An Overview of Dog Allergies

This is a hot topic for dog owners, no one wants to see a precious pet suffer from anything, and if you have a genuine case of allergies going, watching the dog be miserable can drive us to do almost anything to fix the problem.  The first step to solving the problem is learning what you are dealing with, and arming yourself against the massive amounts of misinformation out there can be a daunting task.  Hopefully this article helps you learn enough to get you through a bad case of dog allergies.

I swear every time someone sees a dog sneeze, they assume allergies are to blame.  I see dogs all the time on prescriptions they really don’t need, simply because the vet makes money by selling it to you.  Very few dogs have true nasal allergies, and if they have some sort of pollen or food allergy, it is going to be demonstrated by the skin.  That is the part of the dog that you will notice the problem on, because their bodies work different than ours, their noses are defiantly not the same as ours and are really good at filtering out dust and other particles that ours don’t necessarily.

Again, the misinformation in this area is massive.  Vomiting, in spite of what most folks think, is not typically how dogs express food allergies.  That is more likely food intolerance, and yes there is a difference between the two.  Dog allergies in the food department, just like everything else in the dog allergy world, are most likely to be expressed in the skin and ear glands.  If you suspect your dog has a food allergy, refrain from any table scraps and feed the dog only its food and water.  After twelve weeks change the dog’s food and see if its situation improves over another twelve weeks, if not, change again.  The twelve weeks is important, eight is not enough for the majority of dogs to show symptoms completely.

Now this is the heart of the matter, as dog food allergies really only make about roughly ten percent of the dog allergy category, I would have to say the skin allergy category make up the vast majority of the rest.  Fleas play a large part of this little tragedy, and no matter the true cause of the skin problem fleas will make it worse.  Fix this problem first, and then tackle any subsequent skin issues you run into later.