7 things about dog hairballs including tips on how to prevent them.

Following my doggy hairball "misadventure" we've been doing a bit of research about them, like you do, here's what we found out:

1. Hairballs are also known as Tricholiths ~ defined as "A calcified intestinal bezoar that contains hair" by The Free Dictionary 

or 

a Trichobezoar ~ "a bezoar (a mass trapped in the gastrointestinal system) formed from the ingestion of hair." Wikipedia 

2. Hairballs are formed by ingested hair that does not pass smoothly through the digestive tract to be eliminated.

3. Dogs get hairballs when they ingest large amounts of hair due to excessive licking or eating prey.

4. Hairballs can get stuck in the dog's esophagus, stomach or small intestine. 

5. Symptoms of your dog having a hairball problem include:   gagging, vomiting, trying to cough something up, loss of appetite, lethargy, diarrhea, stomach bloating.

6. Preventing hairballs is important as they can make your dog seriously ill, even resulting in death, here's how:

Groom your dog regularly to remove loose hair.

Vacuum regularly to remove hair from your dog's environment.

Make sure your dog is flea free, licking and biting at fleas can result in the ingestion of hairs.

If you suspect your dog has an allergy due to his / her excessive licking consult your vet.

Make sure your dog always has adequate amounts of clean water and that they are drinking enough. 

Check that your dog's diet includes beneficial oils containing Omega 3 fatty acids.

Try adding pumpkin to your dog's diet it's full of fibre so can help with the elimination process.  

If your dog is licking due to stress try to resolve the stressful situation, if it's due to boredom ensure that your dog has adequate stimulation and isn't left alone for hours on end. 

7. If you have any concerns with regard to dog hairballs you should consult a vet as serious ones can be life threatening. 

    

Dogs do get hairballs here's how I know

The day started brilliantly with an early morning visit to one of my favourite places to play ball. It's brilliant fun, we have more than one ball and they get thrown to me one after the other.

I love this place, it has lots of wonderful smells and I always try to get wet when they get me water. I usually succeed. Then we go home for breakfast and if I've been good I get a treat as well, this time it was a dental stick, I do like those.

Everything was going well, I'd had fun playing, I'd eaten well, I'd enjoyed chewing my dental stick when suddenly I felt strange inside. 

I'd never, ever felt like this before, it was weird like I wanted to be sick but couldn't, like there might be something stuck. I swallowed, I gulped but nothing happened so not knowing what to do I started to lick. I licked the floor, I licked the walls, I was getting quite frantic licking, I couldn't stop. 

This worried the humans, well it worried me too but I wasn't about to let on to them that I was worried, they checked my mouth looking for something stuck in it. They thought I was choking on a piece of the dental chew so they tried the Heimlich maneuver, following instructions in their Bruce Fogel First Aid For Dogs Book. Have to say I'm glad they decided against the small dog routine of holding me by the thighs and swinging me upside down, although maybe that would have been fun. 

Nothing was working, nothing was moving I was still running around licking and gulping, they called the vet.

Of course it had to be out of hours and the emergency vet wasn't even in town, he said he'd see me but having asked if I was breathing normally, I was, and what colour my gums were, normal pink, he suggested that they monitored me. He said that if it was a bit of dental stick stuck it would move by itself though my odd behaviour would last sometime. Also if I started vomiting profusely, once was to be expected, or got diarrhea they should contact him again.

And then it stopped, the strange feeling was gone, I stopped licking the floor, in my humble opinion it's never been so clean, I did a good job. I was back to normal. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and monitored me, I quite enjoyed all the attention.

It wasn't until next morning that I gagged up a hairball, a flipping hairball I tell you, I am not a cat! 

Apparently dogs who groom excessively, licking themselves a lot can get hairballs. The hair gets swallowed, some comes out in the poo but some gets stuck which is vomited up. If it doesn't come out one end or the other it can get rather dangerous causing a major abdominal blockage which could result in death. 

So now I'm on hairball watch, extra grooming and a look at supplementing my diet with something like fish oils and pumpkin to help keep the hair I digest moving out the right end. As long as it tastes good I don't mind! 

Dogs Do like to be beside the seaside

Well Miss Darcey Puffle Dog certainly enjoyed her visit to the seaside.

Not all beaches are dog friendly, some have restrictions at certain points and / or certain times of the year so if you're planning a visit to the beach with your dog make sure you're going to be allowed on before you set out.

Miss Darcey Puffle Dog visited Old Hunstanton in North Norfolk which is dog friendly all year round. The tide was out and she had miles of lovely sand to run on. Make sure to check the times of the tides, they come in very quickly and you do not want to be trapped trying to find a way off the beach with your dog. 

As you can see we kept Darcey on a lead, this was for her own safety, it was her first visit and we did not want her to get lost, it was also so that she did not spoil the enjoyment of the beach for others. No one wants a loose dog running through their sand castle and kicking up sand! Keeping her on a lead also prevented her from chasing birds.

Old Hunstanton has a lovely sandy beach but even on a sandy beach you need to be careful that your dog doesn't cut it's paws on eg. a broken piece of shell. It's a good idea to take a dog first aid kit with you just in case, and if you're going to be on the beach for any length of time remember the sunblock!

You'll need to take some fresh drinking water, and a bowl, as you do not want your dog to drink sea water it can make them very ill. So no drinking from rock pools. And don't let your dog go sniffing round jelly fish, dead things or seaweed all of which can make them seriously ill. 

