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This guide helps you triage; it does not replace your veterinarian’s exam. When in doubt, call us at 514 223-1197.
Go now: the signs that cannot wait
Any single one of these is enough. You do not have to tick several, and you do not have to decide which is worst. Do not wait to "see if it passes", do not wait for morning: go to the clinic or to the nearest emergency centre, and call on the way so we can expect you.
- He tries to vomit again and again and almost nothing comes up. A little foam or drool may come out: that still counts as unproductive retching, especially if his belly is swelling or tightening and he cannot settle. That is the picture of a gastric torsion, and it is a race against time.
- His belly is swollen, hard, or very painful to the touch. He is pacing, he cannot find a position, he keeps looking at his flank.
- He is very flat: he cannot stay standing, he is weak, he barely responds. Pale, grey or bluish gums confirm the emergency, but they are a late sign: do not wait to see them before you leave.
- He is breathing fast at rest, with effort, with his belly heaving on every breath, or with his neck stretched forward. A dog panting after exercise or in the heat is a different thing; this one is lying quietly and still breathing badly.
- He is vomiting blood: bright red in quantity, or brown-black grains that look like coffee grounds (digested blood). Black, tarry stools count the same.
- Yellow is showing on his gums, on the whites of his eyes, or inside his ears.
- He may have swallowed an object: a ball, a sock, a shredded toy, a bone, a corn cob, a pit, a string, a magnet. Do not make him vomit and do not wait for it "to pass on its own". Leave with the packaging, the matching object, or a photo.
- He may have swallowed something toxic: chocolate, grapes or raisins, sugar-free peanut butter or gum (xylitol), cannabis, a human medication, antifreeze, a mushroom from the yard, compost. Do not make him vomit, and bring the packaging or a piece of the plant.
- He is trembling, staggering, collapsing or seizing.
- She is unspayed and was in heat a few weeks ago: pyometra, an infection of the uterus, often starts as a flat dog who stops eating and drinks a great deal. There is not always a visible discharge, and it is precisely the form without discharge that is the more dangerous one.
- He is diabetic and on insulin: call us before the next injection, even in the evening, even if it is due in an hour. Do not decide on your own to give the dose or to skip it. If he is also weak, disoriented, vomiting, breathing fast, or his breath smells oddly sweet: leave right now.
- He is followed for Addison’s disease, or he has had episodes of weakness that resolved on their own: an Addisonian dog who stops eating, especially after a stress (boarding, travel, a thunderstorm, surgery), can tip into a crisis. That is not something you watch at home.
- He is a puppy, and above all a puppy whose vaccine series is not finished. Everything moves faster in him, and a flat puppy who has stopped eating is now, not tomorrow.
One is enough.
You do not have to work out which of these matters most. If one of them speaks to you, go. If you are unsure, call anyway: triage is our job, not yours. Outside our hours a 24/7 emergency centre answers, and describing the situation on the phone commits you to nothing.
A swelling belly and unproductive retching have their own page, because that is the picture where every hour counts: Gastric torsion.
For poisons, the first steps by product:
Fussy or sick: what actually tells them apart
This is the question the page exists for, and nobody has ever explained it to you straight. A fussy dog and a sick dog do the same thing in front of the same full bowl. What separates them is not what they refuse: it is everything else.
The distinction that settles it most often
A fussy dog got that way gradually, over weeks or months, almost always because he learned that holding out pays: when he sulks, something better eventually lands in the bowl. A sick dog has a start date. Yesterday he ate, today he does not.
If you can name the day it changed, this is not a sulk.
And the reverse matters just as much: a dog who has been picky for two years and today will not touch anything at all is not being picky today. His history explains the other days. It does not explain this one.
