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Tactics to Fend Off Pet Allergies

Submitted by Michael Adams on December 22, 2009

An allergy is the adverse response of the body to chemicals present either in food or in the immediate external environment that cause irritation and inflammation. The most common forms of allergies that pets suffer from are skin allergies and food allergies. In both cases, the most evident symptom of the condition is that your pet constantly scratches its body to get rid of the itchiness allergies cause to the skin.

Other symptoms include coughing and sneezing, nasal discharge, watering eyes, itching around the anus and over the ears, reluctance to eat, loss of hair, labored breathing, nervous shaking of the head, diarrhea and vomiting. Parasitic organisms like leeches and ticks also attach themselves to the skin of pets quite frequently and may cause severe irritation to the skin too, as a result of which you may find your pet scratching itself vigorously and mistake this as an indication of allergy. In some dogs, the staph bacteria that are usually present on the skin of this species, may also cause an immune reaction and cause skin allergy.

The best way to prevent allergies in pets is to keep their immediate surroundings clean. Make sure that you wash and sun the bed of your pet at regular intervals. This helps disinfect the fabric completely and minimizes the chances of allergies. You should also keep the floors, carpets and curtains of your house and the furniture clean all the time so that the pet does not come into contact with dust particles, molds, pollen and insects’ saliva and excreta, which are common agents that could trigger an allergic reaction. Also, make sure that you bathe your pet every day with soaps and shampoos especially made for animals. This will rid of fleas and mites that may cause skin irritation and allergy. You should ideally also determine through a trial and error method what foods your pet is allergic to. Generally, meats like lamb, pork, beef and chicken, grains like whey and corn, eggs and milk, and fish cause food allergies in pets. You may have to cook rare meats such as venison or rabbit, and complement this with rice and potato in order to give your pet sufficient nutrition through food without exposing it to the danger of an allergic reaction. You should also check if physical contact with substances like wool, plastic and rubber, or with certain kinds of grasses of leaves triggers allergic reaction in your pet, and act accordingly to prevent exposure to such objects.

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