This week Pippy started coughing and retching. It was as if she was something was stuck in her throat and she was trying to cough it up.
We didn’t worry about it unduly as she is moulting quite a bit at the moment and we assumed she’d got a furball stuck. This has happened before when she threw up what appeared to be a small, brown sheep.
Pippy went to doggy day care as usual on Wednesday and I mentioned it to her lovely substitute mum for the day. Pippy had a lovely day running about with substitute mum’s little poodle and a couple of other dogs who were on day care.
That night as Pippy still hadn’t coughed anything up other than occasional bit of white froth, I decided to make an appointment for the next afternoon. So in the morning we went out for a walk and she was running around happily enough.
At the vets’ another lady in the waiting room said “I’ve never seen a coughing dog before!” and it was the subject of some amusement, but as soon as we went into the vet’s consulting room he said Pippy has “kennel cough”.
I immediately responded: “But she was immunised against that in April.”
The vet then went on to say that the immunisation against kennel cough is only reliable against about 9 strains of the virus, that he doesn’t bother getting his own dogs immunised and that in fact “kennel cough” is a pretty generic term for a cough.
The vet prescribed an anti-inflammatory for Pippy’s throat and said that she needed to be isolated from other dogs until three days after her last cough. This basically means no walks!
I can only hope that, having had it for a few days before we went to the vets, she shakes it off pretty quickly as being confined to barracks is not going to fun for anyone. The alternative is to walk her on her lead maybe late at night when there’s no-one else around, but that’s going to be quite frustrating, too.
So what have I learned? That a coughing dog should be taken seriously and that the immunisation is probably only worth getting if you’re going to be using boarding kennels (who usually insist on it).
Pippy's Farmhouse Bakery 