This summer Elly had another episode of her IBD–bloody diarrhea. I immediately put her on metronidazole, which is one of the most awful tastes in the world. By the end of the week, Elly would not come near me. She’d lean on anyone but me. Rather than continue to make her hate me and my pills, I opted to take her off Rimadyl entirely and simply let her rest. She was on Rimadyl for nearly a year because she was clearly sensitive to touch along her spine, not moving well, and so on. After stopping the Rimadyl, Elly pretty much spent about two weeks just lying around the house, seeking out the softest bed, growling at the puppy when he came near her–in short, being old and cranky. It may have been from recovery from the IBD as much as from all the arthritis.

But after a few weeks, Elly started perking up again, and now, as long as I don’t push her and let her get all the rest she wants, she seems to mostly be moving well and feeling okay, even without the Rimadyl. I think being able to move freely while on Rimadyl may have helped some things to heal. It’s been about two months now and she’s willing to come near me, as long as I reward very consistently.

With feeling better came a return to her old escape artist ways. She’s stayed within our fenced yard for two years, but about a month ago, I looked out to find her in the neighbor’s yard. There’s a fence all along that side, but part of it is a stone wall, wide and only two feet tall, with a five foot drop on the other side. When the neighbor’s pine started producing pine nuts and the squirrels moved in, it was too much for Elly. Somehow she got into Mollie’s yard. I walked around the block (I’m not going over that wall), brought her back, and let her go in the yard. She was over the wall in seconds: she jumped to the top, then jumped down the five feet. No hesitation. I blocked off the top of the wall with an exercise pen; she went to another section, with a seven-foot drop. I blocked it. She then found a section with a bigger drop, where she climbed a grass plant, knocked down half of it to cover the fence, and slid down the stems.

I want Elly with me if I’m ever locked up and need to escape. If nothing else, she can help with digging the tunnel.

(I have fixed the fence problems and she hasn’t gotten out in three whole days. Of course, it took her two years last time, so I shouldn’t feel too safe.)

Elly has IBD (irritable bowel disease) and has shown symptoms for at least the last five years. I mostly control it with diet, probiotics, and the occasional course of metronidazole, but… last week she had the absolute worst episode ever. I thought, seriously, that it was all over.

It started with ordinary diarrhea, the kind she gets from time to time. I treat that by not feeding her for about twelve hours, then given her white rice made with broth and a tiny bit of meat. So Tuesday she got no food, and Tuesday evening she got white rice. Wednesday she seemed better and I gave her some rice and vegetables and a little ground beef, and then she had some more diarrhea but not too awful. She woke me up at midnight to say she needed to go out RIGHT NOW! (Grossness alert for the rest of the paragraph.) She had liquid diarrhea about every half an hour until around 4 AM, which is when she started spraying blood from her anus. She was trying to get out the door as I was opening it, and she failed. Fortunately the door is glass and was easy to clean. She came back in, and it happened again a few minutes later. At that point, I decided I would be at the vet when they opened (7:30) (instead of calling first); I put her in my shower and closed the shower door.

(More grossness coming for this paragraph too.) At 6, I put a crate in my car, lined it with old stained towels, and went to get Elly. The walls and floor of the shower were covered with blood. The mat I’d put on the floor had bloody footsteps. Jay said it looked like a horror movie scene. It smelled of carnage and the smell was quite alarming to poor Dancer.

Amazingly, she didn’t not have another attack on the way to the vet. We saw the first vet to arrive, and she immediately put Elly on intravenous fluids and metronidazole. I left Elly there for about 30 hours and she had no further bleeding. The vet said she was calmly accepting of all that had to be done for her.

When I picked Elly up the next evening, $450 poorer, she was happy to see me, but clearly exhausted from the whole thing. She slept for 12 hours straight, barely moving.

But Friday morning–what a difference! She was cheerful, happy, unfazed by all that had transpired. She even wrestled for a few minutes with Dancer before she went back to sleep.

Today, Monday–I’d say she’s absolutely fine. She’s had no further diarrhea, no further bleeding. Her feces are completely normal. I may never be the same, however.

I went back to the original research on canine nutrition.

It’s mostly presented in the book Nutrition of the Dog by Clive McCay. It’s readily available used for fairly cheap if you do a search on ABEbooks.com (the website of the American Booksellers Exchange–great for finding used books). It was published in 1943 and is about how to maintain research dogs if you’re going to be doing research.

Dogs were used in much early medical research, on diabetes, rickets, and in early B-vitamin research. I had the good fortune at MIT to take biochemistry from Gene Brown who did the original research on B vitamins in the ’30s and he’d mentioned some of the research; it was mostly done by elimination diets. When I started doing working out diets for Elly, as a result of her inflammatory bowel disease, I kept hearing all the stuff about raw diets and was curious where it originated.

Lots of people will tell you that raw diets are a result of the study with cats where cats died if they were given cooked food. True. That’s because long cooking destroys taurine which is an essential nutrient for cats but not for dogs. And cats are obligate carnivores while dogs are omnivores. Dogs evolved from wolves as scavengers in village dumps, according to Coppinger, and I think his research on that makes a lot of sense. (McCay also talks about the role of dogs in scavenging and thus keeping villages healthy.) So dogs evolved from wolves as scavengers and part of that was eating cooked food, because we do.

I wanted to get more information on the original research on dog diets. I went back to Clive McCay and I read his book. He was maintaining populations of dogs for researchers and his interests seem to have been having healthy dogs for the researchers and not the dogs themselves. They bred the dogs so as to have a large controlled population. (John Gibbons, the developer of the heart-lung machine, was a family friend; he did his first surgeries on dogs, too. Dog research used to be a lot more common than it is now.)

