Voodooo poop-doo, aka the thing nobody tells you about puppies
Soft poops, a vet visit, a mahoosive consulting room incident, and the probiotic that turned things around in 12 hours. Here's what nobody tells you about puppy digestion.
If you missed part one, Eliot has been treating my living room carpet like his personal toilet for three weeks. We've got the cleaning situation sorted (Shark StainStriker, non-negotiable). But we also needed to sort out why the poops were so... eventful.
Stop the drop
If you bring home a puppy, expect soft poops from day one. The combination of stress from leaving their mum and family, travelling, a new house, and new smells will absolutely upset their digestion. You'll also get their food wrong and overdo it on the treatos. It's basically a rite of passage.
I thought I was being sensible by getting some Protexin Pro-Kolin. Ho boy. I should have gone with my instincts and bought Purina FortiFlora.
A bit of backstory
Bertie had IBD. It's like Crohn's disease in dogs, and it was awful for the first year. He constantly had an upset stomach, to the point where his poop was a trauma-inducing, indescribably awful situation. House training him took ages. He was obviously in a lot of discomfort because we couldn't figure out what was going on, so he'd wee too much and couldn't produce a solid poop for love nor money.
Probiotics never worked for him. Ever. Which was actually a clue that something else was wrong. But that's a more detailed story for another day.
What I did know, from the golden retriever my ex and I had before Bertie, was that FortiFlora was some kind of voodoo magic wonder drug.
Back to Eliot
Still carrying a bit of PTSD from Bertie's IBD saga, I was on edge. So my wonderful vet (who diagnosed Bertie, and who I have stalked across three different practices every time he's moved) ran a faecal culture to check if something else was going on. Largely because Eliot took a mahoosive shit in the middle of the consulting room during his second round of jabs, and we could both see it wasn't great.
I was hoping for an explanation. I did not get one. Tests came back clear.
So, back to probiotics. My vet said a human one would work wonders, but they're eye-wateringly expensive and I'm on a tight budget right now. The only requirement was to avoid binders or bulking agents, because they can actually interfere with how effective the probiotics are. It's the same with human varieties; mix them with the wrong stuff and they're basically useless.
So I went with FortiFlora.
The results
It's day three, he's had two doses, and I could already see an improvement yesterday. Praise be to DOG. A solid poop. Also, slightly less of an arsehole. Only slightly. He's still a puppy-sized dick most of the time.
Watching him demolish his bowl of kibble when FortiFlora is dusted over it is a bit like watching a canine cokehead hoovering up a line. FML.
FortiFlora comes in a single paper sachet (better for the planet) that you just sprinkle on food. Easy to administer, and probably easier to digest. In the space of 12 hours we went from frequently soupy poop to solid and regular. His behaviour also improved, slightly.
The long game
Here's something my vet told me that I didn't know before: probiotics will leave their system after about two days if you stop giving them. So if I did a short course and then stopped, we'd essentially be back to square one. Given that, we're keeping Eliot on FortiFlora until he switches to adult food at six months, and then we'll reassess.
Worth knowing before you buy a single sachet and think you're done.
And finally
You don't get a puppy and expect it to be a perfect sweet angel baby that does exactly what you want, when you want it. You wouldn't expect a three-month-old baby to be using the toilet. It's tiring, stressful, and honestly I could cry sometimes, but it's really not worth it. As the great Jamie Tartt said: "It's all just poopeh, let it flow."
PS: To the people wrinkling their noses about the carpet situation. I'm a. not letting him poop on the carpet, and b. I'd take a couple of months of this over a poonami on the daily from a baby. Hard pass.
PPS: I went for a smorgasbord of different terms for poop throughout these posts because, like Eliot shitting on the carpet, variety is the spice of life.
I paid for both the Pro-kolin and the FortiFlora out of my own pocket. Wish I hadn’t bought the first one but there we go. This is the third post on a blog that nobody is reading at the time of publishing except me, so y’know… nobody’s giving me free shit. Altho I wish someone would give me 6 months of FortiFlora because it’d save me a few squid. If you want to buy either product (links go to FortiFlora):
Or Google it.