Hi everyone. I have been  having a bit of trouble over the last 6 mnths or so.My neutered male  2 yrold Staff x boxer has been having great difficulty keepig his nails intact.so far he has had to have 4 removed and one severlely reduced.One minute he is happily galloping alone next min he is lame.The nail cracks in any number of ways but always ends up in having to be removed.His nails are white ( don't know if that makes a different) He is fed a good diet of James Wellbeloved and a meat called wainwrights twice a day.He occasionally gets other things while we are training such as liver cake or packaged dog training  treats.
Does anyone have experience of this or know of any supplements I can give him ?.

Thanks

Jac on here had a lab with this problem I'll let her know to take a quick look.

Our Greyhound cross has this problem, his is due to an auto immune disease, and we have been able to keep it in remission for over a year by feeding a fish based dog food (Fish4Dogs salmon variety) and also giving salmon oil as a supplement. Our vet who specializes in auto immune disease said that he had had most success  controlling it with diets very high in omega 3 oils. When he was first diagnosed Jamie had to have the nails removed on 2 of his feet and since then had had other nails split and come off, but for the last year his nails have all remained intact and hopefully will remain so.

Of course your dogs nails splitting may not be due to an auto immune disease but omega 3 oils may help in your dogs case too.

Wow thankyou .How does the vet check for Auto immune disease ? I wonder would this be connected in anyway to his skin flaring up when he is stressed for any reason ?

I'm just checking that his nails aren't too long?

Jamie was diagnosed about 4 years ago and as far as I remember it was from a biopsy when he had his claws removed. I know that the auto immune Jamie has is related to lupus but is  much less severe than lupus itself .

I had the same trouble with my SBT Spud, in his case it was just him being a typical Staffie and bulldozing his way through our walks which are mostly on rough terrain. It stopped once I switched him to  Orijen and then a raw diet, I also use either salmon oil or omega 3,6,9 oil, so the inclusion of either of those oil's might help.Funnily enough when his nails were bad he was on JWB too.

http://www.bloodaxe.com/SLO.html

Below is a useful link that may be of use to you if your dog has the immune mediated condition, symmetrical lupoid-onychoclystrophy.
This informative page also has a link on it to a support group for owners of dogs with the condition. Many vets are not well informed about the condition.

http://whippet-health.co.uk/#/lupoid-onychoclystrophy/4543505220

My two have something similar to SLO where their nails broke and had to be removed. The re-growth isn't great and on a couple of toes isn't complete. I use a Dremmel to trim them and they've been on Oxycare and Niacinamide tablets for the past 18mths with Viacutan for oils. We tried a vet hypoallergenic diet as well but apart from not having any breakages they're still not good. I'm going back to BARF with the Viacutan and added Biotin.

My spaniel went through this when he was younger. We gave him onychoitin capsules that strengthened his nails. We found over time that we could stop the capsules and he's fine now. We got the capsules from the vets.