Penny's cough is improving

Yesterday Penny alarmed us by throwing up her breakfast, some hours after she ate it. On reflection, I think this was because I put some apple cider vinegar in her food, hoping to improve her possible kennel cough.

She had small meals of boiled chicken and rice last night and this morning and seems to be fine as far as her appetite and digestion are concerned. I won't be trying any more apple cider vinegar, but I'll continue with a quarter teaspoon of top-grade manuka honey for the next couple of days.

We've gone on no walks the last two days, and I think the rest is helping her. Because of renovations on the house, she had plenty to keep her occupied, checking out the tradesmen and saying hello as they arrived, so I don't think she was bored.

She has pretty much not coughed at all today, so tomorrow we'll take a short stroll around the streets, keeping away from other dogs. (On the other hand, Penny has only one speed on walks, and it's not a stroll, more like a race to find as much discarded food as possible, as quickly as possible, with quick rushes towards interesting smells on the bases of trees and shrubs and poles. But we'll try to keep it restful and healthful.)

I've blocked off the compost heap, because I turned it today. Penny thinks the compost heap smells delightful at any time.

kennel cough again?

Penny has a cough. Again...

I had a look at a clip that shows the difference between a heart-related cough and kennel cough and I'm glad to say her cough seems more like the latter.



It's not a bad cough, so we're not going to the vet yet, but if it's worse tomorrow we'll get her checked. In the meantime, we're going for only short strolls, aiming to stay away from other dogs in case Penny's contagious, and also to let her rest and recover.

I'm trying a remedy suggested to us by a tradesman who was here today, and who is a dog lover. (BTW, we do wonder whether the cough is a result of months of home renovations and the consequent dust.)

After he suggested honey and vinegar, I looked at America's Blue Lacy Dog Blog, which has an article on natural remedies for kennel cough. We're giving Penny a little bit of - super expensive! - Manuka honey and putting a touch of apple cider vinegar in her water. The woman in the health food shop said the vinegar is better than most, because it has 'the mother' in the bottom of the bottle.

A site called Authority Nutrition (now there's an impressive title for a site, lol) says:

Organic, unfiltered apple cider vinegar...also contains "mother,", strands of proteins, enzymes and friendly bacteria that give the product a murky, cobweb-like appearance.

On reading more, I gather that there's some thought that we shouldn't give too much honey to dogs, so I guess we'll only try it for a couple of days, and assess her stools and her general health. After all, it's wonderful stuff for humans, so it won't go to waste.

There's a great deal of information about honey and about its benefits and dangers for dogs here.

when dogs seem to be sick but we're not sure

Penny was lying on her mat asleep this afternoon when suddenly she seemed to be unable to catch her breath. Because she had been sneezing yesterday, I decided to go to a vet and check whether the kennel cough was back. The vet, who seemed to be aged about twelve - I'm definitely getting old - checked her thoroughly and said she seemed fine. I particularly wanted to be sure her lungs sounded good, and they did.

The vet suggested I might have seen Penny reverse sneezing, or that perhaps her sneezing relates to allergies, both of which suggestions sound sensible to me.

I have seen Penny reverse sneeze, and PetPlace has a couple of video clips of dogs reverse sneezing. I'll keep an eye on her and check whether that is the issue. If it is, I won'tworry, as reverse sneezing doesn't seem to be a big problem.

One symptom was that when she barked, she would start sneezing and coughing, but seeing she's at the front door right now, barking up a storm to tell us there are cats in the front yard, I guess that's not a problem now.

As soon as we arrived at the vet's this afternoon, Penny looked the picture of health - as usual. I guess vets get used to owners saying, 'But she looked sick when we were at home!'

On the way home, we called in at Bundoora Park.




There's a little hill - called Mount Cooper, because our continent is so flat that we call every anthill a mountain - and we had a great view from there. It's an old volcanic vent, but seeing it hasn't erupted for 9.2 million years, I felt safe.

nasal spray for kennel cough vaccine

Hsin-Yi has a video clip at YouTube that shows Honey the Great Dane having the nasal spray for kennel cough prevention.



If you'd like to read what Hsin-Yi said about it, her comment is on my previous post.

Thanks, Hsin-Yi!

yet more about kennel cough in dogs

Penny seems to feel a bit better today from her current bout of kennel cough, well enough to do her door-guarding duty, but her barking is not up to scratch, because she has to pause to cough and sneeze.



I've been told to get her out in warm sunshine, if possible, but wouldn't you know it, after months of unseasonably dry and warm weather we've been gifted with proper wet, cold autumn weather. Wait a minute. The sun just came out...



