Susi Szeremy has been breeding and exhibiting since 1978. She writes about the sport of dogs as she sees it, usually with tongue planted firmly in cheek. On occasion, however, she dabbles with respectability and has served as editor of PULI NEWS, the newsletter for the Puli Club of America, since 1988.
Susi Szeremy

Susi Szeremy has been breeding and exhibiting Pulik under the "Makos" prefix since 1978. She writes about our sport as she sees it, usually with tongue planted firmly in cheek. On occasion, however, she dabbles with respectability and has served as editor of PULI NEWS, the newsletter for the Puli Club of America, since 1988.

FEEDING A DOG WHO WONT EAT

To a conscientious dog owner, there are few things more frustrating than a dog who won't eat. Whether from illness or acquired as learned behavior, a loss of appetite (called anorexia) is no small matter. I can offer advice learned in the trenches, starting with the most obvious and working my way to the more difficult.

First, a caveat. Whenever faced with a dramatic change in a dog's demeanor, get thy dog to a vet. When dealing with an eating problem, one must be able to rule out illness by having the dog thoroughly examined by a capable vet. Be sure to have the dog's mouth and throat examined. A broken tooth, gingivitis, a tumor lying under the gum tissue - even tonsillitis (and dogs DO get tonsillitis) can make a dog go off his feed. 

If it's determined that the non-eating dog is in good health, he may have a behavioral issue. The most common cause of a healthy dog not eating is being a smart dog. Having learned that if he sneers at kibble, tastier food is on its way, a dog quickly learns that an anxious owner will try ANYTHING to get her dog to eat. This would include left-over steak, smoked salmon or that night's beef stew - all served up by a owner perched on her knees,hand feeding a dog far too smart to let a good thing pass.

I promise you, no healthy dog will willingly starve itself. If you recognize yourself and your dog in the aforementioned scenario, there is but one solution: give the dog one week to learn to eat dog food. Prepare his food, put it down in his usual eating spot, give him five minutes to eat and if the food remains uneaten after five minutes, pick the bowl up IMMEDIATELY and put it away. Don't feed the dog ANYTHING again until the next time the dog is scheduled to eat. This includes biscuits, hand-outs, or even a corner of your sandwich that fell on the floor. Nothing. Chances are, this will be harder on you than the dog, but it will work and it may take all seven days of consistent behavior to show your dog the "new you." You mean business. 

If a dog has been under the weather, your approach should change. Again, a vet should see the dog. If the dog has been vomiting, with-holding food for a day or two is often a suggested means of calming the stomach. But if it's determined that the dog needs to eat, it's a sad but true fact that sometimes the less a dog eats, the less he WANTS to eat. Add to that the dog who comes to associate food with nausea and you can have a real problem, so the sooner you can get your dog to WANT eat on his own, the better. So much for the obvious.

I have a list of enticing foods to jump start a dog's appetite, but note that most of them are bad for virtually every medical condition a dog can have, including renal, cardiac and pancreatic complications. You don't want to make these foods a daily staple but only as a means to inspire the appetite: sardines, canned cat food, Gerber's turkey baby food, braunschweiger, Limburger Cheese, broth, chicken noodle soup, pureed liver, Dinty Moore Beef Stew, yogurt, cottage chees or cream cheese, canned mackeral, scrambled eggs with cheese, and even hard-boiled eggs smashed up in French Vanilla yogurt, slightly warmed. Now, for commercial fixes: there are products sold through pet shops, supply catalogs, veterinary offices and through dog show vendors specifically for problem appetites. Though I don't have first hand experience with some of them, I pass them along for informational pur-poses. Re-Vita, Pet-Tinic (not Tonic), Pounds Plus (a high caloric liquid diet and supplement) and Nutri-Cal (pure nutrition that squeezes out like toothpaste) are a few products suggested for the anorexic dog.

If none of these works, this is where I get pretty serious since my own personal philosophy is this: a lack of appetite and eventual starvation is a lousy reason for a dog to die.

You have to get nutrition into the dog and there are four ways to do this: syringe food into the mouth, stuff food pellets down the dog's throat, hook the dog up to an IV, or insert a stomach tube. I've done all of them at one time or another. They all stink as compared to, say, putting a bowl down on the ground and picking up an empty one five minutes later, but they are preferrable to the alternative. And again, consult a veterinarian before embarking on any of these methods. 