Also try to prevent your dog from ingesting sand, easily done if they're playing fetch as the sand will stick to a tennis ball and it can actually cause a blockage.

Like many coastal areas there are cliffs at old Hunstanton, extra care needs to be taken near them to prevent accidents, always keep your dog on a lead and obey any warning signs.

Miss Darcey Puffle Dog had a lovely time at the seaside most importantly she stayed safe. 

Keeping Quail

Long before Miss Darcey Puffle Dog there were quail and as it's "World Egg Day" today I thought I'd write a bit about them:

Ours were the Japanese Coturnix Quail and they were actually my Mother's Day present nearly a decade ago. They were housed in an old rabbit hutch, a v. large hutch not one of those small things that the rabbit can't turn around in.

Quail will fly straight up if startled thus making it well nigh impossible to keep them free range, for their own safety. They like to scratch around the floor and don't need flying space.

They lay throughout the Spring and summer, usually one egg a day each, sometimes two. I'm told that one can tell which quail laid  which egg by the markings on the egg as they are always the same. They don't go broody and they won't sit on their eggs so if you want to hatch them you'll have to use an incubator or a bantam.

We used to sell our surplus eggs at the farm gate for £2.00 a dozen. We never had that many so we didn't make a profit but it did mean that the quail paid for themselves. We found that lots of people wanted the eggs for hatching, ours weren't fertile as we didn't have a cock bird. It would appear that they are primarily hatched as food for raptors, in fact our birds were destined for owl food when we bought them. I understand that they are culled at six weeks.

Quail are endearing little characters and their call is quite charming however they really, really don't cope well with stress of any kind.

Stressful situations like overcrowding can lead to aggression which if blood is drawn can end in cannibalism. If you have a sick bird I'd always recommend separating it before the others literally peck it to death.

We had a "sick bay" where three hens lived peacefully together, each one of them had to be removed from the main hutch for a variety of reasons and it seemed safer not to try and re-introduce them when they were fully recovered.

We fed our quail on chick crumb, layers pellets, seed, corn, scraps etc. They loved a bit of greenery and I remember growing chard and spinach near their hutch just for them.

The hutch had flower pots turned on there sides for little resting places, leylandii branches for shelter and some old CDs/DVDs hung from the caging to give the quail something to peck at rather than each other.

Quail need constant access to water which can lead to a bit of a problem as they will walk in the water. The wet feet then pick up bits and before you know it you can end up with a quail with a ball of "soil" set like concrete on it's toe. This has to be carefully soaked and removed or the bird will end up losing a toe.

They were fun to keep and of course quail eggs are delicious but I wouldn't contemplate having them now we have a bird obsessed Miss Darcey Puffle Dog!

Conkers are poisonous to dogs

Autumn's here, the leaves are falling and so are the conkers. If you have a dog like our Miss Darcey Puffle who loves to pick things up do be careful because conkers present a serious danger to your dog.

They are a choking hazard, they can cause bowel obstructions and they are poisonous.

All parts of the horse chestnut tree, including the leaves, contain a toxic element called aesculin it's a neurotoxic glycoside which if ingested can make your dog very ill. Symptoms of horse chesnut poisoning include:

Drooling
Extreme thirst
Muscle twitching
Loss of coordination
Diarrhea
Dilated pupils
Vomiting
Hyperactivity
Lethargy
Depression

In extreme cases it can lead to paralysis, seizures, coma & possible death so if you suspect horse chesnut poisoning you need to get your dog to the vets asap.

Butterflies are the new Gulls ~ Miss Darcey Puffle Dog's latest obsession

Being as she's a Working Irish Cocker Spaniel it's in Miss Darcey Puffle Dog's nature to flush out birds, after all that's what her breed was bred for. Remember her obsession with gulls recorded here, well they're all flying high in the sky now

as are the other fledgling birds.

But she's discovered something else at eye level

something that flutters past her nose that she'd love to chase.

We did wonder what her new obsession would be, well now we know butterflies!

Oh and tractors, but not little vintage tractors like this one seen in the orchard, huge tractors roaring down the roads with trailers full of harvested produce, she'd like to chase those too!

Sandringham Sunday a Miss Darcey Puffle Dog Day Out

Miss Darcey Puffle Dog is off on an adventure, 

she wonders where she's going.

"Are we there yet?"

"Almost"

And she's arrived at Sandringham Country Park on Her Majesty the Queen's Norfolk estate. 

243 hectares to explore,

with so many interesting smells to sniff,

places to investigate

and look out points to observe from.

"Can you see the sea Darcey? It's over there"

All this exploring is thirsty work and Darcey manages to get herself quite wet at the conveniently situated dog water tap. She's also rather tired now so

snoozes all the way home.

Sandringham Country Park, part of Her Majesty the Queen's privately owned 8,000 hectare Sandringham Estate, is open to the public all year round with no entrance or parking fees. It's 6 miles North East of King's Lynn and can be found using satnav postcodes PE35 6AB (Visitors Centre) or PE35 6EH (Park House Hotel opposite the visitor centre).

The Sandringham Estate was originally purchased as a country residence for Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Kind Edward VII, and his wife Princess Alexandra of Denmark. It has been the well loved Norfolk home of successive British monarchs since 1862.

"Dear old Sandringham, the place I love better than anywhere else in the world" 

King George V said that and we think that a lot of dogs, and their owners, would agree with him.