Has anyone ever experienced a dog with toxic milk. We have a litter of puppies that are now 4 weeks old and look very bad underweight and their coats look very unhealthy. We have treated them for worms, giarda and coccidia and they just nebver go better. The vet finally suggested that the moms milk must be bad or toxic, from an infection, so we weaned the puppies from her but they are still not doing good. I wonder if they need to be put on antibiotics or something. Has anyone had a problem like this? Please help?

Failure to Thrive is not common for an entire litter. It does seem probable that mom has a problem with the milk supply. Still I don't think that it could be known what the problem could be without diagnostic testing. If your Vet suggested supplements or an alternative milk product, go with that.

The natural milk should be a very clean white with no odor. It should taste sweet with no bitterness. Bitterness indicates infection.

4 weeks is about the time that I start to add watered down canned puppy food to Mom's milk. The puppies just lap it up. I have had excellent results with Diamond brand Chicken Soup canned. Just add a little water so that it is slightly soupy. If your puppies are nutrient deficient, this will help.

Good Luck!

***Edited By: DeputyDog on 11/6/2009 8:37:57 PM***
Reason: Added info

Thank you for your reply, we happen to have another mom that just weaned her pups so we now have them with her because the puppies have not appetite and really have no desire to suck from a bottle or eat softened puppy food. I have always in the past softened diamond large breed puppy food (large breed dog) and let soak for 45 mins until soft and mix powdered milk with it as well as dyne and the puppies will not eat enough to keep them going. which makes me wonder if I should put them on antibitics? I decided tonight maybe I should just treat the two smallest ones with antibiotics and not the others and see what progress we have with them in 4-5 days. I'm worried now that I let these puppies suck toxic or bad milk for 4 weeks before I realized what was going on. Will they ever recover? They look aweful and have no energy.

Do these puppy have diarrhea?? are they vomiting? You may want the vet to check the stools again for another type of infection..

when they were only a week old they had loose stools and we put them on two different Antibiotics and it cleared it up now their stools are pretty firm.. However it has now been 2 days since I took them off of their mom who we thought might have bad milk and they are definately looking better and have more energy as well as a better appetite and slowly gaining weight, so it must be the moms milk. I wonder if this will happen again on her next litter as I dont want to go through this again, it was a nightmare trying to figure it out.