Have been reading the message board for some time and been impressed by all your expertise and experience but this is my first posting! Hope you can help me with this. One of my dogs, a year old Westie had a nasty bout of cystitis at about 6 months. This is long gone but she has been left with very concentrated urine, the most concentrated the vet has ever seen!! She is not keen to drink water, though does occasionally so I give her drinks of diluted goat's milk, which she usually will drink. She only weighs 6.5 kilos so she wont drink too much in a go plus you can take a dog to water....! I also feed her Nature Diet with added water. She seems fine and healthy but the urine is still concentrated and I am concerned about the long term health effects. Have any of you had similar experiences or can you offer any advice please.

I've found that they will often drink more if the water is sweetened slightly - it seems to work with poorly dogs at risk of dehydration.

Hope this helps :)

Hi there.
I have had a similar experience with my pup recently. She had cystitis, then because she doesn't drink much, she too had concentrated urine. I give her milky water and any other liquid going, you can also use chicken soup diluted or broth etc... I have had tests done since and they have come back perfectly normal. Try to get her to drink in as many forms as you can, maybe even a cup of tea!! I don't think it will harm her long term if you can get her to drink enough now.
Dawn.

Hi M/maia, you could try meaty broths like Dawn suggests, these have always gone down well when I`ve had a dog not drinking a lot & use a touch of honey to sweeten the water.
Christine, Spain.

Another way to sweeten water is to use some powdered glucose, if my dogs get a tummy bug at any time I always use this plus a small amount of salt to makes sure they don't get dehydrated.

Jayne

Thank you all for your suggestions. I will certainly try sweetening the water!!