Regurgitation, urination, other rocky moments in puppyhood
Is your dog really sick or does she just want to play?
Junee played me, and I kinda respect her (playful) gangsta. After being spayed, the bed rest for my Hound mix is complete. It still takes 10 to 14 days for the stitches to dissolve. But at her first wellness visit, the vet said she’s healing fine and can go back to usual after nine days on bed rest. But my bigger questions during that first wellness visit were: Why does my puppy keep regurgitating her food? Why does she need to pee every 30 minutes to an hour? And why didn’t this happen with my other two dogs?
When a dog won’t stop regurgitating food
I thought I had the dog food thing down! I’d already written a Pinterest board’s worth of content for outside clients on best dog foods, best dog treats, and what you can and cannot feed a dog, so I wasn’t super concerned about my purchasing decisions. I also read and reread all the fine print on the dog bags for adult dog food and puppy dog food. When I adopted Junee, I only had adult dog food because that’s who I’d been boarding for two years with Rover and Wag! She ate it easily (after she got used to eating from an unfamiliar dish and I spent three days feeding her from my hands).
Recommended Read: “For the sake of your dog, take Dentastix weight groups seriously ~ Side effects of wrong dental dog bone: Diarrhea, lethargy, loss of appetite, sad owner”
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But once my parents mentioned puppies should only eat puppy food and I dove back into dog nutrition, I let her finish out the two small adult dog food boxes I had and switched to puppy food. The first day, she regurgitated. My fault, I should have mixed it up. I did so. She still regurgitated the next day. And the day after that. I considered going back to adult dog food, but there was something else going on that I thought was strange. She never regurgitated the food in the afternoon nor evening. Same food. Different reaction. And she always tried to sneak and eat her regurgitated food before I could immediately clean it up. She growled a couple of times to try to get me to step back. Grossed out as I was, I would not back down.
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Reputable dog health sites say to go to a veterinarian if a dog is constantly throwing up or there’s bile. The bile happened one time after she ate trash, so I wasn’t that alarmed. What she was doing was releasing food that looked like it did in the dish! But I kept scratching my head about why this was only happening during a.m. hours. If it was the food, it should happen each time. So I started process of elimination — halving the morning portion so she got the remainder at noon.