My dog has an allergy.

Why didn’t someone tell me this…?!

If I could swear on this site, I really would. We moved house, bought a dog, and then got engaged. I completed nearly all life events within 3 weeks; clever, right? And yes, it was precisely as stressful as you imagine it.

I digress… We had an incredible floofy black dog. It was amazing; he was my best friend until I started having to visit a vet every month. I thoroughly loathed this regular event as it would end in spending somewhere between £100 to £200 PER VISIT!

It turned out that my floofy bundle of joy had an allergy, and that meant for the next 3.5 years, I would effectively become my local vet’s best friend. 

What was going on with my dog?! 

We got stuck in a horrible boot loop: doggo would start itching, doggo would get disgusting/smelly ears, we would go to the vet, the vet would prescribe him something, and I would leave the vet limping with an ever bigger bill. REPEAT.

We made the mistake of signing with a practice that had a different vet every single time, within 10 mins we would be in and out. The geniuses quickly deduced that it was an allergy, but they couldn’t tell me what it was without doing extensive blood work, etc. Even after the blood work, it would be managing the allergy rather than fixing it. 

How did we try to resolve the allergy?

So we tried switching food to grain-free, then to hypoallergenic, and we tried all brands. We even did the rubbish £90 test, where you submit it for analysis to shed some light on what could be the allergy (hint – don’t do it – they are a waste of money, the results will come back and tell you that they could be allergic to pretty much everything). We didn’t want to spend thousands on going to the end of the earth to figure out something that, by all accounts, would still be a problem.

I’m going to save you thousands…

After 3.5 years of ripping my hair out, on one particular visit, we stumbled across a vet who didn’t fancy taking any further advantage of a visibly financially distraught dog dad. CHICKEN! What the internet and every single vet we met before that visit never mentioned to me, which seems like pretty common knowledge, is that avian meats are the leading cause of dog allergies. The one consistent thing in all of my experimenting (which all the vets were aware of) was that no matter how expensive or cheap the dog food we tried, hydrolysed or not, it was all chicken-based! If your doggo is in the corner licking its paws like a lollipop and has been scratching its eyes to the extent that it looks like a panda, try putting them on a grain-free salmon diet. YOU ARE WELCOME.

Flair ups

I can’t lie to you and say that Doggo is now sweet as a nut. He does have flair-ups, but my advice (as a sales manager with zero veterinary experience) is to give Doggo some apoquel for a couple of days, and he/she will be as right as rain.

My god this dog ownership business is REALLY expensive, why the fluff did I agree to this?!