Okay, back inside after ten minutes in a the sun. An informative site at Lowchensaustralia says that if the infection runs a normal, uncomplicated course, there's no need for antitbiotics. (That's what the vet at the animal clinic told me the other night.) A couple of points that surprised me, however, were that it is actually possible for this bronchitis-related disease to pass to humans, and that dogs can shed the virus, ie pass it on, for up to fourteen weeks.

The vet who treated Penny at the emergency clinic said an intranasal spray is a more effective preventative than the annual vaccination, but the site at Lowchensaustralia says:

This vaccine is not without its problems. It is a very effective vaccine, but it must be used carefully and is generally only recommended for dogs that are at high risk. If your dog is not shown, boarded, or comes into contact with stray dogs, your dog is considered low risk.

Hmm... Penny spends lots of time in contact with other dogs, through canine freestyle, flyball and pet dog training with Cindy.

However, when I rang my own vet, he said he prefers the vaccination, as the nasal spray is not necessarily that much more effective as to warrant the trouble in administering it to dogs who hate having something sprayed up their nose.

pesky kennel cough again!

On Tuesday evening, when I was pet-sitting for a friend and Penny was helping me, she started coughing up froth all over my friend's loungeroom and kitchen. Quite dramatic, actually. I decided to take her off immediately to the after-hours clinic near my friend's house - humungously expensive, but worth the peace of mind.

(I did stop to disinfect the house as much as I could before we went, by the way, and my friend was philosophical when she returned, given that kennel cough is passed by an airborne virus and no amount of cleaning the floor was going to do much good.)

Having relieved my mind of the fear that Penny might have a cooked chicken bone stuck in her oesophagus - oh, why didn't we ever successfully train her not to scoff everything she sees in the street? - the vet told me she was ninety percent sure Penny had kennel cough. Okay, not so bad...

We were given a BIG bottle of prescription cough linctus and told to give it two to three times a day for a while. I asked what the point was, given that kennel cough is a virus and basically has to run its course, and the vet said the cough linctus eases coughing and prevents secondary infections developing as a result of damage from constant coughing. (I think that's what she said.)

I was surprised at how easy it is to administer the cough syrup. I just sit behind Penny, hold my hand over her muzzle and lift the corner of her upper lip, revealing a conveninetly placed gap behind her big tooth, and squeeze the stuff in. Penny is a saint of a dog, fortunately, and only squirms around a little. I was proud of her at the vet's where she had to suffer a thermometer up the backside, a lung check with the stethoscope and squeezing of her throat. (As I posted last time she had kennel cough, if you press lightly on the dog's throat just under the jaw and above the collar, she will cough immediately if she has this virus.)

Surprisingly, she didn't cough when the vet did that, but seeing she was spluttering froth around the vet clinic floor, I guess it wasn't necessary to see her cough right then.

Here she is the next day, all tuckered out, and perhaps a bit sleepy from the cough medicine.



The vet was insistent that we do other dogs a favor and stay on our own property for two weeks. Two weeks!!

However, I think it would be two weeks from the time she first showed symptoms - I'll have to check that - and if we hadn't been so silly we would have kept her away from other dogs as soon as we noticed her sneezing and coughing.

lumps, bowels and doggy illnesses

Penny's been keeping us on our toes lately. She had her annual vaccinations last week, one of which which should protect her from distemper, infectious hepatitus and parvovirus; the other from bordetella brontiseptica and canine parainfluenza.

Well, I think that's what they were - the teensy tiny stickers on her health record are hard to read, even with my glasses on!

That evening she threw up five times. I rang the local animal hospital and the vet said to keep an eye on her and gave me the phone number of a local all-night clinic. However, she slept through the night okay.

We didn't, though.

In the morning my own vet examined her and he thought she was more likely to have vomited because she had a bowel inflammation. (She had been having jelly-like material in her poos on and off over the last few weeks.)

He put her on antibiotics for a week, which are nearly finished now.

It's hard to know what to do for the best for our beloved animals. There are lots of internet sites with scary stories of pets' reactions to vaccinations, and I did check out lots of such sites when I posted last year about the concern that we over-vaccinate in Australia.

I thought Dog Owners' Guide seemed to have a reasonable overview of the question. Basically they referred to vomiting as a severe reaction, but said we should still have the vaccinations with the proviso that the dog might need to take antihistamines or the leptospirosis part could be omitted.

They discuss (but not in detail) recent research that suggests we should vaccinate less frequently.