The observations that separate them tonight
| What you see | More like a fussy dog | More like a sick dog |
|---|---|---|
| Is he interested in food? | He comes to the bowl, sniffs, waits, looks up at you. He is disappointed, not absent. | He does not even get up. The treat bag crinkling no longer moves him. |
| Does he refuse everything, or only that? | He refuses his kibble and begs at the table. That is a preference, not a lost appetite. | He refuses what he has never refused in his life. |
| Is the rest of his life normal? | He begs, he plays, he asks for his walk, he sleeps as usual. | He sleeps more, he no longer comes to greet you, he takes himself off, he pants at rest. |
| Does he want to eat and fail? | No. When he decides to eat, he eats well. | He comes over, takes a mouthful and drops it, chews on one side, drools, jerks his head away as if it hurt. |
| And the rest: water, urine, stools? | Nothing changed. | He is drinking far more, or not at all. He has not passed a stool. He is vomiting. His stools changed. |
The treat test, and its limits
There is one simple and genuinely useful observation: offer him, once, the thing he has never refused in his life. A piece of cheese, his favorite treat, the thing you know works every time.
If he takes it immediately: keep that information, it is good news. It does not close the file, but it makes a complete blockage or severe pain less likely.
If he sniffs it and turns away: stop the test. A dog refusing what he has never refused is not being fussy. Call us.
Four cautions. Do this once, not all evening: keep offering better and you manufacture the fussy dog you were trying to rule out. It does not apply if anything from the go-now list is present, or if he has vomited today: in those cases you test nothing and you call. And do not use rich or fatty food, or sugar-free peanut butter, for the reasons set out further down.
What proves nothing, either way
- He is still drinking. That is not good news in itself. A dog can drink normally with a foreign body in his gut. And a dog who has started drinking a great deal more over the past few days interests us enormously: that is a signal in its own right.
- He does not look like he is in pain. Dogs almost never cry out. They withdraw, go quiet, and refuse the bowl. That is often all you get to see.
- He is wagging his tail. A dog wagging his tail at you is wagging his tail at you. It says nothing about his abdomen.
- He is eating grass. You see that in a nauseated dog and in a perfectly well one. Build nothing on it.
"He’ll eat when he’s hungry."
True of a fussy dog, and false of every other one. Hunger is not what a dog is missing when his belly hurts, his mouth hurts, or he feels sick: it is there, and something is stopping it from getting anywhere. So waiting for him to give in tests nothing at all, except how long the cause can go on advancing unseen. A fussy dog does eventually eat; a sick dog only gets worse while you wait. And because the two look the same in front of the same full bowl, that sentence never tells you which one you have.
The thought we want out of your head
No, you did not "spoil him into being ill". A dog who becomes selective because he has been given good things happens in every household, it is fixable, and it is not what made him sick. If your dog is unwell tonight, it is not because you were too kind.
How long it has been, and what that actually changes
You are looking for a number of hours. We do not publish one for dogs, and that is not a dodge: the real rule is shorter, and it is more useful.
A dog who is refusing food completely is seen the same day.
Not in a set number of hours, not tomorrow morning if this is tonight. From the first real meal refused by a dog who is not himself, we triage together on the phone, and very often the answer is reassuring. And because you are probably reading this in the evening: if we are closed, a 24/7 emergency centre answers, and you do not have to wait for us to open to ask the question.
Complete refusal, or eating less?
Complete refusal
He takes nothing, not even what he loves. That is the same day. And if a single sign from the go-now list is added, this is no longer a call: you leave.
Eating less, or more slowly, or leaving half
A quieter signal, not a less real one. If it settles in, comes with weight loss, or turns up in a senior dog or one followed for a disease, we want to see him.
He eats his treats but not his kibble
See the previous section. It is not the same thing depending on whether he is refusing by choice or can no longer manage to eat.
We will still ask you the time of his last real meal, not the moment you started to worry. Those two are rarely the same moment, and it is the first thing we will ask you.
"I read 24 to 48 hours." That rule is a cat rule.
You may have come across a figure of 24 to 48 hours, and a story about a liver flooding with fat when an animal stops eating. It is true, it matters, and it is about cats. In a cat, fasting becomes an illness of its own, hepatic lipidosis, which is why our feline page counts the hours so tightly. A dog’s liver handles fasting far better.
