Coping With Pet Allergies

Series Summary

Caring for a family pet requires basic care at home and regular visits to the veterinarian. An animal's health is important for it to maintain a good quality of life. Sometimes it is difficult to tell if a pet is as healthy as it can be. A veterinarian is able to assess animal health and treat pets, livestock, horses and reptiles. In this free video series on pet care, a pet specialist explains pet medication information. Learn how to identify pet allergies, how to treat pet allergies and how to relieve pet allergy symptoms. Get information on Baytril and Drontal pet medications and learn how nebulizers are used on animals.

Video Transcript

"How to cope with a pet's allergy. Well depending on the type of allergy that we're dealing with will depend on the type of things you can do to help that. Let's assume that we have no idea what's causing the allergy. We're just going to pick and choose various things to try to help alleviate and calm the pet down to make everybody's life a little bit easier. You can try something like a sulfadine product, there's lots of different brands out there, it some sort of a hot spot treatment. This is an ointment you'll put directly on the affected area. So if it's an itchy spot or a hair loss area, you can apply this directly to that and that'll help alleviate any burning and itching sensation that the dog is having and hopefully help stop him from itching. Again this is to help alleviate it, this won't cure an allergy, none of these we're talking about will cure allergies, they're just going to be helping to alleviate the symptoms of them. You can try a hydrocortisone spray, that can help a lot in relieving the itching and burning. Very, very helpful, again but it's a temporary thing, you're going to spray it on the area or it'll be a salve, you can buy salves that you'll put on the area as well or an ointment, very, very helpful. Any kind of hypoallergenic shampoo can be very helpful like this is oatmeal based and baking soda based. What that will do is it will help soothe the skin and it will also alleviate any burning and itching which is really our number one symptom with most allergies is going to be a burning or itching sensation accompanied with hair loss. And then as far as supplements that go into the food, any fish oil or omega fatty acid supplement is going to help alleviate those problems as well. Now since we're feeding this to the animal, it can take a little while for it to actually have effect. Figure two to three weeks for any kind of, anything fed to the animal to affect the overall body. But these will do, they come in capsules or they come in liquid form. You feed the capsules directly to the dog or cat and the liquid goes on the food and what that does is it promotes the natural oils in the skin and the coat to help alleviate any dry itching and burning in the skin and helps solve some of those allergy problems. So hopefully the dog will stop itching and you can get some rest at night."