McCay–like any good lab–wanted to keep his costs down, so he was mostly feeding stuff no one else wanted. One of his diets used tomato pomace, which is what’s left if you press tomatoes for juice. (I notice it’s also used in the Wellness food I feed.) He feed “meat scraps from the butcher” as well. And here’s the quotation: “Over a century ago, Magendie found that dogs could be kept alive for long periods upon fresh bones; but if the bones were boiled, the dogs died within a couple of months.” (p.26, third printing, 1946). He goes on to say “the cooking of meat for dogs is a waste of time from the point of view of nutrition.” (p. 26)

With regard to the tomato pomace, he says it “is a rich source of pectin, which regulates the water of the feces within limits and safeguards the dog from diarrhea and constipation under normal circumstances.” (p. 103). Here you have the reason why the diet rich in fruits and vegetables works so well for IBD.

(I also like McCay’s observation that “probably the greatest evil in over-feeding either men or animals is the deposition of excess body fat. It shortens the span of life.” (p. 21))

McCay notes that some foods are dangerous for dogs when fed raw. Corn and eggs both should be cooked. Carrots provide more useable vitamin A when cooked.

While McCay’s book is almost seventy years old, I’ve found the research in his book stands up well. He discusses calorie-limited diets. His proportions of various vitamins and minerals in the canine diet are still recommended. He talks extensively about how different diets affect the feces (dogs feed just meat and bones apparently defecate as little as once a week). He even addresses the needs of dogs (and humans) for adequate amounts of vitamin D. One thing I like is that his book predates the chemical approach to nutrition that is now so common; his recommendations for vitamin supplementation usually require adding a specific food to the diet, not a chemical powder.

She’s lost some weight in the last few weeks, and I thought it was because I’d been working so hard on her fitness. Now, of course, I’m worried about her IBD. Poor Elly, it’s not easy.

Poor Elly. IBD. Hip dysplasia. A sore shoulder off and on for months now. I took her in to get the shoulder xrayed to see what the story is–and while she was there the vet, the excellent Evelyn Robertson, removed a mole from her flank and sent it for biopsy. It came back as a LOW-GRADE hemangiosarcoma. Low-grade hemangiosarcomas are not as bad as some others, but it still sucks, the prognosis is good but not great.

So today she had three more moles removed and biopsied. Sunday I washed her and checked her skin, and yesterday I shaved her all over with a 10-blade and Stacia and I checked her skin again. We found five spots that I pointed out to Evelyn, and she felt three of them needed to be biopsied. She did the removals under local anesthesia, apparently Elly behaved quite well. She is home and wearing a sweater, both to keep her warm and to keep her from chewing on the stitches. Results in a few days.

Anyway, this year I want to accomplish these things in agility:

• run faster (me and the dogs)
• run clean more often in competition, which will mean being more precise about my handling
• get Elly some titles that aren’t novice titles (she has nine novice titles!) while making sure she’s still having a good time
• teach Dancer the teeter so well that she loves it

I have some big dreams that I want to make progress towards:

• I’d like to move both Elly and Dancer into Excellent level competition

Outside of agility:

• I want to get the book my sister and I are working on out the door and get it published.

Yesterday in the afternoon I took Elly and Dancer to Camp Charlie to play with Raven and Diane. The dogs had a lovely time and ran and ran and ran. Elly, of course, dug and dug and dug in between bouts of racing and chasing. She didn’t catch anything though. But there was another dog there that joined us for a bit and I got nearly knocked over in the course of the roughhousing, and ended up so sore that I took a hot bath and two advil, skipped dinner, and went to bed with a book. (In this case, it was a trashy murder mystery about knitting) I was asleep by 9. This morning I’m fine, though.

I’ve been surprised that Elly had no ill effects from her meal of vole. She’s allergic to so many things. But nothing. In fact, at the trial Saturday she was running like her tail was on fire.

When Elly (also 24″ at the shoulder but more heavily muscled) first developed her IBD (irritable bowel disease), she weighed 49 pounds. When we put her on prednisone and the inflammation was eliminated, she gained 17 pounds in 2 months, going to 66 pounds… which is way too much for her. Once she was off the prednisone and we figured out what she could eat without getting bloody diarrhea (I hope no one’s reading and eating), she started losing weight, going quite rapidly to 57 pounds in about two months. In the year since then, I’ve been focusing on her overall fitness and trying to deliver a healthy diet. As of this morning, she is at a low of 54.5 pounds. I think another pound should do it. The slimmer she is, the better for her hips–but I don’t want to send her into another IBD bout either.

On an unrelated note, I’ve been trying something completely different with Elly’s nasty leash habits (she can pull you over!). Since she heels fine if you have treats, and pulls like a percheron if you don’t… I’ve been trying the method where you turn around and go the opposite direction at the second she pulls on the leash. Last night it took SEVENTEEN turns to get from our front door to the top of the steps into the play area… Ten minutes, but she did stop jerking me around. With consistency and a few years, it should be possible to walk out the front door without being worried about being pulled over.

Elly has irritable bowel disease and has multiple food allergies as well, specifically to soy, salmon, dairy, lamb, wheat (in large quantities) and probably a few other things I haven’t tried yet. A year ago, she spent three months on prednisone to calm down her system, and since then she’s been mostly fine. I cook for her and Dancer most of the time, usually a soup of dehydrated vegetables with chicken broth, flax seed oil, lactobacillus capsules, and some chicken liver or roast chicken, sometimes a bit of beef.

For training, I make special chicken liver and oatmeal brownies. I put the recipe on its own page.