Hello! I apologize in advance for a long post and about a stinky topic!

Stella is now 4 1/2 months old and a whopping 25.5lbs! She's getting so big and really starting to understand our commands better. Over the past week we have noticed a "fishy" smell coming from her bum. I did quite a bit of reading online about anal glands and decided to take her to the vet today. The vet said she had full glands and expressed them. She was slightly concerned because she is young so she put her on a steroid/anti-inflammatory for 48 hours. I went back and read older posts (thank you!) on the forum and it sounds that puppies can grow out of this issue and/or a new diet and more exercise can help improve. I am keeping my fingers crossed that we can figure this out so she doesn't have this issue for life. The vet also said that anal gland issues go hand in hand with skin allergies. Has anyone found that to be true? She has eye boogies several times throughout the day and her eyes kind of tear. So, maybe she does have allergies? We are currently feeding her Eukanuba Large Breed Puppy food and would like to switch her to a hollistic brand to see if that helps. What type of hollistic food would you suggest? Grain free? No chicken? OR just hollistic in general? I definitely want to try small bags first to see how she does before buying a large bag. Also, my sister is a distributor for Lifemax Mila - which is a raw chia seed "miracle seed" that is high in Omega3, potassium, calcium, etc. All of the human family eats Mila daily in our diets and my brother gives it to his Great Dane, Sampson. Sampson has serious skin allergies and the Mila has drastically improved his allergies and you can tell he feels so much better. He will actually not eat his meal if the Mila is not in it. He knows it helps! So, if I need to I will start giving that to her. I wanted to wait until she is at least 1 year old before starting it.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I will try to get some pictures uploaded soon! She doesn't sit still for long!  

Kintra starting needing her glands expressed at approx 4 months and this continued throughout her short life.  She was affected by a rather nasty skin allergy for most of her life until i gradually transferred her onto a raw diet. Her skin did appear to improve but we never got to find out whether it was the raw food or not.  I'm not a vet, but i certainly never SAW any correlation between the anal glands and skin - her skin flared up randomly but her anal glands only required a little regular attention.  She did however get itchy eyes and ears regularly, the vet being of the opinion that the eyes, ears and skin problem being related to each other with makes sense.  Good luck.

 Thank you for your replies! Seems like stella is experiencing normal puppy things! We will just stay on top of expressing her so that it does not build up. The vet did an internal expressing.

We just got home from the dog park and she is exhausted! She can barely keep her eyes open.