That is not good news, and it certainly does not mean wait. It means that in a dog the danger does not come from the fasting: it comes from whatever caused it. A dog with a foreign body in his gut, with pancreatitis, or with a pyometra can look almost normal while things get worse inside. We are not watching a clock: we are looking for a cause.
And that is exactly why we publish no figure for dogs. The ones in circulation come from the cat world, or from nowhere at all. A published ceiling always ends up being read as a budget to spend, and a dog waiting for a count to run out is a dog waiting for nothing.
Do you also have a cat at home? The rule is different and far tighter for her:
Friday evening is not a waiting room
More than sixty hours separate Friday night from Monday morning. A foreign body, a pancreatitis, a pyometra or an Addisonian crisis does not pause for the weekend, and the dog who arrives on Monday almost always arrives sicker, and needing more, than the one we would have seen on Friday.
If we are closed, call a 24/7 emergency centre: someone will tell you whether it is now, today, or an appointment. You do not have to make that call alone.
Why a dog stops eating
A healthy dog refusing his bowl almost always has a reason, and that reason is what we go looking for. Here are the leads, sorted by what you can actually observe at home tonight.
A lead may explain why. It does not change when to call.
What blocks or hurts badly, right now
A foreign body in the digestive tract.
A ball, a sock, a shredded toy, a piece of bone, a corn cob, a fruit pit, roast string. This is the cause we worry about most in a dog who stops eating suddenly, and here is what makes it treacherous: many of these dogs stop eating before they vomit much, and between episodes they can look almost normal. A partial blockage may even let some stool through. So never count on "he will pass it eventually", and never make him vomit: a sharp object or a bone comes back up as badly as it went down. Most owners never saw their dog swallow anything: tell us anyway if a toy has vanished or a sock is missing.
A gastric torsion.
The stomach swells and then twists on itself. The dog retches without bringing anything up, his belly swells, he cannot settle. It is one of the few true races against the clock in veterinary medicine, and it has its own page. If that picture sounds like your dog, stop reading and leave.
Pancreatitis.
The pancreas inflames, often after a fatty meal: the leftovers from Sunday dinner, a dish of gravy, a raid on the bin, the fat off the holiday turkey. The dog is nauseated, refuses everything, his belly hurts, and he may vomit and have diarrhea. He often hunches his back or refuses to let you touch his abdomen. Careful: that same pain posture also appears with a torsion, which is exactly why it sits in the go-now list rather than in a home diagnosis. Some breeds are predisposed, the Miniature Schnauzer in particular, and a dog who has had one episode can have another.
A mouth that hurts badly.
A fractured carnassial tooth, often from a bone, an antler, a chew that is too hard, or an ice cube. A root abscess, sometimes visible as a swelling below the eye. An oral tumor in an older dog. What we look for: he chews on one side, drops his kibble, suddenly prefers soft food, drools, jerks his head while eating, his breath has changed.
And the reverse reasoning, which matters just as much: plenty of dogs with a mouth in terrible shape carry on eating and show nothing. So a dog with bad teeth who has stopped completely did not necessarily stop because of his teeth. We look, but we do not stop there.
A lead may explain why. It does not change when to call.
What has been building for weeks
Addison’s disease.
It is called the great pretender, and it is the cause this page most wants you to know about. The classic picture: a dog who is off, who stops eating for a few days, sometimes with vomiting or diarrhea, and who then gets better on his own. Then it happens again weeks later, often after a stress: boarding, a trip, a thunderstorm, surgery. It turns up most often in young to middle-aged adult dogs. If you recognize yourself in "he does this now and then and it always passes", tell us in exactly those words: it is valuable information, and it is a disease that is managed very well once it is named.
The kidneys.
In an aging dog, look for what changed before he stopped: is he drinking a lot more, asking to go out at night, has he quietly lost weight, has his breath changed? A nauseated dog comes to his bowl, salivates, then turns away.
