Amber Monroe Facebook ad: “If your dog's allergies never end, read this”

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I have four tubs of dog collagen in my kitchen cupboard. Three of them were a complete waste of money, and it took me eleven months and about $180 to work out why. I am writing this because I see the same comment under every post about itchy dogs. Someone suggests collagen and four people reply saying they tried it and it did nothing. That was me. I said exactly that, in a Facebook group, in March. I was wrong, and not in the way you would expect. Collagen was right. I had just bought the wrong kind three times in a row, and nobody selling it to me had any reason to explain the difference. So here is the difference, and it takes two minutes to check on whatever is in your cupboard right now. My dog is Pepper. She is six, some sort of terrier mix, and she has been chewing her front paws since she was about two and a half. Rust brown stains halfway up both legs. The whole routine you already know. The food changes, the shampoos, the Apoquel that worked brilliantly and then did not. Somewhere in year two I read about the skin barrier and it was the first thing that ever explained why nothing lasted. Skin is a wall, collagen is what holds it together, dogs stop making enough of it after about age two, gaps open and the allergens walk straight through. The itch is the alarm, not the problem. That made sense to me. It still does. It is the only explanation I have found that accounts for the two good weeks you get from literally anything you try. So I bought collagen. Tub one. A powder from a big pet retailer, beef sourced. Every day for two months. Nothing. Not a slightly better week. Nothing at all. Tub two. Chews. She loved them, which I took as a good sign at the time. Three months. Her coat maybe looked slightly better and honestly I think that was the weather turning. Tub three. Another powder, more expensive, marketed hard at dog people like me. Six weeks. Nothing. That is when I posted the comment saying collagen was a scam. A woman replied. She did not argue. She just asked me to go and read the back of all three tubs and tell her what type of collagen was in them. All three said the same thing. Type II. Here is what nobody had told me, and once you know it you cannot unsee it. Collagen is not one thing. There are different types and they build different tissue. Types I and III build skin. That is the structural protein in the layer under the surface. That is the wall. Type II builds cartilage. It is a joint ingredient. It is what you give an old dog with stiff hips. It has essentially nothing to do with the skin barrier. And type II is the cheapest collagen there is to source, because it comes from chicken sternum cartilage, which is a slaughterhouse byproduct nobody else wants. So an enormous amount of the dog collagen on the market is type II, or type II with a little of something else thrown in so the label can say multi collagen. I had spent eleven months and $180 giving a dog with a skin problem a joint supplement, three times, and then concluded that skin science was wrong. That was not the only thing I had got wrong. The form matters too. Collagen is a big molecule. For any of it to reach the skin it has to be hydrolysed, broken into peptides small enough to cross the gut wall. A baked chew has been through enough heat to damage a good proportion of whatever was in it before it ever reached my dog, and most of the mass of a chew is binder, starch and flavouring anyway. That is why she loved them. I was buying a biscuit. Powders mostly pass straight through. And the source matters. Marine collagen peptides are smaller molecules than the beef and pork collagen in nearly everything on the shelf, so more of it actually gets absorbed. There is one more thing that would have mattered to me if I had known. Pepper was on a strict elimination diet for four months at one point. Chicken free, then beef free. And I was, at the same time, giving her a beef sourced collagen powder every single morning. I undid four months of my own work and did not know it. So, eleven months in, I finally knew what I was actually looking for. Types I and III, not II. Hydrolysed and liquid, not a chew and not a powder. Marine sourced, so it is small enough to absorb and it does not blow up an elimination diet. That combination turned out to be surprisingly hard to find. Most products manage one of the three. What I ended up with is a liquid marine collagen from deep sea cod, types I and III, with hyaluronic acid in it, which matters because collagen builds the structure and hyaluronic acid is what holds water inside it. One without the other is half the job. I want to be straight about how it went, because the thing that nearly made me quit a fourth time was the timeline. Weeks one to four, nothing. Genuinely nothing. And after three failures I was extremely ready to write this one off too. If you take one thing from this, take that. The wall took years to thin. It does not close in a fortnight. Week 5, the evening chewing got shorter. Not gone. Shorter. Week 7, I noticed I had stopped hearing it at night. That is a strange thing to notice, the absence of a sound you have been half listening for. Week 9, the rust staining started growing out. Clean fur coming up from the nail bed, which is how you know it is new growth rather than the stain fading. Week 12. Her paws are cream coloured. I have not seen that since she was two. I still have the three useless tubs in the cupboard. I keep meaning to throw them out and I never do, I think because they are a reminder that I nearly gave up on the right idea because I kept buying the wrong version of it. More than anything else, go and read the back of whatever you already own. If it says type II, or it is a chew, or it is a powder, you did not run the experiment you think you ran. You were not wrong about collagen. You were sold cartilage. EDIT: people keep sending me photos of their tubs. Yes, if it says type II or chicken collagen, that is the joint one. Yes, chews count. And no, I am not saying every other brand is a scam, I am saying most of them are made for joints and got marketed at skin because collagen is a word that sells. Read the label, that is the whole message. The one that worked for us: bloompet.co/products/bloom-triple-collagen

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bloompet.co

☝️ If your dog's allergies never end, read this

Bloom Pet