Test Your Dog’s Gut Microbiome
Problems like diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, itchy skin, and even bad breath can be a sign of trouble in your dog’s gut microbiome. A diverse, well-balanced gut microbiome is essential for almost every aspect of your dog’s health and wellbeing. But when important groups of bacteria are missing or out of balance, some of the gut’s important functions stop working. If your dog suffers from digestive symptoms or skin issues, gut microbiome testing can often reveal the underlying cause.
What Is Gut Microbiome Testing for Dogs?
Gut microbiome testing means examining the bacteria and other microbes found in an individual stool sample. The bacteria in your dog’s stool sample offer a snapshot of their gut microbiome, the complex community of bacteria and other microorganisms living in the gastrointestinal tract.
How It Works
Our at-home DoggyBiome™ Gut Health Test kit makes it easy:
Order a Gut Health Test Kit.
Find out what’s really going on inside your dog. (The cost of the kit may even be covered by your pet insurance.)
Collect a sample.
The kit includes everything you’ll need to collect two pea-sized samples of your dog’s poop. Be sure to register your dog’s sample and enter the six-character ID code printed on the instruction guide and/or sample tubes.
Send us your sample.
The kit includes a postage-paid envelope for US residents.
We analyze your sample.
Using DNA sequencing, we identify the types and proportions of all the bacteria living in your dog’s gut and compare the results to our healthy reference set.
Receive your report.
In 2–3 weeks, you’ll receive an email notification that your test results are ready and can be accessed via our online Pet Portal. The interactive report also includes personalized diet and supplement recommendations to improve your dog’s health.
Questions about your dog’s report?
We are here to help! Email us your questions or schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation to review your dog’s personalized gut health report.
Video Tour: What’s in the Test Report?
This video tour walks you through an actual DoggyBiome Gut Health Test report for Charlie, a 14-year-old dog with diarrhea.
What Can You Learn about Your Dog’s Health from Gut Microbiome Testing?
Our DoggyBiome Gut Health Test provides you with useful insights that no other current veterinary test can offer. If your dog has digestive problems, itchy skin, or immune system issues, those symptoms are often related to a gut microbiome imbalance. You will receive a detailed report with results you can use to help resolve symptoms and improve your dog’s health and happiness for a lifetime.
Find out what’s going on inside your dog’s digestive system:
Your dog’s unique microbial community
Using DNA sequencing, we identify all the types of bacteria living in your dog’s gut, giving you a detailed picture of their unique gut microbiome.
Imbalances
If important bacteria are missing, the gut microbiome is out of balance. Identifying imbalances early allows you to make changes to your dog’s diet or lifestyle that can improve or even prevent symptoms.
Your dog’s diet
Each gut microbiome is unique. Different dogs need different dietary adjustments to support the growth of beneficial bacteria. Food recommendations based on your dog’s individual results will help you make simple changes that can improve their gut health and overall wellness.
Missing bacteria
A comparison of your dog’s results with our healthy reference set reveals whether your dog is missing any important bacterial groups. If so, that absence may be a result of antibiotic use, diet, illness, or other factors.
Harmful bacteria
Microbiome testing can quickly identify any problematic groups of gut bacteria. These may be pathogens that don’t belong in a healthy dog’s gut or normal members of the microbiome that have grown too numerous.
In addition, gut microbiome testing can provide your veterinarian with useful data and actionable next steps, whether or not your dog has already been diagnosed with a health condition (like IBD or allergies).
What Happens after Your Dog’s Gut Microbiome Test?
Once we’ve analyzed your dog’s sample, you’ll be able to access the results online in an interactive report. We give you a lot of information about your dog’s individual gut microbiome, so don’t worry if you feel like you could use a little help understanding it all!
A 15-minute phone consultation is included in the price of the test kit. Just schedule your consult, and one of our Animal Care Specialists will review your dog’s results with you.
If your dog’s gut microbiome is already diverse and well-balanced, it will look a lot like the healthy reference set. That’s great! But if not, the report will explain whether the best solution for your dog is to Add beneficial bacteria, Remove harmful bacteria, or Rebalance the existing bacteria populations. Learn more about restoring your dog’s gut health:
Are AnimalBiome’s DoggyBiome Gut Health Tests Legitimate?
Like anything unfamiliar, gut health testing raises a lot of questions, and we often get asked whether it’s legitimate.
Tens of Thousands of Poop Samples
After analyzing the fecal microbiome (poop) samples from tens of thousands of cats and dogs, we can definitively say that AnimalBiome’s gut microbiome health tests are legitimate, providing accurate, actionable results. Just ask our customers: they’ve given our DoggyBiome Gut Health Tests hundreds of four- and five-star reviews.
Our Healthy Reference Set
We maintain the largest database of dog microbiome samples in the world. And based on our analysis of that large database, we’ve identified a “reference set” of all the types of bacteria we can expect to find in the gut of a healthy dog.
A pea-sized sample of dog poop contains roughly 1 billion bacterial cells. To test your dog’s gut health, we extract DNA from the bacteria in their sample, then use DNA sequencing to identify the different types of bacteria living in your dog’s gut, which we compare to our healthy dog reference set.
A Well-Established Diagnostic Tool
Gut microbiome testing is a well-established diagnostic tool in human medicine, where studies have found that gut microbiome dysfunction is associated with an amazing variety of health conditions—including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), type 2 diabetes, and depression. In dogs too, problems with the gut microbiome have been identified as a factor in numerous health issues, including IBD, diabetes, allergies, obesity, and dementia.
That means looking closely at the gut microbiome can give us valuable information about what’s going wrong when your dog develops symptoms like diarrhea, gas, or itchy skin. (Microbiome testing is an especially useful tool if your dog has been treated with antibiotics, which are known to cause both short- and long-term changes to the bacterial community in the gut microbiome.)