The liver.
Loss of appetite, vomiting, lethargy, and sometimes yellow on the gums or the whites of the eyes.
The gut.
An appetite that turns choosy over weeks, weight sliding down, soft stools or occasional vomiting. That history explains the past; it does not excuse tonight. A dog who has been declining for weeks and today will not eat at all is precisely the one we want to see quickly.
The heart.
A dog in heart failure eats less, tires faster, sometimes coughs, and breathes faster at rest.
Pain somewhere else.
Arthritis, a back, a leg. Look at what has changed over months: does he hesitate before jumping into the car, does he sleep lower down, is he slower to get up, does he eat standing oddly because lowering his head hurts? That explains a slow decline. It does not explain a dog who has eaten nothing since yesterday, and known arthritis does not lower the urgency a notch.
Cancer.
In an older dog, an appetite that fades alongside weight loss is one of the pictures we have to rule out. It is not the commonest explanation, and naming it here does one thing: it saves you from waiting another three weeks.
A lead may explain why. It does not change when to call.
The unspayed female
Pyometra.
An infection of the uterus in an intact female, most often in the four to eight weeks following her heat. She is flat, she stops eating, she drinks a great deal more and urinates more. There may be a foul, purulent vulvar discharge, but not always: when the cervix is closed there is nothing to see from the outside and the pus builds up inside. That is the more dangerous form, and it is the one that gets missed by waiting to see a discharge.
This is a surgical emergency. An unspayed female who was recently in heat and has stopped eating is not something you watch: call right away, us during our opening hours, a 24/7 emergency centre if we are closed.
A pregnant or nursing female
She has no margin either: she is feeding for several. We do not count hours with her.
A lead may explain why. It does not change when to call.
What he was given or swallowed, and what changed around him
A medication started in the last few days.
Note the date, call us before the next dose, and stop nothing on your own. One exception, and it matters: if he is on a prescribed anti-inflammatory and he loses his appetite, vomits, or passes black tarry stools, stop the medication and call us. Those are possible signs of a digestive ulcer, and faced with them we would rather the dose was skipped before we have even spoken.
A recent anesthetic, surgery or dental cleaning.
A reduced appetite that same evening and through the 24 hours that follow is expected. Beyond that, or with lethargy, follow the discharge sheet we gave you and call us rather than relying on this page.
Something toxic.
Chocolate, grapes and raisins, xylitol, cannabis, a tablet dropped on the floor, antifreeze, a mushroom in the yard, the compost bin. Loss of appetite is sometimes the first visible sign.
A change of food, or a new bag of the same food.
It happens: a reformulated recipe, a badly stored bag, a bag open too long. It is an honest hypothesis and easy to check, but it only holds if everything else about him is normal.
The heat.
Yes, dogs eat less in hot weather, and a Montreal summer shows it. But a hot dog still takes an interest in food, still drinks, still asks for his walk. A dog doing none of that is not simply warm.
Stress.
A move, renovations, a new baby, someone leaving the household, a stay in boarding, a thunderstorm, fireworks. Stress genuinely shuts down a dog’s appetite. But two things. One: a sick dog withdraws and ignores his bowl exactly like a stressed dog, and from the outside it is the same dog. Two: finding an explanation does not replace the call.
He may be eating elsewhere.
Someone is feeding him from the table, a neighbor is topping him up, he empties the other pet’s bowl, he raids the compost or the neighborhood bins. A dog refusing supper because he has already eaten is not a dog who has stopped eating. Poll the household before you call, and tell us what you find.
A lead may explain why. It does not change when to call.
The dogs who do not have that margin
The same-day rule applies to every dog. For the ones on this list it tightens further: you call at the first real meal refused, even if everything else looks normal. And if we are closed, you call an emergency centre rather than waiting for opening.
- A puppy and especially one whose vaccine series is not finished. His reserves are tiny and the infectious diseases of young dogs move fast.
