Food, Glorious Food!

Duncan's allergies have been pretty good lately (except when Jax visits), so we've been running a few food trials to see if we can introduce something beyond kangaroo and oatmeal into his diet. Since a food trial consists of giving him large amounts of a new food for a couple of weeks – deliberately trying to provoke a reaction – he is very enthusiastic about them!

The results: a little bit of bad news, but a lot of good news as well:

The Bad News

Duncan loved the week he spent eating enormous quantities of chicken. But unfortunately he spent equally enormous amounts of time scratching. Not quite the old "scratch 'til you bleed" level – that must have been a cumulative effect from all his many allergies – but far more than we want.

So chicken is off the menu permanently. Unfortunately, chicken seems to be a very common ingredient in most dog foods & treats, so a lot of things are ruled out, but it's good to know what to avoid.

The Good News

Scarfing down two large lamb meatloaves plus a batch of dehydrated treats made from stewing lamb over the course of a couple of weeks didn't seem to cause any extra scratching – great news!

We celebrated by going to Ren's and buying a bag of Orijen's lamb treats.

It's easier to "Leave It" for the photo op if you don't look.

The really exciting news is that he doesn't seem to be allergic to beef! This is wonderful, because let's face it - stores that sell kangaroo are few and far between. Even lamb isn't all that easy to find. But beef is in every supermarket, it goes on sale, and there are even some commercial dog treats that are beef-only. And his lordship loves it; after gobbling down his "final exam" (a big bowl of stewed beef), he was caught counter-surfing in search of more!

Fish is a "maybe", simply because he really hasn't had enough to be 100% sure. But a few packages of freeze-dried fish treats didn't seem to cause any problems, so at least in small quantities it seems okay. This might be helpful if/when we try to switch him to a non-prescription food, since some of them have fish as an ingredient.

With meats pretty well covered, we will probably move on to test some veggies, and other goodies like peanut butter or pumpkin. It's slow going, because it takes about 4 weeks to test each item, including "recovery" time. Sometimes it's easier to see a reduction in scratching when the food is discontinued than to notice a gradual increase while he's eating it, so we can't just jump from testing one food directly to another.