Is Your Dog's Itchy Skin Driving You Crazy?

After a little research, I found there are a couple of main factors that can cause dog itchy skin:

• Fleas/insect bites
• Chemicals - like shampoo
• Allergies (food/pollen/dust/etc)

Fleas and other insect bites are one of the most common reason for why you see your dog itching. Check where you see your dog scratching. Is there a raised bump indicating a bite? Do you actually see fleas or ticks?

If so, there are several remedies for your itchy dog due to insect bites. There are topical and oral medicines for dogs that:

• repel certain insects (fleas/ticks)
• kill off flea eggs so they can't mulitply
• kill fleas/ticks

Some of these can be purchased at local stores or from your vet. Really look over your medication to be sure it will be doing what you want (for instance, one topical will kill the fleas, but does nothing for flea eggs, another might kill fleas but not ticks). You can even get an all-inclusive oral medication for heartworm and flea control from your vet.

Just like people, dogs react differently to substances directly on their skin. They may be reacting to a different type of shampoo you used on them. Or maybe you didn't get it all off and that is irritating their skin, making an itchy dog. Try a different, gentler shampoo and make sure to rinse them thoroughly.

Dogs can have allergies too, just like humans. And they can have the same type of triggers that humans have (pollen, dust, etc.) One of the biggest culprits of the allergies for dogs though, is probably food. And the most common food allergy symptoms are itchy skin, diarrhea, ear infections, gas, and smelly stools.

So I started researching about dog food in general, trying to find out which brands would be the best to help my dog's itchy skin. What I found kind of sickened me.

All these years I've trusted that the pet food companies actually cared about what our pets ate. How wrong I was! Now, I don't consider myself naive - I know that they are businesses, and their business is to make money, like any other business. But when they promote that their dog food is good for my pet, I trusted them. I don't know why. Perhaps because I grew up feeding our dogs commercial dog food. It's just the way it was. Now if you talk to my parent's generation, they didn't feed commercial dog food to their dogs - they got table scraps (and lived!!!)

So what's wrong with most commercial dog foods? They basically have very little nutritional value to them. Some of the ingredients found in them are downright dangerous to the health of your dog. Very simply, they take what is left over from anything considered "fit for human consumption" and process it as dog food filler. Your dog scratching may be an indicator for you look take a good look at what you are feeding him.

So I kept researching dog food and finally decided that I needed to make my own homemade dog food for allergies. I know exactly what is in it, exactly what my dogs are ingesting. And it's not hard, just takes a little more time than ripping open a bag of commercial dog food.

After two weeks on my homemade dog food, Stella's itching at night stopped! When I woke up in the morning and realized that I did not hear my dog scratching at night, I was convinced!

Want to learn how to cure your dog's itchy skin?

Learning how to make your own homemade dog food may be the answer you're looking for - and it's not rocket science! Anyone can do it - it just takes a little more time.