation. My shepherd mix was most likely mixed with a lot of lab and had a cast iron stomach. Nothing fazed him a bit, even when he stole an entire four pound roast off the counter. The malinois had a very fragile digestive system, so that's probably a lot closer to what I'm dealing with here.

 Thanks to all for great suggesitons.

  Thanks for the congrats, but I was trying to make the point that the older they get, the more sensitive their digestive system seems to be. Like your chow mix, Jessie needs probiotics. I use FortiFlora by Purina and if I don't add it to her food on a regular basis, she gets an overgrowth of clostridium bacteria in her intestines and has sloppy stool. The Blue Buffalo was one of the foods that we were considering for Jessie but decided against it because of the potatoes (they're listed after the rice). She does best on a food with rice and is allergic to potatoes. I hope he does well on it. Jessie is allergic to chicken so she baked turkey breast as a topper every day. Doing three meals a day is great; we usually do four meals a day.

Stacita

I don't believe in scoping if it won't change the treatment. It's expensive and traumatic for the dog.

  I agree; we've learned what she can tolerate and what upsets her system. I know someone that did have her dog scoped after the dog was in the hospital twice and very sick both times. It was helpful; the dog lived happily the rest of her life on a diet of turkey and squash, balanced with vitamins and minerals.

Those are good suggestions. Thanks!

Stacita

I've taken on what will be most likely a permanent foster. Monty is a senior shepherd with  digestive issues but never received the full scope for IBD so call it either IBS or IBD but he'd lost almost 20 lbs by the time he was placed on prescription food...

Stacita

...He's also somewhat allergic to eggs, wheat, beef, lamb,  and pork. No allergy to grains, but that doesn't mean he'll digest them well...

 If he has IBS/IBD, he probably won't do well with grains.