- A very small dog Chihuahua, Yorkshire, Pomeranian, pocket-sized anything. A few missed meals are enough to leave them weak and shaky.
- A senior dog. The follow-up that catches these causes early exists for him.
- A large dog with a deep, narrow chest and above all one with a close relative who has had a torsion: Great Dane, Saint Bernard, German Shepherd, Weimaraner, Irish or Gordon Setter, Standard Poodle, and any big dog built the same way, Labrador and Boxer included. In them, a refusal to eat alongside a belly that looks different is treated as a possible torsion until proven otherwise.
- A flat-faced dog Bulldog, Pug, Boxer, Shih Tzu.
- A diabetic dog on insulin. Call before the next dose. Do not decide on your own to give it or skip it.
- A dog followed for a chronic disease kidneys, liver, heart, gut, Cushing’s, Addison’s, or on medication, above all an anti-inflammatory.
- An unspayed female, and a pregnant or nursing one.
- A dog who has already had pancreatitis, or who has swallowed something once before. Both repeat.
And if he is on a weight-loss diet?
If your dog is on a weight-loss diet and stops eating, that is not the diet working: that is an alarm, and we want to know.
While you wait for the appointment
These things are for getting through the next few hours, not for replacing the exam. None of them is a test: if they work, good, we will know tomorrow; if they do not, nothing changes, the appointment stands.
What can help
- Offer his usual food, a small portion, at a set time, then take the bowl away after a few minutes. We do not push, and we do not leave a bowl planted in front of a nauseated dog.
- Warm wet food to barely lukewarm, body temperature: it releases the smell. Always test on your wrist first, microwaves create hot spots.
- Feed him somewhere quiet, away from other animals and from traffic through the room. If several animals eat together, separate them: you will finally know what he ate.
- Fresh water always available, never forced. Note whether he is drinking more than usual or not at all: both interest us.
- Take him out to see his urine and stools, and write down what you see. It is one of the first things we will ask, and "he has not passed a stool since yesterday" is real information.
- Note the time of his last real meal, and exactly what he refused.
- Check whether a toy, a sock or an object has gone missing from the house.
What hurts
- Do not bring out human food to tempt him. Two reasons, and the second is the bigger one. First, a dog who feels unwell learns very quickly to associate a food with feeling bad, and we burn the very thing we will need to get him back on his feet. Second, a fatty meal (bacon, gravy, leftovers, meat fat) is a classic trigger of pancreatitis: you can turn a small problem into a big one while trying to do the right thing.
- Do not fast him on your own initiative. If resting his gut is useful in his case, your veterinarian will tell you, and will also tell you for how long.
- Do not give bones, chew bones or antlers to "get him interested again". It is one of the commonest ways to fracture a tooth, and if the problem is already digestive it makes things worse.
- Do not stop or change any current treatment without speaking to us, with the anti-inflammatory exception described above.
- Do not make him vomit. The next section explains why, and what we do instead.
Force-feeding: a veterinary decision, never a home one
Do not force-feed your dog and do not syringe food into him. Three reasons, and any one of them would be enough.
A dog who is forced can inhale food and develop pneumonia, and it is precisely the dogs we are most tempted to force, the nauseated ones and the ones struggling to swallow, who are most likely to inhale.
Above all, a dog who is not eating because something is blocking his digestive tract, or because his pancreas is inflamed, must have nothing forced into his mouth until he has been examined. Forcing him makes him vomit and makes him worse. What he takes on his own, let him have; what you put into his mouth, never. You cannot know, from home, which case you are in.
And there is one more reason nobody thinks of: what your dog eats on his own is the information we use to judge whether he is getting better or worse. Force-feed him and you erase that sign. If he licks a little food off your finger of his own accord, let him and note it, but licking is not eating. If you have to hold him to get food into his mouth, stop.
If one day we ask you to feed your dog yourself, it will be after examining him, with written instructions written for him specifically.
Already done it tonight? Read this.