Syringing: I recommend non-chunky canned food; determine the amount of daily food your dog needs to sustain his weight, divide that amount in half and spoon that much into a blender for one meal (you and this blender will become inseparable over the coming days). Add enough warm water to blend easily into a very fine puree and spend the next two weeks gently syringing one meal into the side of the dog's lips. Or, you can cut to the chase. Since we're talking about getting nutrition into the dog, not fine dining, I take a no-nonsense approach. Pry the dog's mouth open and squeeze the syringe plunger down so that the food trickles to the side and back of the dog's mouth. It takes a bit of time to get the hang of this since you don't want the dog to aspirate food into his lungs.

Stuffing: This was my least favorite means of getting food into a dog. It was messy, degrading, and I always felt like I was preparing my dog's liver to make fois gras. But in a nutshell, you make "food bombs" that are narrow enough to slide down the back of the dog's throat. There are folks out there who are really good at doing this - I've seen them at dog shows - and some dogs (even healthy dogs who just don't eat well on the road) become so used to eating this way that they'll stand calmly, lift up their little heads and open their mouths like guppies for the next "bomb." But since all we care about is getting nutrition into the dog, if this works for you, that's what counts.

IV: no brainer. At this point, a dog is so critically ill that this is pretty much a final option. And it's still no substitute for the calories gotten from real food.

Stomach tube: I think this is what separated me from the boys. When faced with a dog whose heart medication caused anorexia, I had but little choice to pull out all the stops. Syringe feeding, food bombs - these were not long term solutions. Guided by my vet, we made the decision to insert a stomach tube. Mind you, at the time we thought the tube would be a short term fix until my dog ate on his own. Keep reading.

The first tube put in was an ugly, brown rubber affair that was as long as the Pennsylvania turnpike. It was SO long that it had to be wrapped around my dog's mid section with an ace-bandage when not in use. Over time, I got to be pretty clever with ways to get it out of everyone's way and ultimately settled on a woman's tube top slid over the dog. I prepared the food as if I was going to syringe it into the dog's mouth, only it went into the tube. I followed that with water to "clean" out the tube and voila, we were done.In less than a week, the dog knew the sound of the blender, knew what was coming and would lie down on his side in preparation for his meal.

Each day before I approached the blender,however, I always offered the dog his meal in a bowl since it was my fondest desire that the dog eat like a dog. After months and months, however, I knew this wasn't going to happen. Ever. At that point, my vet and I had a frank discussion about options and that's when he mentioned a permanent tube, one inserted from the inside out. What he had in mind was a new product, one never before used in canines (at least not in our state). The "Bard" was a gastrostomy device made of silicon that was successfully used to feed disabled children. The "button" was inserted into my 13 1/2 year old dog who, with the exception of the geriatric heart condition which caused the eating problems in the first place, was in otherwise good health.

Unlike the previous tube, this was a slick silicon "button" that fit flush against my dog's stomach. A little "lid" flicked it open like the flip-top portion of a tube of toothpaste.Compared to what I had been working with, it was a Porsche compared to an Edsel and no one else ever knew it was there.

The tube enabled my dog to live with a good quality of life for a couple of more years. Feeding him took less than five minutes and afterwards, he would run with the other dogs, bark into the wind, enjoy the sun on his back and know that I adored him. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Because of the seemingly radical step we took to ensure this dog's survival, it wasn't something I discussed openly among my dog friends. Too many people out there feel that if a dog can't eat on his own, he's not meant to live. To them I say, "Phooey." The dog wanted to live, to survive and feel the hand of those who loved him rubbing his ears. But he couldn't eat. His spirit was willing and he would have done anything to please his mistress, but this one thing he couldn't do. How then, was I to deny him the one thing I could do to help him?

Hopefully, those of you reading this won't have to go down the roads I've traveled in the last 20+ years to help the odd dog who wouldn't eat. But if you do, there are some options out there; by discussing them frankly, hopefully I've removed a little of the stigma attached to them.

Here Susi Szeremy does what Susi does best- entertaining while educating.  

Somewhere on the northeastern seaboard is a woman who is alive only because of divine intervention. And scattered throughout the United States are the fifty or so individuals who came as close to murdering her as a collective crowd can get at a dog show. HAD the unthinkable been done and the case gone to court, my imaginary Court of Law (made up wholly of dog-showing men and women), would have dismissed the charges as justifiable homicide. And this woman's heinous crime? Planting herself at the entrance of the Best of Breed ring with a class bitch in full blown season for no good reason other than an apparent out-of-mind experience. Not one male Special who entered the ring that day failed to detect this bitch's delectable odor; Not one of the handlers showing these male dogs failed to struggle mightily as they tried various handling tricks to get their dogs to show beautifully for one of the sport's prized plums: Best of Breed at a National Specialty.

Makos Pulik