So this come from recent experience and it was a very scary moment for all of us at Krabi Animal Welfare but I have to admit that we are all a bit on edge seeing as how we are constantly bombarded with news about how the world is falling apart because of disease and viruses.
At the end of it all it turns out that we had jumped the gun and actually ended up spending a bunch of money for nothing because after it was explained to us by a veterinarian who was totally fluent in English and able to explain it to us, we understood what needed to be done, changed it, and the problem (which wasn't really a problem anyway) went away.
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Most animal medical professionals will agree that the best way to detect problems in animals without some sort of invasive and expensive testing is just to monitor what your dog's poo poo looks like when they go to relieve themselves. This is something that we do on a regular basis but our situation is normally the opposite because the animals we take on are normally quite sick when we get them. We are looking for the state of the poo to improve not get worse.
There was an instance recently where we had 15 dogs in our kennels that we were looking after, and one by one, all of their poo started turning green. Some brighter colors than others. It gradually spread to nearly every dog in our kennels. Then, even though we were a bit worried, one of our field techs, who normally goes on feeding runs to strays, started noticing it was also happening with the dogs that we look after in "the wild." This took a lot longer to discover because it was only by chance that one of the dogs happened to do her business near him while he was feeding her. Otherwise, he probably wouldn't have noticed it.
We did some research online (as most people do before they get professionals involved) and found out that this can happen for a number of reasons and one of them was "excessive eating of plants" because chlorophyll cannot be broken down in a dog's digestive system. This would make sense in the field dogs but our dogs at our shelter don't even have access to a tremendous amount of plants on our property (a situation we are trying to remedy and will do so this rainy season which is upon us now.)
So we took the dog with the greenest poop of all and took her to the veterinarian, explained the issue and ran a couple of blood tests only to discover that there was nothing wrong with her that could be determined. We "freaked out" a bit because one of the causes of green poop according to the internet was rat poison, which is a very common and extremely unkind method that some of the Thai population handles the excessive street dog population.
We were at a loss because after a week nothing had changed. The dogs seemed fine but all of their poos were as green as can be.
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After a while one of our members contacted a veterinarian friend in the United States and asked him. He told us that this can be caused by changes in diet such as a sudden change in the brand of dog food. Neither of us who are in charge of overall operations are in charge of acquisition or distribution of the dog food and as you might be aware, most dog food, whether premium or the cheapest on the shelf kind of all look the same.
After some inquiries to the staff we discovered that they had recently transitioned, without our knowledge to a different brand of dog food, one that claimed to have vegetable in it. Since our vet friend in the states told us that this is nothing to be alarmed about provided the dogs don't have other issues we bought their another brand of dog food and changed everyone's diet to that one. Within 2 days everyone was pooping a color of dookie that you would expect to come out of a dog's backside twice a day.
So it was a scary situation that we probably got a bit unnecessarily worked up over. The Thai staff had stockpiled a lot of this particular brand of food that contains vegetable, so we are still using it, but just for the sake of peace of mind, we will not purchase this brand in the future.
The moral of the story is that some times there is no reason to get all worked up over something like this and even though we deal with hundreds of dogs a week, it was all new information to us. Perhaps it will come in handy to someone else out there and save you an expensive trip to the vet's office.
If you would like to see how you can help out, or simply spread the word, please visit our website at
http://krabianimalwelfare.org
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the same happened over here and there is something about green that makes us worry more... well red would probably be worse though.
good to know. I don't currently have a dog and I would definitely freak out if its poo turned green one day