No blame: it is the reflex of someone trying to help, and plenty of people do it. But do not do it again, and watch him closely over the next few hours. If he coughs, if his breathing turns noisy or fast, if he drools, if he gags, or if he goes down after an attempt: this is no longer an appointment, we leave now. And do tell us you tried: it does not shock us at all, it helps us interpret what we are seeing.
What about appetite stimulants?
Yes, there are medications that support appetite and settle nausea, and we use them often. But they are prescribed after the exam, never before, for three reasons. They make an animal comfortable enough for us to find the cause; they do not treat the cause. They work poorly while pain, nausea or dehydration are still unaddressed. And above all, in a dog whose gut is blocked, bringing the appetite back fixes nothing and erases the one sign that was warning us.
A dog who has stopped eating is not fixed with something to open his appetite.
Get your call ready (2 minutes)
- When was his last REAL meal? Not his last treat.
- Is he refusing everything, or only his kibble? Did he take the treat he never refuses?
- Does he want to eat and fail, or has food stopped interesting him altogether?
- What changed: food, a move, boarding, a new medication, a recent anesthetic, table scraps, the bin?
- Has he vomited? Has he passed a stool since yesterday, and what did it look like? Is he drinking more, less, or the same?
- Has an object or a toy gone missing?
- Is she an unspayed female, and when was her last heat?
- His known conditions, his current medications, and the time of the last dose.
Give no home medications
Faced with a dog who is not eating, the temptation is to give him something "to take the edge off while we wait". It is the well-meant gesture that brings us the most poisoned dogs.
Ibuprofen (Advil), naproxen (Aleve)
Toxic to dogs. Stomach ulcers, digestive bleeding, kidney damage. "He looked like he was in pain, so I gave him an Advil" is a sentence we hear often behind these cases. Veterinary anti-inflammatories exist precisely because ours do not suit dogs. Cats are even more sensitive than dogs, so the same rule holds for them.
Acetaminophen (Tylenol)
Toxic to a dog’s liver and blood. There is no safe home dose. And it is not an anti-inflammatory: if what you remember is "no human anti-inflammatories", this one slips straight through that rule. In cats it is fatal, even a single tablet.
Aspirin
No human aspirin, not as a stopgap, not "just this once".
Pepto-Bismol
It contains a salicylate, the same family as aspirin. Never without direction, and it turns stools black, which masks exactly the sign of digestive bleeding we were looking for.
Gravol, Imodium, antacids, leftover prescriptions
Never without direction. An antidiarrheal or an anti-nausea drug given blind to a dog whose gut is blocked erases the signal while the problem advances. And Imodium is particularly risky in herding breeds, which often carry a genetic variant that makes them very sensitive to that kind of drug.
A medication prescribed to another animal
Same apparent diagnosis, same weight, same household, it is never enough. A dose calculated for another patient is not a dose.
The sugar-free peanut butter trap
It is the classic move for getting a dog to eat or for hiding a tablet. Many "sugar-free" peanut butters, gums, candies, yogurts and toothpastes contain xylitol, which is toxic to dogs and can send their blood sugar crashing before attacking the liver. Read the ingredient list first, every time, even if you have done it before with another jar. If your dog has swallowed some, it is an immediate emergency.
And making him vomit?
Never make him vomit on your own: depending on what was swallowed, bringing it back up can do more damage than it did going down. Hydrogen peroxide, the one every search result offers, is not harmless: it causes lesions in the stomach lining, including in healthy dogs, and the liquid can be inhaled.
You will not find a method or a quantity here, and that is deliberate: only your veterinarian or an animal poison line can tell you whether making him vomit makes sense in your case. Call first, us during our opening hours or a 24/7 emergency centre if we are closed, and as early as you can: in these cases, time counts.
Inducing vomiting is a clinic procedure, and it is one we perform here when the case allows it, once we have assessed what was swallowed and how long ago. And in several situations making a dog vomit is outright dangerous: a sharp object, a bone, a corrosive product, a dog who is already flat.
