How can you tell if my dog has allergies?

When you come to The Drake Center to see me and your dog is itchy and red and kind of miserable, I'm going to start to have an idea that your dog may have allergies. But I'm going to begin to rule out other things first, including external parasites. Sometimes there may be a food component, depending on where they're showing me symptoms. We tend to see food allergies in the ears and on the back end. A flea allergy is there too. When dogs are chewing on their feet, they may have a combination of contact allergies and a yeast infection. So there are many things that we're going to do. But I always say it takes a process of you understanding what it is that we're doing to get a determination of what's going on. And you also need the patience to see how your pet is going to respond because every dog responds a bit differently.

The most common things that we will see are your dog scratching, losing hair, red skin, chewing at their feet, and scratching their ears. Those are generally the most common types of things that we'll see.

The first major thing we see with allergies in dogs is skin problems or itching. Itching is by far the most common symptom. Itching often looks intuitive in dogs. When a dog licks their paws, people will often think they're just cleaning its paws or it's a behavioral action. This may be the case, but more often, they're licking their paws because they're itchy, and they don't have the dexterity to scratch their hand like you and I would, so they lick or bite at their paw instead. Biting, licking, scratching their sides and ears, shaking their head, and rolling their back on the ground a lot are all things we see in dogs. It means they are itchy, and an itchy dog generally has skin allergies. Other things we might see are active skin lesions. This may include redness, red circles on the skin with crusts around them, hair loss, and swollen and red ears. In addition to that, allergies can sometimes manifest in GI problems. So if your dog is chronically vomiting or has diarrhea, a food allergy may be the cause.

We determine if a dog has allergies through a combination of a thorough physical history, going over everything that the dog has been exposed to and the signs they have, and a full physical exam. A lot of times, we'll run some blood work to help us eliminate other issues that could be going on, and sometimes we will send the dog to a dermatologist.

A lot of times we're going to be looking at the skin, so we may do a skin cytology or a skin scrape. We're also going to be doing a full physical exam to see if we see any issues that may be caused by allergies.