Originally Posted By: Gyggles1How do you know if your dog has allergies to like the food they eat ? I see a lot of GSD's do have allergies and I have often wondered how you would know, do you need to go in for testing ?
After seeing the vet several times for itching/hot spots, my vet suggested doing environmental allergy testing (which came back positive for several environmental allergens). On the advice of my breeder, I decided to do a raw food elmination diet to see of any food allergies as well. Within three weeks of taking him off kibble and putting him just on chicken - less itching (and I could take him off antihistimines). So, I haven't tried to add anything back in (like wheat, corn, barley, etc) to actually see if he is allergic to those things - I just try to stay away from grains (except rice if we are doing a bland diet, and that seems to be ok for us) and we haven't had any problems since.
Originally Posted By: Gyggles1I know the only thing to look for is itching & gas but that is all I know. There's so many ingredients in a dog food I'd imagine it would be hard to rule it out by each ingredient. ??
To rule out food allergies, you would have to do a home cooked or raw food elimination diet because it would be too hard with all of the idividual ingredients in kibble.