As I write this, Penny is frantically licking her paws. She tends to have a problem with her paws, so it's not a new issue, but I feel sure she's doing it more these last couple of days. So I'm interested in a site that suggests paw licking can be a reaction to vaccinations.

And to top off our worries, when I got home from the vet after the vaccination, I noticed Penny had another lump - this time on the top of her head. It's not long since she had one removed from her chest.

The vet said it would be safer to remove it, but not to worry about rushing into it. I'm fairly sure it is getting smaller every day. At first it was as big as a pea, but I think it's only pin-head size now. Here's hoping!

more about kennel cough

Penny seems much better already but we are trying to make sure she takes it easy for a while. Normally we try to walk for about an hour but today we just strolled along our local streets for ten minutes. It was a great chance to smarten her up on walking nicely on lead because we weren't headed anywhere in particular and we could turn back towards home every time she tightened the lead.

Which brings me to why I'm writing about kennel cough again. Lately it has seemed as if Penny was pullingl so hard on the lead when walking that it was making her cough and gag. We became so concerned that we decided we'd have to use a harness instead of attaching the lead to her collar.

I just had a look at a site about using homeopathy to treat or prevent kennel cough and it had a piece of information that would have made us realise earlier hat was wrong with Penny. It said that you can test for this disease by pressing lightly on the dog's throat just under the jaw and above the collar. If she has kennel cough she will cough immediately.

So that explained the mystery of Penny pulling. She's not actually pulling hard after all, it's probably just that the lightest tug on the collar has been making her cough and gag.

Another extra snippet of information I gleaned tonight is that owners often report that their dog seems to have something stuck in the throat. I read this at the Mar Vista Animal Medical Center. We had been worrying for a few days previously whether Penny had something stuck in her throat, or whether she had scratched her throat.

So, all in all, she sure has the classic symptoms of kennel cough! We'll be making sure she eats well, drinks well and rests over the next few days.

kennel cough and vomiting - it's been a dog's life this week

Penny has been coughing recently. Because she’s our first dog, we are learning as we go and it wasn’t until Jabari’s mum commented that it sounded like kennel cough that we even considered this disease. Penny’s never been to a kennel and in my naivety I thought you couldn’t get it anywhere else. (The power of names to influence our thinking!) Also, her vaccinations are up-to-date and I believed they included kennel cough. We wanted to take her to the vet but the cough is seemingly random and occasional, so we thought there wouldn’t be anything for the vet to observe. (As you can see, we are definitely beginners at dog ownership!)

I rang the vet and the nurse told me that even if dogs are vaccinated against this disease, they can still get it; however, it should be a milder form. I decided to have a look around the Net to see what I could find out. One of the most interesting pieces of information was that there are video clips of dogs with kennel cough on YouTube. When we listened to this one, we thought it sounded similar to Penny’s cough.

Next I thought I would visit the Merck Veterinary Manual. It said:

Spasms of coughing are the outstanding sign. These are most severe after rest or a change of environment or at the beginning of exercise.

This is exactly the situation in which Jabari’s mum noticed Penny coughing. It was as Penny rushed from the car to join Jabari in the park. We’ve also noticed that she coughs when she gets up after resting on her mat.
The Manual also said:

The acute stage of bronchitis passes in 2-3 days; the cough, however, may persist for 2-3 wk.

I also found some relevant information at a site called all doctors. They said the name kennel cough is misleading as it can be caught at any gathering of dogs. It’s caused by a combination of a bacterium and a virus. Dogs with this disease often finish their coughing with gagging or retching and produce frothy phlegm. It can persist for several weeks and sneezing is common.

ThePetCenter.com says dogs will usually recover from this disease without treatment but a visit to the vet is recommended because a cough might be a symptom of another disease entirely. The cough sounds as if the dog needs to "clear its throat" and will be triggered by any extra activity or exercise. In many dogs the general state of health and alertness will be unaffected, and there might be no rise in temperature, or loss of appetite. The symptoms may last from 7 to 21 days but it’s rarely life threatening. It goes on to say that sometimes cough suppressants and occasionally antibiotics are prescribed.


It’s been a ‘medical’ week for Penny. Unfortunately, she became quite sick on Tuesday after I accidentally fed her treats that were too old. (I’ve learned a lesson!!) We rushed to the vet and he gave her a painkilling injection for her sore stomach and a penicillin injection in case of infection.

We’re going to wait a couple of days and see how she does before we go back to the vet. Perhaps the penicillin will help her with the cough. Today when we walked along our local creek she was full of energy and fun but she still occasionally coughed or sneezed.