Pets like humans can develop allergies during their lives. It’s important to understand that allergies develop and you are not born with it. So maybe if your pet or yourself have been fine with something for a long time you can start to be allergic against it the next day. There are different types of allergies. You can be allergic against pollen and things like that, which would be classical hey fever, you can develop a food intolerance or you can be allergic against for example medicine or cleaning agents.
Symptoms of an allergy against pollen can be: skin rashes or sneezing and runny eyes. It can be diagnosed via blood test or intracutaneous allergy testing. The results are reliable and you can treat them via hypersensitation.
Same clinics offer blood tests for food intolerance too. These are not so reliable due to the mechanism of food intolerance. The better way to test for food intolerance is a elimination diet.
Dogs and cats are usually allergic against the protein they are eating, meaning they are allergic against for example beef. Very seldom they are allergic against other ingredients (98% protein 2% other ingredients). Food allergies can have different symptoms. It’s ether skin problems or diarrhea. Even a recurrent ear infection can be a symptom. For elimination diet you ether feed a new protein for example ostrich (be sure the food is single protein!) or you feed processed protein. After 12 weeks the original symptoms will be gone. Then you provoke the allergy by feeding the original food again, if symptoms are recurring you can be sure that it is a food intolerance. Then you test with different 12 weeks periods, which proteins are causing the problem and which don’t. Please also be aware of that protein is in every product of the animal. If your pet is allergic against beef, it can not eat cheese or drink milk from a cow!!
For the rest of the allergies there are no real test, it’s more detective work. Through observing your pet carefully you will find the problem. If you have any questions regarding allergies please do visit Vet Plus or contact us.
