Gundog Training Forum

Hi, can anyone help with the food that they feed their English springer spaniel? I have a 2 year old springer that seems to have an upset stomach when he’s eaten and he farts awful which smells disgusting, but this is only in the afternoon. He’s fine when he goes out first thing in the morning, but when he goes in the afternoon it’s quite loose and sometimes I’m unable to pick it up properly ?‍. I feed him skinner’s salmon and rice. As I’ve noticed it’s when he’s had any meat based products. So it’s not cheap rubbish food. He’s now to the point he gets no treats and only the odd carrot or blueberries as a treat. I’ve never had this problem with my other one as he could eat anything.
I taken him to the vets and he advised to get the most expensive food there is, hills or royal canin as he thinks it might be IBS which is fine but it works out to much when you have other animals to feed on top of that. Anybody out there had/ having the same problem?

Hi, welcome to the forum, I have moved your post into Health and feeding as it seems more appropriate.

How often do you worm him? How often do you feed him? Has the vet checked for Giardia? Have you tried one of the grain free kibbles for a month or two? Change over gradually!

Hi and thank you,
He gets wormed every 3 months I was feeding him once a day but have split it to twice a day now, which I have now found he goes even more during the day. The vet has given me probiotic sachets to add to his food for when I do a change over, but it’s knowing which/what food that isn’t costing an arm or a leg. He was on grain free chicken and turkey when he was a puppy and that was just a nightmare when I got up to let them out as he was crated at the time and well I had to bath him and the crate before I could even start at look at feeding any of them. I found he was better on the skinners salmon and rice as it was sorting itself out when I did. But now it’s gone back and it’s an afternoon thing. He doesn’t make a mess in the house just when he’s out and about.

Hello

Our cocker had awful digestive issues as a young pup. We had him tested for all sorts of issues as we couldn’t get to the bottom (boom boom) of what was going on for him. Tests came back clear. We had him on skinners for a bit however decided skinners wasn’t for him, as his digestive system wasn’t improving at all. After this he was on a fish based kibble called fish for dogs which did him well for quite a while.

I did a lot of research about foods before changing his diet completely again and chatted to our vet about options as we had discussed a hydrolysed diet if we couldn’t work out what was happening ie what was upsetting his digestive system.

One thing we did was give him probiotics everyday to help his tummy and finally we changed him to raw food and we’ve not looked backed. He still has his bananas, blueberries, cucumber and carrots across the day and we very rarely have loose stools even if he has eaten something he shouldn’t

I appreciate though raw feeding isn’t for everyone. I heard Caroline speak the other week (best dog website below) and her view was fresh food works wonders for dogs.

Our little pup has taught us a lot and one of the reasons you’ll get looser stools from your dog in the afternoon is due to arousal levels your dog experiences across the day.

The website below (all about dog, he does a lot on faceache too) really valuable when looking at dog food brands. Think too about giving your dog good bone broth each day as that’s excellent for digestive issues for dogs as well as adding probiotics each day to your dogs diet.

Our behaviourist recommended a brand of probiotics and we decided we couldn’t make head nor tail of what it contained so therefore would we give our dog it??

https://www.allaboutdogfood.co.uk/

http://www.thebestdogdiet.com/

It’s hard to know which probiotics dogs need as we don’t know what they’re lacking so here are some for you to look before you explore others.

AOK9
Four Leaf rover
Adored beasts healthy gut or love bugs

Pumpkin powder is good too for dogs.

Hi and thank you for that, that’s a start for me as I’ve never had this problem before in all the years I’ve had dogs. I’ve had the usual everyday issues but nothing like this.

You’re welcome. With our previous dogs like you we hadn’t experienced such issues with digestion or realised how much a dog’s arousal levels across the day affects their digestive tract! Then us humans in many ways aren’t that different if we’re anxious about something we may go to the toilet more than usual.

It was our vet who mentioned about arousal levels and loose stools in the afternoon. I forget the reason entirely as we’ve been through quite a lot with this cocker, but it made sense to us. If you do look into arousal levels and dogs another phrase to look at is dogs and the candle analogy.

Though I do recognise that your vet has suggested something like IBS might be the reason your dog’s digestive system may be out of kilter.

We had some slightly different issues with pupster which were linked to his digestion too, so food wise we went totally grain free including no rice, also no chicken or turkey products (we’ve discovered since that a lot of dogs have sensitivities to chicken and turkey and that might not be related to the meat itself but more about what the chicken or turkey is fed). This included any treats we were using for training purposes, and that involved taking our glasses so we could read the packaging as so many contain grains or chicken or turkey!

I think there is brand of fresh food for dogs called different dog which might be worth looking at, and I’m certain Caroline mentioned this when I heard her speak.

It took us a good while at least 3-4 months before pupster’s digestive system settled down. So don’t get disheartened if you don’t see changes immediately. Good luck.

I feed the dachshund skinners muesli and that works well for him and that’s only because my old springer ate it and he didn’t want nothing but what he was eating. So kept him on that, he has to have that in a greedy bowl though. But this springer is not a guzzler he chews his food to the point it’s like a human slapping their lips when eating. But he does have a high energy drive from when I get up in the morning and take him out to when he does his last evening run, that I do try and keep on top of, so maybe it’s that, that’s not helping his stomach. All trial and error at the end of the day, it’s now got to the point where I say to him have you farted? he gets up and moves out the way.
I will say he’s not treat oriented he’s all about ball obsession and that’s his reward which he is happy with

Now they're adding their links to other peoples posts! That's new

munstyman wrote: ↑Sun Apr 27, 2025 7:26 pm Now they're adding their links to other peoples posts! That's new

Sorry, missed that one, PM if you see something like this please, I get notifications of PMs but not always of new posts so I might miss something in my daily skim through.

Have you considered switching over to a raw carnivore centered diet?