Heart pig & Hooting

[Puddles1999]

Hi!
So Penelope is around 5 years old. Quite a few months back she had started hooting and was put on antibiotics to see if it stopped. It continued off and on for a while until she randomly got a bunch of fluid in her abdomen.

She was then put on furosemide and was diagnosed with a little bit of an enlarged heart. She is now on daily Benazepril and Vetmedin. I’ve since stopped the furosemide because she hasn’t needed it for months.

However, the past few days she’s been hooting more often. You can especially hear it when she’s eating her veggies now. It seems to stay worse after she finishes her veggies for a little while. She was just at the vet a few weeks ago and has another vet appointment in about 20 days. Everything was great at her appointment. The hooting has just started back up. It sounds like it is coming from her nose.

I’ve been weighing her every day and there’s no weight change or gain to indicate fluid build up. Wondering if anyone maybe has experience with their heart pigs and the hooting.

Thank you!

 

[Wiebke]

Hi!
So Penelope is around 5 years old. Quite a few months back she had started hooting and was put on antibiotics to see if it stopped. It continued off and on for a while until she randomly got a bunch of fluid in her abdomen.

She was then put on furosemide and was diagnosed with a little bit of an enlarged heart. She is now on daily Benazepril and Vetmedin. I’ve since stopped the furosemide because she hasn’t needed it for months.

However, the past few days she’s been hooting more often. You can especially hear it when she’s eating her veggies now. It seems to stay worse after she finishes her veggies for a little while. She was just at the vet a few weeks ago and has another vet appointment in about 20 days. Everything was great at her appointment. The hooting has just started back up. It sounds like it is coming from her nose.

I’ve been weighing her every day and there’s no weight change or gain to indicate fluid build up. Wondering if anyone maybe has experience with their heart pigs and the hooting.

Thank you!

Hi

In our experience on here, hooting is generally a symptom of a mildly blocked nose (usually just a little speck of hay dust temporarily blocking the nose,which is usually breathed or sneezed out). If it is more persistent, you may want to consider a very mild sensitivity to hay dust and see whether changing your hay brand may help.

Hooting is not a serious symptom and it is not used by vets to diagnose heart problems. The link has been somewhat arbitrarily made by some owners over a decade ago but this has never been confirmed. It is however still very much making the rounds online, unfortunately. Very occasionally, like in your case, heart disease can be found when looking very, very closely but that connection can be quite as likely coincidental and not causal.

If you strongly feel that you have major concerns, then please see your vet whether the medication cocktail needs adjusting, especially if you notice more substantial and persistent changes in your piggy's behaviour/reduced level of activity or laboured breathing (heaving sides) and loss of weight/reduced food intake (the need to breathe comes before the need to drink and thirdly the need to eat). Right now there is no indication of that.

 

[VickiA]

It sounds more like irritation from hay dust or something similar especially if she’s maintaining her weight and otherwise seems herself. If anything changes then I would see the vet but for now I think it’s a watching situation.