Australia

Niko was born in Melbourne in 2019. For the first four years of his life, he was healthy. No itching, no infections, no skin issues. He ate well: fresh gourmet food on rotation (lamb, fish, mutton, kangaroo, beef) alongside Royal Canin Shih Tzu kibble. He slept on good pet beds. We lived in an apartment with stone floors and carpet that we steam mopped every week, with whatever floor cleaner was on sale at Coles. Nothing about it was special. Nothing needed to be.

The move

In 2023, we moved to Chennai. Niko was four. The flights were long, but he handled it better than we expected. Chennai is hot, but he had air conditioning and settled in without much trouble. What followed, though, took longer to make sense of.

A lot changed at once. The gourmet fresh food subscription wasn't available in India. He stayed on Royal Canin Shih Tzu Adult for his kibble, but the protein variety he'd had in Melbourne was gone. We moved into a family home, not an apartment. The cleaning routine was different: a combination of strong floor cleaners, and at one point neemyle, which the family thought might be gentler on his paws. Agarbatti at the front door. Different fragrances through the rooms. None of it seemed significant individually.

The slow creep

The symptoms didn't arrive overnight. They built up over months. Some scratching at first, the kind you assume is a one-off. Then more scratching. Red paws he started licking. Watery eyes that he rubbed against the sofa. Then the first ear infection: sudden, smelly, with the head tilt and the shaking. The vet treated it. It cleared. Six weeks later, the next one started.

By the time Niko was four-and-a-half, he was visibly uncomfortable most days. His paws stained orange-brown from the licking. The fur between his toes was thin. The skin underneath was inflamed. He'd shake his head several times a day, pawing at one ear or the other.

The vet rounds

We saw multiple vets over the following months. Each one was kind. Each one followed roughly the same playbook: antihistamines, a steroid course when the inflammation was bad, antifungal drops for the ears, a medicated shampoo. A skin scrape that came back unhelpful. Another round of steroids.

One vet, to his credit, asked about Niko's food. He pointed at chicken as a likely driver and suggested taking it out of the diet. That was the first useful direction. But it wasn't a clean answer, and it wasn't the whole picture. Figuring out everything that was contributing took considerably longer, across several different doctors and several rounds of trial and error.

The slow figuring-out

We tried removing chicken from his diet. It helped, but not fully. The ear infections slowed. The paws improved somewhat. But some symptoms kept returning, particularly the skin issues. That pointed somewhere else.

The next variable was the home. We looked at what Niko was touching every day at floor level. The strong floor cleaners came under scrutiny. We switched to a milder, pet-friendly kennel cleaner. That made a difference too. The picture became clearer: it wasn't one trigger but a stack of them, and each had to be found separately.

Months passed. Each change was small and deliberate, one variable at a time. Some made a clear difference. Some didn't. We slipped once and gave him a chicken treat at a relative's house, and the licking came back within a week. We switched detergents and lost track of which change did what. Eventually, after enough rounds, the picture settled.

"It wasn't fast, and it wasn't one answer. It was a long series of smaller ones."

Where Niko is now

Niko is seven. He has the occasional bad day, and he flares a little in Chennai's peak summer months (April and May are harder than the rest of the year). The chronic ear infections stopped about eighteen months in. The paw licking is mostly gone. He's the same playful dog he's always been.

His food has been fish since the elimination phase: mackerel and sardines mostly, with no chicken. The home is mostly fragrance-free in the rooms he uses. His bed cover is washed weekly in fragrance-free detergent. The floors are cleaned with a pet-safe kennel cleaner. None of it is dramatic. All of it had to be figured out, one thing at a time.

The realisation

What stayed with me, after we'd finally made sense of Niko, was how many people I knew with the same story. A Cocker Spaniel getting an ear infection every quarter, on steroids every six months. A rescue with paw licking that nobody had connected to her food. A cat who over-groomed for years before someone asked what she ate.

Most of these pet parents were doing exactly what we did: trusting the vet, buying the premium food, trying a different shampoo, following the advice in front of them. The system is set up to treat the symptom of the day. The cause behind the symptom is usually fixable. Almost nobody is being shown how to find it.

That's why ode exists. To give pet parents the questions and the framework we wished we'd had, earlier and in plain language.

Where to start

If your pet is showing the same signs Niko did: paw licking, recurring ear infections, scratching that won't stop, start here:

Take the 2-minute Allergy Check →

Or read about what we cover:

• Why is your dog itching?
• Chicken allergy in dogs
• The elimination diet for dogs
• Is phenyl safe for pets?
• Monsoon allergies in Indian pets

This is education, not diagnosis. If symptoms persist or worsen, please see your vet.