Simple ways of keeping your pet’s skin healthy
Skin disease is one of the most common reasons for pets visiting the vet, accounting for around one in four visits to vet clinics. The most common form of skin disease is itchiness. Other types of skin disease include skin growths, sore ears, and areas of baldness.
The specific cure for skin disease depends on an accurate diagnosis of the underlying cause: vets go through a systematic process of investigation to work this out. Parasites are easy to rule out, examining the animal carefully, and perhaps taking a skin scraping to search for tiny mites under the microscope. Next., food allergies as a cause can be checked by putting a pet on a vet-only special diet for six weeks, including only ingredients that are highly unlikely to create an allergic reaction. Hormonal causes of skin disease may require special blood tests. A skin biopsy is needed to diagnose some rare immune-type causes of skin disease. Finally, special skin tests or blood samples may be used to identify the dusts and pollens that may be causing an allergic reaction in an animal.
Once the cause of the skin problem has been identified, a specific treatment plan can be put in place.
Someone asked me recently if it was possible to have a general “skin treatment” regime for a pet, rather than going through the detailed veterinary process listed above. The truth is that for serious skin disease, the only answer is to engage with your vet for a full skin work up. But if a dog or cat has a mild itch, or if their coat is simply not in ideal condition, there are some simple steps that can be taken to generally improve their skin health.
To start with, it’s worth giving effective flea treatment to be absolutely sure that fleas are not causing an itch. Fleas are common in Ireland, especially in the summer months. They are easy to treat with the right products: if you are not sure what to use, ask your local vet.
Second, it can help to wash your pet regularly (e.g. twice a week) e.g. using a shampoo designed for pets with sensitive skin (e.g. an oatmeal-based product). Most pets only need to be washed rarely (e.g. if a dog has rolled in muck), but animals with skin issues can often be helped by regular bathing. Washing helps to remove debris from the coat, including bacteria, yeasts, and allergens that may be provoking or aggravating an allergic skin reaction. Sometimes your vet may recommend a specific medicated shampoo for a particular type of skin condition, but for mild problems, a general shampoo can help.
The third simple change to consider is to review your pet’s diet in two ways.
First, you can do a broad check for the common food allergies by reading the ingredients on the pet food label. It is rare for food allergy to be the cause of itchiness in pets: it affects only 1 – 2% of dogs, and slightly fewer cats, although this does mean up to 25% of pets with long term itchiness.
The four most common proteins involved are beef, dairy, chicken, and wheat (and fish in cats), together causing 80% of pet food allergies. So if you choose a diet that does not include any of these ingredients, this can be a simple way of ruling out common food allergies as the cause of your pet’s itch. If your dog or cat stops itching on this new diet, you may have found the cause. And if your pet continues to itch despite these proteins being absent from the diet, then you have proven that an allergy to one of these common proteins is not the reason for the itchiness. This is not an absolute rule-out for food allergy: vets use special, higher-grade, ultra-non-allergic diets to completely check for food allergy as a cause
of itchiness. But it’s a simple approach that may solve 80% of cases.
The second dietary review that you can carry out is to start to feed a daily oil supplement to your pet. Modern commercial pet food is complete, in that it fulfils all of your pet’s nutritional needs. However some animals seem to need a higher level of oils than others. This is why it’s often recommended that pets with skin disease should be given extra oils, either in capsules or as a liquid supplement (such as mackerel oil).
Oils (also called unsaturated fats), derived from plants and fish, are an essential part of all animals’ diets: they make up part of all new cells in the body. Oils are classified as omega six fatty acids (e.g. from sunflower oil and corn oil) and omega three fatty acids (from fish oil, and some plants like flax seed oil). They are both key ingredients in skin cells: if a pet has dry, flaky, skin, extra supplementation with oils helps to create a glossy coat. But omega three fatty acids have an additional anti-inflammatory impact that omega six does not have. So if a pet is itchy, giving extra omega three (i.e. fish oil) can often help.
Of all fish oils, mackerel contains the highest amount of the most important fatty acids. It’s possible to buy specific capsules containing these important oils, but it’s more cost effective to use fish oil from a bottle, bypassing the extra process of putting the oil into gelatin capsules. Effective flea control, regular shampooing, changing your pet’s type of diet, and adding a squirt of fish oils: these are simple changes you can make in your pet’s life. If you do this, and a month later, your pet still has skin or coat issues of any kind, you definitely need to visit your vet for that more detailed investigation and treatment.