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Amount of Stool


Guest maya's mom

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Guest maya's mom

Due to ongoing gastritis and digestive issues, we have had to move Maya off of dry kibble. Though she was getting a very good food, Orijen and CA Natural prior to that, she is just not digesting the dry kibble properly and has been having vomiting and regurgitation issues that I have posted about previously. After looking into some canned foods, I decided to go with The Honest Kitchen, which is a dehydrated food that is supposed to be top notch. She's been on it a few days and seems to like it and hasn't had any vomiting episodes. But, she is pooping a ton! She used to poop 2 times a day (sometimes 3) while on dry kibble, and it was always very firm and sometimes she would strain to get it out. Since being on the new food, she is pooping at least 4 times a day, and a large amount each time. Much more than before. The stool is nicely formed and bulky looking and she passes it very easily without straining. My question is, should I be concerned that she's pooping so often? I guess my concern would be that she's not absorbing everything she needs. For those of you familiar with THK, she's on the Keen formula.

Thanks!

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I’ll place the caveat front and center: This is correlation and not causation.

However, in his first year, Cerb would have what we euphemistically called “pudding poop”, and lots of it, the majority of the time. Nothing debilitating or worrisome, but hard to pick up, especially on hot sidewalks. At eight months we took a trip to the family cabin in Northern New Mexico, where Cerb proceeded to eat all the cow poop he could find. His stools have been great ever since.

YMMV.

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Not sure. I have one dog that goes twice a day, small-ish stools, firm but not hard. The other will go 3 or occasionally 4 times, but still small-ish and firm but not hard. He is younger and eats more. I switch between Halo (kibble) and Urban Wolf (homemade, dehydrated). There are no issues with my dogs switching between these two foods, which I love and the bag of dehydrated stuff even says there should be no issues with sudden switching. But due to Maya's digestive history, it could take her system a little bit get accustomed to the food. Maybe?

 

To me though, excessive stool usually means too much filler in the food, but I've heard only good things about this Honest Kitchen stuff.

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I see the higher volume with the dehydrated food. In my dog, a 5-year-old BC rescue we've had for a year, if he's on dry kibble, he'll produce hard stools and be irregular in his elimination (perhaps once per day, perhaps once every 1.5 days). We switched him over to a mix of dry and wet food after he'd had a bout of diarrhea, and I noticed that a canned food diet resulted in softer stools that seemed easier to pass and were more regular (twice per day, though occasionally once per day). I should say that he does drink adequate water.

 

I'd started dehydrated food when we went on a trip for a couple of weeks and I didn't want to pack cans for that time period. I immediately noticed that the volume increased with the dehydrated food. While I was concerned that I might be seeing the results of filler, the dehydrated food carries no grain. My suspicion is that it's the increased amount of liquid ingested with the food that makes the difference.

 

I did switch back to canned for a while upon returning home, and noticed the stool volume decrease, but opted to go back to mixing with dehydrated food after noticing that my dog will scarf the kibble/canned mix in less than a couple of minutes, but will take several minutes to eat the kibble/dehydrated mix.

 

At any rate, I speculate that the results I'm seeing are from increased liquid intake coupled with increased dietary fiber from the potatoes and sweet potatoes in the dehydrated food.

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