Is Your Dog Puking Yellow?

Napa is a puker. He’s not a crapper, but he’s definitely a puker.

When he was a pup, he’d puke all the time. The only things we really knew were that he puked up yellow stuff, and he didn’t like to eat.

We told our first vet that Napa didn’t like to eat. She said, “dogs will eat when they’re hungry, they won’t starve themselves.” Well, she was wrong because later on we came to find out that he was puking yellow because he was, in fact, starving himself. It’s bile.

According to VetStreet, “in most cases, yellow foam indicates that the dog’s stomach is relatively empty of food. The yellow color comes from bile, a digestive fluid that’s produced in the liver, stored in the gall bladder and then released into the small intestine just below the stomach.”

When your dog is vomiting yellow, they caution to check for other substances in the bile, like grass, to find out what might be causing it, and to take a sample to your vet if there is (unless it’s grass of course!).

Also, “if your dog shows other signs, including loss of appetite, lethargy and diarrhea — or if you notice a yellow tinge to your dog’s skin, eyes or gums — it merits a trip to your veterinarian. The problem may be as simple as a sudden diet change, stress or side effects from medication. But it could also be something more serious, such as pancreatitis, toxins, liver disease, parasites, allergies and more. When a foreign body is involved, like that sock that suddenly went missing, it may even require emergency surgery.”

In our case, the cause was Napa just not liking food that much. He was terribly hard to train in the beginning because he didn’t even care about treats!

We learned after a long time that Goldendoodles are just picky. Too smart for their own good!

We went through ten different dog foods in his first year. We started with Castor & Pollux, which was supposed to be the most healthy, top of the line dog food out there. We tried out everything else on the “high end” for months. The vet said that “good foods” tend to go stale quickly and he might be sensitive to stale food.

That wasn’t a likely scenario because we always bought small bags knowing the pooch wasn’t going to like it for long. After moving to a new vet and trying a few more things, we found Fresh Pet, which Napa loved for a long, consecutive period of time. The downside was that for his size, it costs around $100 per month in dog food. The upside is that he likes it! A ton! And we like feeding him real food. The vital roll looks like a big log of bologna. We’d cut it up into slices for the week and put the bags in the refrigerator.

Eventually he got bored (he’s such a foodie diva!) and wanted something new. We moved on to several more unsuccessful dog foods after that, but always come back to Fresh Pet until he got bored again (takes much longer than the other foods though!) Now we’re also experimenting with Taste of the Wild’s Boar blend and he loves it. Whew. We’ll probably start rotating back and forth between the two.

Anyway.. every once in a while, when Napa gets bored again, he barfs up the yellow foam. We typically scramble up an egg for him and he’s fine. The “bland diet” which is good for dogs who need to eat foods that won’t irritate their stomachs is a combo of rice and hamburg, so that’s good too if you have the ingredients on hand.

---

Side note: Do you run a business in the pet industry? Would you like to drive more traffic and sales to your site through a search-optimized pet blog? Get in touch with my office-mates at Lantern Content Marketing!

---