Poop Soup

On Wednesday we got the call we'd been waiting for. The samples we provided to the University had produced some answers to the cause of the mystery disease. Sky and Samba have cryptosporidium and clostridium perfrigens.

 Now what do we do about this since they seem to be drug resistant?  Well, the answer is rather gross, so you might want to stop reading here.

While surfing the internet Rob found reports of people who had been treated for intestinal infections by using a procedure called fecal transplant. We called Dr B and asked him about it. He got in contact with the university vets and after numerous calls back and forth we all agreed it was worth trying.

The procedure involves replacing the fecal content containing the harmful bacteria with new fecal matter containing healthy bacteria. It has been successfully done on many humans and a couple of zoo gorillas, but we couldn't find any records of dogs receiving the transplant.

We decided to go for it and this morning Samba and Sky went to the vet hospital along with two bags of fecal matter from healthy donors. We selected Bailey and Norma Jean as the donors. Bailey had the illness and recovered easily and Norma Jean didn't get sick. Because of their close relationship they would make good donors.

We just got word that the initial procedure went well and the dogs are resting. The first step was flushing out as much of the bad poop as possible and rectally injecting the good poop. The donated poop was mixed with milk and injected. On Saturday and Sunday they will receive more of the "poop soup" orally. I'll be using a syringe to feed it to them. This probably sounds worse than it is, since dogs don't have the same aversion to poop that we humans have.

We may have to repeat the procedure until the good bacteria gets established and fights off the bad stuff. We'll know in a few days how this is working by observing the dogs. So at least we know what we're fighting and have a game plan on how to fight it.