Dogs and All about Them

Among other causes, we find the eating of indigestible food, drinking foul or tainted water, too much green food, raw paunches, foul kennels, and damp, draughty kennels. Symptoms--The purging is, of course, the principal symptom, and the stools are either quite liquid or semi-fluid, bilious-looking, dirty-brown or clay-coloured, or mixed with slimy mucus. In some cases they resemble dirty water. Sometimes, as already said, a little blood will be found in the dejection, owing to congestion of the mucous membrane from liver obstruction. In case there be blood in the stools, a careful examination is always necessary in order to ascertain the real state of the patient. Blood, it must be remembered, might come from piles or polypi, or it might be dysenteric, and proceed from ulceration of the rectum and colon. In the simplest form of diarrhoea, unless the disease continues for a long time, there will not be much wasting, and the appetite will generally remain good but capricious. In bilious diarrhoea, with large brown fluid stools and complete loss of appetite, there is much thirst, and in a few days the dog gets rather thin, although nothing like so rapidly as in the emaciation of distemper. The Treatment will, it need hardly be said, depend upon the cause, but as it is generally caused by the presence in the intestine of some irritating matter, we can hardly err by administering a small dose of castor oil, combining with it, if there be much pain--which you can tell by the animal's countenance--from 5 to 20 or 30 drops of laudanum, or of the solution of the muriate of morphia. This in itself will often suffice to cut short an attack. The oil is preferable to rhubarb, but the latter may be tried--the simple, not the compound powder--dose from 10 grains to 2 drachms in bolus.