Canine inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic gastrointestinal condition causing persistent nausea, abdominal discomfort, and nutritional malabsorption that significantly affects quality of life without proper management.
IBD is a condition of chronic, fluctuating discomfort. Dogs with poorly controlled IBD experience persistent nausea, abdominal cramping, and the distress of unpredictable vomiting and diarrhoea. The nutritional malabsorption causes progressive weight loss and weakness. Well-controlled IBD dogs, by contrast, can have very good quality of life — comfortable between flares, maintaining weight, and engaging normally with their environment. The welfare challenge is that IBD management is often complex and iterative: finding the right dietary or pharmacological combination requires patience and careful monitoring. Protein-losing enteropathy represents a severe welfare emergency — dogs with very low albumin develop abdominal effusion, pleural effusion, and profound oedema that causes breathlessness and discomfort. Early recognition and aggressive treatment of PLE is critical for welfare preservation.