Quick update, we called 10 vets on Monday, most are not accepting new patients, there is a shortage of vets in the industry due to covid I guess. We got 1 hit, which is all we needed, and had a mobile vet come to our house yesterday. The vet agreed that it does not look like a parasite infection, since we tried the usual anti-biotics without any success and took a bunch of blood tests (including TLI test for EPI). EPI tests is also something that was suggested by a bunch of Basenji people in the Basenji Companions FB group and also folks in the EPI Facebook group. I really hope that is it and a diet plan + enzyme supplement will get Kiya to digest the food again.

I also ordered an animal biome test, so we will see what that comes back with.

Quick update on Kiya, hope this is helpful to others dealing with similar issues:

We had a full blood panel done for parasites, kidneys, thyroid, liver function, etc.. also a TLI test for EPI and a urine test. Still waiting for the gut test results from (animalbiome.com).

While waiting for test results, and since all the signals were pointing at EPI, we started her on an enzyme supplement (BioCase Plus), which is enzymes + probiotic + b12 supplement. Something a lot of people successfully use for treating EPI dogs according to the EPI FB group. To our surprise after 2 days of supplement, liquid poop firmed up a bit and for the first time in months, she had solid poops (not consistently solid, but also not as liquid as before and not needing to go out every 30 min).

Fortunately and unfortunately, the EPI test came negative, her TLI was fine, and her liver functions were fine, no thyroid issues, but her proteins+b12+calcium level was very low, which supports the weight loss of 5lbs in two months. The vet diagnosed and decided to treat her for PLE protein-losing enteropathy and said we should continue BioCase Plus as it's probably helping her pancreas, which in turn helps other body functions.

She had an injection of a steroid (dexamethasone) and is on prednisone to ease her GI inflammation, also she is eating Hills Diet Biome prescription food right now + taking b12 + calcium supplement. It seems like she is doing better (no major diarrhea) and is less anxious, but time will tell and we will see if she starts gaining weight over the next few weeks on this new prescription diet.

Trying to reason with my two basenji to go outside does not work when it's raining outside. I just pick them up and take them outside and start walking really fast and even running. They eventually run to the grass or a pee spot and go. Then I just run back. Everyone gets wet, but at least no accidents in the house.

Hi Community, I'm sure you've noticed by now that the look and feel of the forum has changed, hopefully for the better.

There were a couple of things that prompted this change.

• This forum is hosted by a commercial forum provider and was running on a very old version which was needed to be upgraded in order to receive the same level of support, increase reliability and add features to ensure security and compliance with the latest privacy laws.

• As a result of the upgrade, the old forum theme which I paid over $2,000 to make years ago was no longer usable, and so I had to default to the skin provided by the hosting company. I actually think it looks better.

It is possible that some functionality has changed and will not work as it used to, so please reply to this thread and let @elbrant and I know, so we can get that figured out.

Thanks

@debradownsouth I have enabled ads for non-registered users, as I believe these users generate the bulk of the web traffic just by looking up information on Basenjis. If that is not enough, then I will run an experiment to do it for everyone and see if that helps, but initially did not want to deter long-time users from using the site because of the annoyance of ads, I am not a fan myself. Thanks for the feedback on the new format, I should have enabled it sooner, it was kind of a forced update by the provider and I am glad we did it.

@blkavatr Thank you for the kind words, I'm writing up a post about how the community users can help. Thanks for the suggestion, we have a facebook page https://www.facebook.com/basenjiforums/, but facebook in my opinion does not have the best user experience for organizing communities, 15 years of content would be lost and it is not searchable outside of Facebook. It's an option though that I will consider if all else fails.

@bill-t sometimes I sneak in a taste, while making it. :)

Hi, I appreciate you bringing this up. All the spammers have been cleaned up and are gone now. Looks like they found a way around the current spam protection, I will look into updating the spam filter settings. Meanwhile please keep flagging them.

The legal clause in our rules around content is pretty standard for most dynamic content public user forums to protect the owners from any legal claims related to content rights.

This forum gets indexed by many other sites, so content ends up showing up on the other sites without our consent and we don't want to be dealing with each site that decides to copy our content. If anyone has concerns about ownership of any content you are about to post in a public forum, just know that it may get redistributed to another place without anyone's knowledge or permission, so if it's a concern please don't post it and save us all some trouble.

Hi Community, I started this forum 15 years ago and it has grown to be a great resource for new and existing Basenji owners thanks to all of your contributions.

I have hosted this forum on my own servers for many years and customized community software to meet the needs of the growing community, as software development is one of my passions, and essentially just costs me time. In the last 5 years though between taking care of my family and two senior Basenjis there was not much time left for maintaining the forum software, so I ended up switching to a fully managed forum service from nodebb.org. The cost of this service is about $250-300/month depending on the traffic and email volume. I have paid this out of pocket for 5 years, but unfortunately, my personal situation, as many of you can relate to during the pandemic, no longer allows me this type of expense.

I am talking with other forum owners and exploring a few options like Ads for non-registered users (you will probably see some of them soon), Patreon which will enable any user of the forum to set up a small monthly donation towards the hosting costs.

I don't think the options above are going to be sufficient as we would need much higher user and traffic volume to raise this much monthly, so feel free to private message me and let me know if you have other ideas. I will continue paying for the forum out of pocket, but ideally, I get some relief soon.

Thanks,

My two senior basenjis have had food challenges since they were little. It's always been a struggle and they had pretty regular bouts of refusing to eat, itching and diarrhea from us switching the food or some food ingredients. We tried a lot of foods recommended on this forum, including home-cooked meals.

For many years we ended up settling on Acana Regionals Grasslands which is recommended by some here, is grain free and has mostly natural ingredients. It was the best food by far for our basenjis out of everything we tried. It is pretty high on protein so may not be the best for senior dogs.

Over the last year, we switched to Dr. Harvey's Canine Health Miracle Dog Food, Human Grade Dehydrated Base Mix for Dogs with Organic Whole Grains and Vegetables + ground turkey and coconut oil. It's been working great, they both enjoy it, are active, their weight is normal, and no more upset stomachs. I usually premake a batch for a week for both. 4.5 cups of Dr. Harveys dry mix + 2.6lbs of ground turkey (cooked, buy in bulk) + 3tbsps coconut oil (costco). Keep it in the refrigerator for a week.

Happy new year!

Happy new year!

Thank you @Redial and @elbrant , appreciate you stepping in to help moderate.

I would be careful with tea tree oil based shampoos, essential oils it can trigger seizures in dogs who have history of epilepsy. It happened to one of mine, when we put teatree oil on him as a flea preventitive.

https://www.whole-dog-journal.com/health/tea-tree-oil-diffusers-are-toxic-to-dogs/

Welcome! Two basenjis are better than one :)

Hi, as some of you know Kiya crossed the rainbow bridge a few months ago, succeeded by Chance, who is still relatively healthy and is now 16. Chance is very chill, friendly with everyone including other dogs in the neighborhood, and sleeps most of the time nowadays except for 3 daily walks.

We are thinking about bringing home a doberman puppy into our house in a few months. I am curious about your experiences with bringing a puppy in with a senior male basenji in the house.

@eeeefarm we've seen less spam over the last week since I enabled the captcha on the login, I have removed it for now as I understand the inconvenience by getting caught on it a few times matching chimneys :)

With that said, if the spammers are going to come back and require a bunch of time to do cleanup from @elbrant and me, I am going to have to reenable it.

Sorry you are going through this, it must be really hard, hope for a speedy recovery