And giving him his real medications?
A dog who has stopped eating is also a dog whose tablets no longer disappear inside a mouthful.
What we look for, and how
"Not eating" is not a diagnosis, it is a front door. Here is what actually happens when you arrive, so you know what to expect.
The exam
We take his temperature, look at his gums, palpate his abdomen inch by inch, listen to his heart and lungs, check his lymph nodes, look in his mouth. Often that alone points the way: a painful abdomen, a mass we can feel, a fractured tooth, a female whose uterus is enlarged. A genuinely painful mouth sometimes cannot be examined fully in an awake dog, and we will tell you that plainly rather than force it.
The laboratory
Bloodwork answers a lot of questions: complete blood count, biochemistry, and above all electrolytes, because sodium and potassium are exactly what gives Addison’s disease away. Those tests are run here, in our own laboratory, and the result sometimes comes back during the visit itself. We add a urinalysis as the case requires, and that is run here too.
The specific pancreatic test, on the other hand, goes to an outside laboratory. How long it takes depends on the test and on where it goes: ask which of the two applies and how long to expect, that is the question to ask when the sample is taken.
Imaging
An abdominal radiograph settles a great deal: a foreign body, a gastric torsion, a bowel that does not look the way it should, an enlarged uterus.
Ultrasound does two very different jobs here. During our opening hours, our team can take a focused look on the spot to answer a single question, such as whether there is free fluid in the abdomen, and that fluid can be tapped or drained right here when it is called for. The full organ by organ ultrasound, the one that looks at the pancreas and the wall of the gut, is a separate, planned appointment, and it also takes place here: either with our own team, or with a specialized imaging team that travels to us.
What follows
Most often, support against nausea and pain, fluids, and a clear plan.
Sometimes hospitalization, and it is worth saying what that means here: it is day hospitalization. Your dog is admitted, treated and rechecked on site during our opening hours, and a stay can run over several days, with a recheck each day. We do not provide continuous medical monitoring overnight. When a dog needs to be watched without a break, we stabilize first, then we arrange the transfer to a 24/7 centre, with the full record. In every case, we tell you at admission what the plan is for the night.
Sometimes surgery, when an object is blocking or an infected uterus has to come out. Soft tissue surgery happens here, during our opening hours, and depending on the case under sedation or under general anesthesia. When it happens depends on how urgent it is and on the day’s schedule: call us and we will tell you what to do and when to come in.
And if we find nothing?
That is the best possible result, and it happens often. A normal exam in a dog who has stopped eating is not a wasted exam: it is information that takes the emergencies off the table, and it lets you sleep instead of watching your dog until three in the morning. Nobody will think less of you for coming in.
Frequently asked questions
The questions that come up most on the phone, and two people do not always dare to ask.
He skipped a meal but he is tearing around the house. Can I wait until tomorrow?
He refuses his kibble but he will eat chicken. Is he just being fussy?
It is evening and you are closed. Do I wait until morning?
I read that an animal who stops eating has 24 to 48 hours. Is that true for my dog?
Can I force-feed him, or give him something to bring his appetite back?
It is hot out, or we have just moved. Surely that is all it is?
My dog is old. Is eating less not normal at his age?
He has started eating again. Do I cancel the appointment?
Has he stopped eating because he is dying?
For those moments:
Also worth reading
The honest sort, in one sentence
Unproductive retching, a swollen belly, deep lethargy, blood, yellow, an object or a toxin swallowed, an unspayed female recently in heat, an Addisonian dog, a diabetic dog, a puppy: leave now. For every other dog, a complete refusal is seen the same day, and there is no reason to wait any longer than that. And keep the sentence that sums up the page: in a dog it is not the fasting that is dangerous, it is whatever caused it.
Your dog has stopped eating and you are hesitating to bother us?
Do not: hesitating to call is already a reason to call. We triage together, and if an appointment is all it needs, we will tell you right away.