Depression? New Canned food

2014 Aug. 4th

Big Steve seems depressed lately.  I see him licking his paw and chewing. He also refuses to eat sometimes.

My husband and I are on summer vacation and there were times we needed to board him to dog sitters. It works well with some cases, but there are cases it won’t work. The day before we leave home, Big Steve already knows we are going somewhere, but he just doesn’t know if we are taking him with us. So he must be so stressed out.

This summer, we visited my family in Japan for the first time in 6 or 7 years. We needed to board Big Steve to one of our dog sitters during the trip. It worked pretty good! He loved being there. She, the sitter, always has many dogs boarding at her house, so Big Steve can play with them. He was a happy dog when we came back from Japan.

Now there are other times we needed to board him with other sitters. When we pick Big Steve up from these sitters, he doesn’t seem so happy. Even the day we took him to one of my sitter’s house, he throw up.

So we try to take him to dog park often so that he can social with other dogs. He seems like having a good time at the dog park, but he seems not so happy after returning home.

As his owners, we think what we can do to make him happy. I realized how he is probably bored of his prescribed canned food. Vet told us only give him that prescribed canned food, GI Low fat, but I asked vet if we could give him other food. Usually, vet seems like not so sure what’s okay and what’s not. Well, I can understand why that is so because every dog is different, and we just don’t want to take any risk. However we know about Big Steve better than vet, and there are some time we, owner, need to decide what to give to make our dog happy.

Today, I found this new canned food called “Chopped Lamb & Rice Dinner – Premium dog food with vegetables” at Trader Joe’s.  Ingredients are good and contains only 4% min of crude fat. It’s kind of difficult to find a good low fat canned food, but I though this may be good for Big Steve, so we bought it.

We added some of this canned food to his prescribed canned food, and he loved it so much! He seems happier!! 🙂 We need to keep an eye on his diet, but I hope this helps his stress.

The following picture is the new canned food we are giving to Big Steve. It’s good!