Welcome to the Pet Doctor Blog. I’m Dr. Dean Severidt and I’m here to answer some of the questions that people have been sending in to our website, PetDoctorsofAmerica.com and let’s get right to the questions and see what we’ve got here.
The first topic I’m going to talk a little bit about is just skin problems in dogs and if you’re living in Florida and you have a dog or a cat, you probably had a lot of skin issues and I’ve got some questions on it that I’d like to try and answer today; there’s some people who have sent in and the first one is, “Why is my dog scratching?” I hear it everyday. It’s a very common question and to be honest, that answer could take about two years to answer. There’s just so many reasons that a dog would scratch, but anytime you get a dog scratching and chewing, you’ve got to start thinking about possibly some allergies and like I said, living in Florida in the south, there’s lots and lot of allergies that dogs have, allergies to all kinds of different things and we see a lot of this.
So, once your dog is scratching, what I usually tell people that scratching enough that it bothers you is definitely bothering the dog and you probably ought to take that pet in and have it checked out to see if it’s allergies.
Other possibilities could be dry skin, you can have some skin infections, so there’s some other things that could certainly be causing it, but a lot of times, these are secondary to allergies also. So allergies play a big, big role in a lot of these dogs that are doing a lot of scratching.
Another one I get calls on, there’s a good question here is, my dog has a lot of sores on his skin and what does that mean? Well, once again, it can it can mean a lot of different things. It could be allergy related. The dog could have allergies. They’re scratching. Because they’re scratching, they’re causing a lot of sores on their skin, causing excoriations, causing a secondary infection to come in or the dog could have a staph infection that is causing a dog to scratch and so the dog is scratching because of that.
So once again, when your dog gets sores on it, you should have that checked out by a veterinarian and see what’s actually causing this. See if it’s an infection or see if you’ve got some type of an allergy going on because these things are so related, a lot of them are a combination of multiple processes going on.
Another question and I guess, a really good one is, my vet tells me my dog has allergies, what’s it allergic to? Well, basically dogs are allergic to everything that we are, so it depends on what part of the country you are in. Your dog is going to be allergic to everything that’s in the air. In Florida, we see a lot of allergies to dust, molds, ragweed, pollen, all of those types of things, so anything that’s in the air that people are allergic to, dogs are allergic to and it just affects dogs differently.
Dr. Dean Severidt
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