[Continued from Scary Symptoms]

A TURNING POINT:  How do I treat dog kidney disease?  I had to get my dog to eat so I had to find out how to treat kidney disease in dogs.  I got started right away so anxious to get her interested and excited about eating again.

So just where you can find how to treat dog kidney disease? Granted, in the very beginning I was so dismayed when she wouldn’t eat the prescription canned moist foods made for kidney-disease dogs and I really tried as I am a firm believer in that when they get hungry enough they’ll eat.  Well not so when they have kidney disease.  So I started researching all that I could online and I was just thrilled to find a nutritious treat idea which she ate readily and I was so pleased to have her eating something nutritious as she loved my homemade sweet potato treats, especially with a drop of Lite Bleu Cheese Dressing on them and I had read sweet potato is a fermentable soluble fiber that absorbs toxins and allows them to be removed through her stool and not add to the work of the kidney so I felt I would just make her a vegetarian.  And I did not push fluids as I had read an article to allow the natural thirst mechanism work. [Note:  My Full Diary has links to my research.]

But I came to realize that eating just sweet potato treats would not be even close to a nutritious diet and I had to get her eating a balanced diet with protein.  And that is when my research led me to raw green beef tripe – touted as a miracle food. My vet said to feed quality protein and I thought this was it.   I introduced it to her first with a canned, grain-free tripe product sold by my local pet food store and she Loooooooved it!  And I thought although that was pretty good for her just think how the real thing would benefit her even more without any fillers or additives.  So I found a supplier of raw pet foods and because of the mandatory minimum of frozen packages that are needed to make shipping cost effective, I ordered their Ground Green Beef Tripe (with spleen) with other raw pet meats.  Because now that she was not vomiting and actually keeping food down I had to acknowledge she had damaged kidneys, and I had read my objective needed to be to get the small remaining healthy part of her kidney functioning optimally and to not contribute to any further deterioration and feeding affected animals a proper diet usually preserves remaining nephron function (again my full diary has much more about this and the links to where I read it all!).  I had read also I had to concentrate on keeping as much phosphorus out of her as possible,  supplying nutrients in the most accessible form and so the other raw meat selections I made like ground chicken, pork, beef and venison were all ground with bones and organs so the bone calcium would offset the phosphorus (calcium is a phosphorus blocker) and more like a dog would eat in the wild.  And I didn’t find it any more expensive than what I had been feeding (keeps nicely in the freezer) and in fact I probably came out ahead with lowered dental bills as the acid in raw meat keeps tarter from forming on the teeth.  But finding tripe was indeed the turning point because she ate that raw food out of her bowl like I couldn’t believe and everything just improved from there. Skipping ahead, at one point I even had to cut back her food intake because she was gaining too much weight and it would be hard on her back legs as she had luxating patellas.  (How many kidney-disease parents have THAT problem?) This video shows her interest in eating 9 months after diagnosis as I wanted to show off her progress with my family!     [Continued in About Nutrition]