My Dog is Full of Crap

A month ago, my entire world was consumed by dog pee when our new Lab puppy had a urinary tract infection. It was really great. She was expelling nine to ten times her body weight in urine every hour, fortunately only inside the house.

We got that cleared up with twelve rolls of paper towels and two cans of carpet cleaner for the house, and for the dog, an evil-smelling remedy of apple cider vinegar and Greek yogurt. Personally, I would have rather eaten the carpet cleaner.

Amazingly, even after ten days of ingesting that demonic concoction with her food, her poop remained normal.

All that has changed now.

Now, my world revolves around her poop. Now, a month after the pee issues cleared up, she is experiencing some issues in the bowel region. To put it in layman’s terms, we’ve got poopy puddles and potty problems, people.

By the grace of God, however, she has not pooped in the house.

{sound of me knocking on every wooden surface in the house}

I will spare you the less than appetizing details. Suffice it to say, her poop has been anything but normal lately. If you decide to visit our backyard in the next few days, I would strongly suggest bringing some hip waders and a military-style gas mask.

She’s also having trouble “going” all at once, and has been gracious enough to wake me up multiple times the last two nights to allow me to experience her GI tract problems with her. She’s so thoughtful for a canine.

I just hope this passes quickly, because I am out of ideas. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what she could have eaten that would be causing such bowel-related stress. She has been religious about sticking to the standard Labrador retriever diet. This past week she has only eaten:

Thirty sticks

Six pounds of leaves

One plastic outer coating off a cheap baseball, and half the stitches

Just under three acres of grass

One wayward hotdog, whole

Thirty gallons of pool water

Seventeen pounds of bark chips

A handful of lamb lung toasters –I am not making that up – Treats that consist of little pieces of dried lamb lung with waffle marks on them!

Three-quarters of a foam squishy ball

One pair of swim goggles

Fifty or so Rice Krispies

More or less half a roll of duct tape

Somewhere between six inches and a foot of polyethylene pool noodle

Thirty-six square inches of dog bed plush top fuzz

One paper towel

One Lego man’s head, with space helmet

Half a tennis ball

One gravity-stricken slice of a quesadilla, with sour cream, whole

Two feet of nylon rope

And approximately six hundred little shriveled red plum things off the ground from our neighbor’s tree.

Oh, and about five pounds of actual dog food. But she doesn’t really seem to eat that, so much as suck it in, the way a jet engine sucks in air.

I mean, who knows what could be causing this, what with such a strict diet? Your guess is as good as mine.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

ACV for your UTI, ASAP

Dog urine is my life.

Sure, I had hopes and dreams. There were things I wanted to do. Things I wanted to accomplish. I had goals. Those are all gone now. They have been swept aside by a tidal wave of dog pee.

Get a puppy, they said. They’re so adorable, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

I’m not a big fan of them, whoever they are, right now.

A standard healthy puppy has enough pee issues to make you want to cry and then move to a new house. A puppy with a urinary tract infection is roughly four hundred times more annoyingly unpredictable, pee-wise. That’s the kind of puppy we have right now.

Within days of bringing her home, things seemed to be going fairly well. She was sleeping though the night and keeping her bed dry. She was starting to understand that peeing inside the house is frowned upon. She was even starting to clue in that we want her to pee only in certain spots in the back yard, like the grass and the dirt, and not places like the patio, or on our shoes.

All that has changed now that our puppy has a UTI. (UTI is the standard acronym for Urinary Tract Infection, but could easily also stand for Unbelievably Timed Incontinence, or Unexpectedly Tinkling Inside.)

The best way for me to describe what I’m dealing with is to make an analogy to your children. Imagine you have a toddler that you have successfully potty trained. They are sleeping through the night, and no longer need diapers. A milestone has been reached and life is good. Then one day, at Target, they pull down their pants and pee all over the Lucky Charms display in the cereal aisle. As you rush them out of the store in your arms, they pee on you. They pee all over the inside of the car on the way home, and all over the outside of the car once you’re back in the garage.

At this point, your child has somehow released roughly twice their body weight in urine, and they still manage to pee in the hallway on the way to the toilet. Once on the toilet, however, they spend three straight days saying they need to pee, but not producing a single drop of urine.

At this point, you gain some measure of false hope, and decide to remove them from the potty. As soon as they are off the toilet, they proceed to hose down the walls and floor of your living room with twelve gallons of wee-wee during a two-minute impression of a burst water main.

It’s exactly like that, but with a dog.

The standard home remedy for a dog with a UTI is apple cider vinegar. You are supposed to either add it to their food or their water. I want her to actually drink her water, so I decided to add it to her food. The recipe consists of the apple cider vinegar and plain yogurt mixed into her normal dry dog food.

Our dog already eats sticks, leaves, bugs, grass, bark, and seems to be seriously considering how to eat rocks. I always thought her extracurricular diet was weird until I tried the plain yogurt and the ACV. (ACV is the cool internet acronym for Apple Cider Vinegar, but could easily also stand for All Contents Vile, or Actually Contains Vomit.)

It tastes like someone mixed up some chunky sour milk with pickle juice in a blender with a rotten apple. The fact that she eats that unholy concoction is proof that dogs will literally eat anything. I would rather eat grass and rocks than try either of them again.

On further advice from reputable internet sources, I have begun adding blueberries to the mixture to help the healing process. So, along with the plain yogurt, she should be getting pretty healthy, pretty fast. I mean, if you subbed in kombucha for the ACV - which probably taste identical - my dog now has the same diet as most yoga instructors.

Since my life now consists only of listening for my dog to whine about pee, encouraging my dog to pee, waiting for my dog to pee, watching my dog pee, praising her for peeing in the correct locations, and cleaning up gallons of pee that happened in the pee-free zones, I’m not getting much else done.

That’s why you just read a column about dog pee. You’re welcome.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!