How to Make Your Sick Dog Feel Better – 2 Tips
Your dog is sick. Maybe she’s got a cold, or maybe her illness is more terminal.
Your sick dog. Perhaps she has diabetes, or an age related disease like arthritis. While you can’t cure everything that ails your dog, you can help her take the pain away. Consider the following four tips on how to make your sick dog feel better.
1. Make Sure Your Sick Dog is Properly Hydrated
A common problem with sick animals be the animal a dog, a cat or a person, is dehydration. Often sick dogs are more dehydrated than healthy dogs due to excessive diarrhea, vomiting, urination, or sweating. Dehydration is a problem because dogs need a certain amount of liquid in their bodies to function. Water helps the blood move and the brain function. Without the necessary amount of water, a dog’s body cannot stay healthy.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to monitor how much your dog is drinking. Unlike with humans, you cannot give your dog a glass of water and tell her to drink it. Healthy dogs will drink as much water as they need throughout the day without your help, sick dogs will not. A tricky, and easy way to increase the amount of water your dog is drinking is to get her dry food wet before she eats it. This is also a great trick if your dog suffers from Urinary Tract Infections. Before you give your dog her food bowl, saturate her dry food in water. It may take a couple of meals before your dog eats all of her now wet dry food, but by doing this you are ensuring your dog gets twice the amount of water she would normally. This extra water will help your dog stay healthy and it will help her ward off future illnesses, like Urinary Tract Infections.
2. Exercise Your Sick Dog
An important way to help your dog stay healthy, and to make your dog healthier is to get her exercising. Obesity is a major problem among dogs today. Obesity can lead to a medley of other health issues, such as cardiac problems, diabetes, arthritis, respiratory issues and more. No matter if your dog is obese now, or if she is the perfect weight, exercise can help her. Obviously, exercise helps her maintain a healthy weight, but it also does wonders for her mentally. Dogs who get to go outside and play on a regular basis tend to be happier and more optimistic than dogs who do not get to go outside on a regular basis. Dogs who are happier are often healthier and will often live longer with a higher quality of life.