Brands Critical Care and soybean? Why is there soybean in a product made for animals that can't process it?

[Slimphlip]

Why is there soybean in Critical care? I fed my piggy Clara probiotics mixed with critical care the other night because her poops had been few and far between and she wasn't eating normally after a round of antibiotics. When I gave her the CC/benebac mix she started having severe diarrhea. I assumed it couldn't be the critical care or benebac, that it was just an underlying issue and the fact that I gave her veggies (lettuce and carrots) earlier in the night. the vet recommended I give her 10 ml of critical 3 to 4 times a day and take her off veggies for the time being. so I started doing that. Her weight has gone up and she's started drinking water, and eating pellets and hay again, but every time I give her critical care she poops her little heart out with gloopy, soft poops. I then read that soy can cause a proliferation of bad bacteria in her caecum, is actually bad for guinea pigs, and that critical care has soy as one of it's top ingredients. I feel so frustrated that this is recommended for hind gut fermenters because there are plenty of scientific articles about soy being bad for them. Does anyone else on here have any similar experiences?

 

[Slimphlip]

I'm thinking that if her digestion issues continue and her appetite decreases again I'm just gonna grind andmash up her pellets and Timothy hay and feed her that in a paste. I really hope I haven't caused permanent damage to my Clara's guts! I feel so frustrated and like none of these companies actually care about these sweet babies.

 

[4boipigs]

I don't know anything about this soybean issue, but you could always try a different food - Emeraid or Sherwood Recovery.

 

[Slimphlip]

Ok. So the vet I first took her to just basically told me what I already knew. She's got diarrhea and she's losing weight and prescribed her 4 rounds of 10 ml of critical care a day. They didn't do any simple diagnostic tests like a fecal culture or x-ray, and when I asked them to, they said they could but haughtily explained why 1. x-raying for blockage wouldn't make sense bc "stuffs moving through her too fast not too slow, so it's probably not a blockage", and 2. Fecal cultures would take a few days and by that time it would be "too late". I felt like they knew better and that in their words: "don't believe everything you read online." I'm a biologist btw and despite knowing about the different types of bacteria present in guinea pigs guts and what makes them overgrow or become unproductive, and that I'm perfectly capable of reading scientific literature, I trusted that they maybe knew something I didn't. Diarrhea continued and she kept losing weight. We took her to another vet and the first thing they did was broke down what it could be: 1. Bad(I understand this is a loaded descriptor bc bacterial that is sometimes beneficial, if not in the presence of other bacteria bc of being killed by antibiotics, can out compete it's normal neighbors) bacterial overgrowth, 2 blockage, 3 backed up, low functioning cecum. The tests to determine the cause were x-rays and fecal cultures. They determined almost immediately that her cecum was rather full of food bits and gas and was creating a bit of a traffic jam in there, and was therefore not able to get nutrition from the food she was eating. They said that Timothy and other forms of hay, painkillers, only a few veggies a day (mainly to encourage her to eat), and benebac were the proper course of treatment. They said that as long as she is eating, critical care would be redundant and possibly counter productive bc it could be too much for her to process along with other food. The cecum, they told us, needed to work through what was going on inside of it. I feel infuriated at the first vet and I honestly wanna give them a piece of my mind.

 

[Slimphlip]

Not only that but they didn't prescribe probiotics with the antibiotics in the first place.