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Is it okay for Aspen to drink water that's available at the dog park fountain?
Kinda makes me glad that we have never been to a dog park and have never even seen a dog park! We walk in a field and the woods and Rocky drinks from the creek and from puddles if they are fairly fresh. The only time I don't let him take a drink is if we are walking along the road and the ditch looks really grungy with old sitting water....then he has to wait until we get home just because I don't want him to drink a lot of car runoff. Sometimes I pack a water bottle for each of us (I have a fanny pack that holds two water bottles). I try to teach all my dogs to drink from a water bottle when they are little. Makes life a lot easier if they can do that! .If the water is from a clean source and constantly draining away while being replaced with fresh water, it's very unlikely that any significant level of giardia could remain present. If it's being recirculated (like in a landscape fountain or pond), that can be a problem.
At our local dog park, there are a bunch of water bowls and faucets to fill them but there are a lot of dogs that just walk right into the bowls. Sadly, there are a lot of morons there who don't clean up after their dog craps so between a few unhealthy dogs here and there, standing water in bowls, and dogs that walk through feces then trample through the bowls, it's a recipe for trouble. I've watched it happen over and over again and I know it only takes one dog with a careless owner and giardia to defecate and that becomes the impetus for a "perfect storm". The more crowded the park is, the more likely it is to happen, especially in a place like this that is full of self-absorbed idiots.
Ya' gotta' love L.A. :frown:
i think we all have to have our own comfort level...giardia is transmittable to humans. it is a nasty parasite....i watched malia go through three treatments for it and she is ten years old.....while I commend anyone who loves their Dog enough to take it to this level...
from a philosophical standpoint, I would be scared that if I get to the point where I'm fearful of the water my Dogs drink...I wouldn't know where it would end.
Before it was over, I'd have them in plastic bubbles for protection, sleeping in Oxygen chambers.....and they'd be about as far from Dogs as the prissy people I work with who roll their eyes when I tell them I have to vacuum my bed at night.
You probably have a healthy dog (or dogs) then. Dogs are much like humans in that some go through life without a care in the world, rarely getting sick, and seemingly immune to otherwise dangerous environments and substances. Call it "good genes" if you want.while I commend anyone who loves their Dog enough to take it to this level...
from a philosophical standpoint, I would be scared that if I get to the point where I'm fearful of the water my Dogs drink...I wouldn't know where it would end.
Fair points, guys.You probably have a healthy dog (or dogs) then. Dogs are much like humans in that some go through life without a care in the world, rarely getting sick, and seemingly immune to otherwise dangerous environments and substances. Call it "good genes" if you want.
On the other hand, some dogs are susceptible to everything going around, probably due to some issues causing a compromised immune system. Sometimes these problems, especially the underlying cause, is almost impossible to determine. Of the two dogs I have now, each is very different in this regard. One never gets sick and the other is very susceptible.
My male doxie/cocker mix came to us very, very sick. He had been living on the street for awhile and was only a few months old when we rescued him from a county animal shelter. We have no idea if or how well he was cared for as a young pup, whether he had access to mother's milk, and how healthy he was before he ended up on the street. All we know is that when we got him, he was a scared, emaciated, dreadlocked mess. Whatever ailments he didn't bring into the shelter with him, he probably contracted while he was there.
Then the shelter, on the day we were allowed to pick him up, gives him a barrage of vaccinations and neuters him all on the same day. He should have never been put through all of that in such a weakened state but that is how these county shelters work. The next day I have him checked out and he has kennel cough, giardia, and coccidia and three days later his kennel cough turns into pneumonia and it is not responding to antibiotics, oral or IV, and a week later we are basically told by the vet that he wasn't expected to live.
Well, he did live. I nursed him back to health. He recovered but you could tell that he was just fragile. I was determined to keep him "bug free" for the first year to give his body a chance to heal and rebuild itself. Since he was so sick, this was one of the reasons I didn't switch to raw right away. I didn't want to put that much of a bacteria load on him until he was a little more fit. But we eventually made the switch and he finally started growing and filling out and looking good.
Then we went to the dog park.
It was a busy day there with lots of different people and lots of different dogs. I let both of my dogs drink from the bowls there, thinking nothing of it. A few days later the male is crapping out blood. The female, as usual, is fine. I take them both in and the male most definitely had contracted giardia...again. So now I have to force meds down his throat to purge the organism and he becomes miserable and weak for the next 5 or 6 days. My goal of keeping him bug free for a year was shattered.
We still go to the dog park but I do not let them drink the water there and I wipe their paws down with anti-bacterial pet wipes before we get in the car so they don't drag any bugs home with them. You may think this is going "too far" but understand that like humans, every creature's health issues and needs are different. If I only had my female, I wouldn't worry about any of this in the least. But the health of my male is somewhat precarious and delicate and we treat the situation accordingly because I need him to stay well and get strong.
I'm happy to report that now that we passed the 1-year mark with him, just last month, he is like a new dog. He's happy, healthy and strong and I don't worry too much about him now like I used to. But I still won't let them drink from the bowls at the dog park any more than I would let them drink stagnant gutter or puddle water.
there are risks everywhere and we've got a whole generation being reared now who think more about germs than we ever did in my day...it's frightening to see what lengths parents go to to avoid germs. we never worried about MRSA or AIDS or HERPES or HEPATITIS C, etc.....If I knew I had an immune compromised dog (for whatever reason) I wouldn't take it to high risk environments in the first place, which a dog park is pretty high risk. Not only do you have to worry about giardia (which can be transmitted straight from one dog to another so keeping your dog from drinking community water isn't going to protect your dog 100%) but what about the dogs that come with communicable diseases like kennel cough? Or there is always the risk for attacks since some people that frequent the dog parks don't have a clue about canine communication and behavior.
It's almost like if you're worried just about your dogs drinking public water you're not worrying about enough since that is only one threat out of many that are prevalent at dog parks. Why not take an immune compromised dog to a safer, more controllable environment if you're worried about them getting sick and you know that he can't handle things well physically???