When a dog is running a fever, a number of things can happen, but none of them are good. For this reason, having your dog with a fever can be one of the things that scare us animal lovers the most.
We define a state of fever as a state in which the body temperature of an animal is higher than normal, which makes the animal feel general malaise and severe pain caused by this sudden increase in body temperature.
Obviously fever does not just happen like that, but it has its causes. When there is an infection or disease in the body, the body tends to raise its temperature so that it can work faster and fight disease more easily.
Fever is a condition that appears in most mammalian animals such as cats, humans and of course dogs. In all cases, fever is a discomfort, but in the case of dogs it is especially dangerous for the health of the animal.
The worst thing about a fever is that, as I have already said, it is usually preceded by an illness or infection, which could seriously damage the health of your pet, and can even kill it in the most serious cases.
For this reason, it is essential to learn to detect fever in dogs, since if we manage to do this, we will be able to treat the disease or infection that your dog has more easily, since the sooner an infection is caught, the sooner it will be able to cure and with greater efficiency than if we take a long time to do it.
In addition to this, you must also learn to lower the fever, since it is quite an unpleasant state for the dog. If we manage to lower it a few tenths, the animal will be much more comfortable and will not have as bad a time as if we let it have a very high fever.
In addition, thanks to this we will be able to create a bond with the dog, because if it sees that we take care of it and take care of it, the dog will feel more affection towards you, since dogs are very faithful animals that value much that they take care and keep them healthy.
For all this, today we are going to teach you how to detect fevers in dogs and how you can make it go down a little, something that will allow you to get your dog’s health back to normal and return to being that nice playful dog that before used to be.
Instructions to know if you have a fever and take care of it
Symptoms of fever in dogs: The first thing we have to do when treating fever in a dog is to try to detect the most obvious symptoms of fever in dogs. These symptoms look pretty good and they will allow you to detect with almost no chance of being wrong if your dog has a fever or not. Two or more symptoms really do have to coincide, because if only one coincides, it could be caused by other causes (for example, if your dog only has dry eyes, it could simply be that he has irritated or tired eyes). I present to you are 5 symptoms that you have surely already seen in your dog, symptoms that are easy to detect and that you will see with the naked eye without any problem.
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- Very hot snout: The first symptom and one of the most obvious is that your dog’s snout is very hot, that is, if you touch your dog’s nose, it is much hotter than its normal temperature. This is because when the dog has a fever, the body temperature rises and since the dog’s snout is very sensitive, it is one of the parts that we are going to notice the most. Lightly touch your dog’s snout to check its temperature, to see if it is normal or slightly elevated.
- Dry eyes and nose: The second symptom that your dog might have a fever is dry eyes and nose. Dogs when they have a fever usually have problems in the eye and nose, feeling how both parts dry up when they have a fever. Therefore, when the dog has a very dry nose and eyes, it can be a symptom of fever.
- The dog trembles: This symptom is very similar to what people have in cases of very high fevers. When the fever is quite strong, it is common for the dog to begin to tremble, with a tremor very similar to the one that dogs have when they are very cold. In addition to the dog you can see a facial expression of sadness and concern, as if he were dying.
- Lack of strength and appetite: This symptom is also very similar to what people have, that is, lack of strength and appetite. When someone has a fever, he feels like he doesn’t feel like eating and like he has to lie down all day and do nothing, since he doesn’t have the strength. This happens the same in dogs, something that you can check by seeing how it reacts when you feed it. If he eats less than normal, the dog may have a fever and if the dog is always lying down and away from you, much more than usual, he has a fever.
- Aggressiveness: Although aggressiveness is not one of the most common symptoms of fever, it can happen that sometimes the dog reacts too aggressively to you. This will be done because since it is so bad, it can feel threatened when you are going to approach it, something that will make the dog feel bad and react in this way.
- Apply cold water: Once we have identified all the symptoms of fever in dogs, we are going to explain the main steps we have to take to eliminate fever in dogs. The first step that we are going to take is the application of a little cold water on the dog’s forehead. The cold water simply regulates the temperature of the dog, causing the cold of the water to slightly change the temperature of the animal’s forehead, thus lowering the fever. The way to do it is to apply a little cold water on a cloth, and then we pass the cloth over the dog’s forehead and over the snout, making the cold water cover the dog well. This process must be repeated several times, specifically until we manage to lower the fever, doing it more or less every 2 or 3 hours.
- Give a bath: The second thing we can do to lower the fever in the dog is to give him a bath with slightly cold water. With this we are going to achieve several things, firstly, we are going to make the dog more comfortable, secondly, we are going to get the dog’s body temperature to drop, therefore, we will be able to put an end to its fever. Finally we will be able to make the dog have better hygiene, since surely when he is sick he is not well groomed. When the dog has a fever, give him a bath and you will see how you can easily relieve part of the symptoms of the fever.
- Hydration: Dogs, like almost all living beings, are composed mostly of water; therefore, if they drink water they will feel much better. This is especially important in fevers, since when an animal has a fever, it will feel generally unwell. Also, since the dog will be hot, it will spend the day panting, making its mouth dry and making it much thirstier. For this reason, it is important to give your dog plenty of water, making sure that his water bowl is always filled with fresh, clean water. Surely you notice how your dog drinks much more than when he is healthy, so you must be careful so that he never runs out of water, since being so bad he will not ask you for water as he does when he is healthy, having to worry about your of this task.
- Cool with a hair dryer: The next thing we are going to do is give the dog some air with the hair dryer in the bathroom, a device that emits air through the electrical current in your house. Of course, do not blow hot air on the dog or the remedy could be worse than the disease. What you have to do is press the cold air button, so that the air that comes out is fresh and allows you to relieve the excessive heat of the animal. This will not only serve to make the dog feel more comfortable, but it will also serve to make your dog have less fever, since if we apply cold on a hot surface, we will always get the temperature to decrease, achieving thus a significant drop in body temperature of the same and thus lowering the fever.
- Apply ice: In extreme cases, what we must do is apply a little ice on the animal’s forehead and snout. We will do this in the same way as in the steps in which we had to apply water to the dog, that is, what we must do is take some ice, wrap it in a paper or towel and apply it to the forehead and the dog’s muzzle. The ice is extremely cold and therefore, what we should do is apply the ice only in cases of very high fevers, in which the other remedies have not worked and the dog has tremors and is too hot. The low temperature of the ice will make the fever go down in 90% of cases, so it is one of the best home remedies that exist to lower high fevers.
- Go to the vet: Finally we must go to the vet to see what is happening with our dog. The veterinarian is a doctor specialized in treating animals, a doctor who will examine our dog and will do two things: First, he will try to determine the cause of the fever, something very useful if he has a disease that is difficult to detect with the naked eye. Secondly, he will be in charge of making the fever go down, prescribing medications for your dog and also some home remedies very similar to the ones I have explained here today. This will improve your animal’s health and therefore prepare it to be healthy again. Of course, you must pay attention to everything your veterinarian tells you, because if you do not comply with everything he tells you, it may happen that your dog’s health does not evolve in the way you expect.
