Once a family with a puppy who is growing too fast cuts back on the food, the poop will return to normal. If you have a Golden Retriever and aren’t sure if you are feeding the correct amount, see our growth chart on our page entitled How Much to Feed Your Golden Retriever. Also see our page on and How Much to Feed your Golden Retriever Puppy for more information on how puppies should be growing.
When we started feeding TLC to our puppies, we had virtually no loose stools except for the very occasional bacterial overgrowth that is discussed in the next section. See our page on How to Choose a Dog Food for information on how to choose a food that has adequate fiber without sacrificing on good nutrition. If you’d like to try TLC, click on the link below to get $5.00 off, a free gift, and to go to their website for more information.
Overfeeding puppies will have an even stronger impact. We have had families with our puppies call us reporting that their puppy has begun having chronically loose poop. The first questions we ask are about what the poop looks like and the weight of the puppy. If the puppy is over the weight ranges in our growth chart, the puppy is having loose cow patty looking poop, and the puppy is acting normally in other ways, the culprit is almost certainly too much food. Families will often say that the puppy doesn’t look fat and that the vet says that he is at a healthy weight but decreasing the food still can help.
I am not a veterinarian, so please consult your own vet. However, I’ve been working with puppies for years. I’ve also talked to many other breeders who’ve been working with puppies for long periods of time. Tylan works. Adequate amounts of fiber works. Permanent use of high fiber, low protein diets is seldom necessary. If treated before problems get bad, strong antibiotics will rarely be needed either.
Many people think that a “sensitive stomach” puppy needs to be on a “sensitive stomach” diet for life. What they don’t realize is that most cases of loose stools in puppies can be easily fixed and shouldn’t become chronic. There are good solutions without sacrificing good nutrition for most of these problems. If treated correctly to begin with, these problems should not become chronic.
Overfeeding your puppy can cause diarrhea
Overfeeding your puppy can also lead to diarrhea. If overeating continues for only a couple of days, your pup’s digestive system will recover. However, if you overfeed your pup for an extended period, diarrhea become chronic.
Don’t forget that there are many reasons that your puppy could have diarrhea. Severe diarrhea can hint at serious, life-threatening health problems. It is always best to consult your vet, no matter the cause.
Symptoms of overfeeding your puppy regularly
The primary symptoms of overfeeding a puppy over a duration of time are:
My DOG Has LOOSE STOOLS How to Fix It
Soft, gooey poop is not a joy to clean up at all; worse still if it is runny stool. It’s messy and icky but more importantly, it is possibly an indicator of poor gut health.
In both dogs and humans, diarrhea and vomiting is the body’s natural way to purge itself of a toxin or pathogen. If diarrhea lasts for more than 48 hours, it might be a sign of an underlying health problem.
As dogs love eating things they shouldn’t, it can lead to a pretty upset stomach. Most dog diarrhea and vomiting can be treated at home. However, there are other cases where a visit to the veterinarian may be in order.
In this article, we shed light on when to call it an emergency, what you should do if it is and what you can do if it isn’t.
First, let’s have a basic understanding of how a dog’s digestive system works. The key difference between us and dogs is our jaws. We can chew sideways and grind our food. Our dogs can’t.
Canine jaws are made to crush and tear. That’s about it then they swallow chunks of raw food, especially meat (fresh and not so fresh). That is why their salivary enzymes are designed to kill some bacteria.
Their stomach acids are 3 times stronger than ours, so dogs can digest chunks of food and even bone. Under normal circumstances, food travels through the entire digestive tract in 6 to 10 hours (at the most) to produce a firm, well-formed stool.
Whatever cannot be absorbed into the system is expelled as waste. At times, this system runs into some problems and causes the runs. When this occurs, dogs’ natural instinct is to nibble raw grass.
Why? Cellulose or fibre from greens is hard to digest. It helps to absorb excess liquid build-up in the intestine. At the same time, fibre bulks up matter in the gut and helps to move everything along out.
Next, let us differentiate soft stool from diarrhea. If you look at the poop chart below, you can see representations of consistency from 1 to 7.
The 4th and 5th are undesirable soft or loose turd while numbers 6 and 7 are considered diarrhea. Number 3 can shift to 2 or 4 depending on the dog’s diet.