Tag Archives: gastrointestinal disease

When I was a kid, our family dog ate the edges of my mother’s beautiful living room drapes. Because she loved that dog more than her children, she blamed us for touching the drapes with sticky fingers. In her mind, the food residue on the drapes enticed the dog to eat them and thus, the dog, but not the children, were forgiven. Fast forward to the present and, as a veterinarian at the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, I routinely encounter patients who eat items with no nutritional value, a condition called “pica.” If you follow us on Facebook and Instagram, you’ve seen the dramatic x-rays of animals that have eaten items like a string of lights, an airtag, rocks, magnets, an ethernet cable and all manner of other non-food items. Today’s blog takes a closer look at pica—what it is, why it happens, and why it matters.

For those of us in the dog world, much of our focus over the last couple of weeks has been on infectious respiratory diseases in dogs. While the current outbreak remains a mystery, today’s blogpost will focus on the well documented link between respiratory and gastrointestinal illness in dogs. The link between these two body systems might surprise the casual reader; however, the two systems share a common origin: the mouth. The mouth divides into the trachea (windpipe) of the respiratory system and the esophagus leading to the stomach.