Brown Urine in a Dog: What Would You Do If It Was Your Dog? Jasmine’s Story

How freaked would you be if your dog’s urine was brown and they had difficulty walking on top of that?

Brown Urine and Difficulty Walking in Dogs: Jasmine's Pee is Brown

If your dog’s pee is brown, it’s never good news.

Urine turns brown in color because it contains things that should not be there. This can be waste products of the breakdown of muscle tissue or red blood cells or old blood from somewhere in the urinary tract.

I refer to it as the day we almost killed our dog.

It was not what we were trying to do.

Jasmine was five-and-a-half years old at that time She was suffering from episodes of panting and pacing. During these episodes, Jasmine was clearly in distress. The problem kept getting progressively worse and more frequent. We were trying to get it diagnosed for years and no vet could figure it out.

Because at this point, all working theories fell through, we were going to get chest x-rays to see whether Jasmine’s heart was the cause. It should have been a routine procedure, and we didn’t think twice about it.

Hubby dropped Jasmine off at the clinic and we were to pick her up some time in the afternoon.

But instead, we received a phone call that Jasmine suffered drug-induced hyperthermia and they were trying to stabilize her.

We didn’t know whether Jasmine was going to make it.

The vet released Jasmine to home care at the end of the day. While she was still in bad shape, he felt she’d recover best at home. He told us that Jasmine should improve by the next morning, but that’s not how things played out.

Jasmine arrived home looking like a train wreck.

She could barely walk and wasn’t able to get up on her own. She wasn’t interested in eating or drinking and we were to monitor her temperature to make sure it remained within safe normal. When she had to go to the bathroom, we had to support her with a towel sling.

We didn’t know what color Jasmine’s urine was then because it was dark and we didn’t know to watch for that then. We were more focused on making it through the night, hoping she will feel better by morning. The vet told us she would.

However, after a long night, Jasmine looked just as horrible in the morning. In fact, she looked worse. She needed a lot of help to make it out to pee.

And when she peed, Jasmine’s urine was brown!

I didn’t quite understand what brown urine in dogs meant but I knew it was an emergency–particularly considering how ill she looked overall.

While hubby was getting Jasmine in the truck, I was on the phone with the veterinary ER to explain why we were on our way. My dog couldn’t walk and her urine was brown.

Do you know what brown urine in dogs means?

What do you think caused Jasmine’s brown pee? What would you do if it was your dog?

Read Jasmine’s story here.

Related articles:
Symptoms to Watch for In Your Dog: Brown Urine
Our Own Emergency Vet Horror

Further reading:
Discolored urine: What does it mean?

Categories: Brown urine • Conditions • Dog health advocacy • Hyperthermia • Mobility issues • Symptoms

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Jana Rade

I am a graphic designer, dog health advocate, writer, and author. Jasmine, the Rottweiler of my life, was the largest female from her litter. We thought we were getting a healthy dog. Getting a puppy from a backyard breeder was our first mistake. Countless veterinary visits without a diagnosis or useful treatment later, I realized that I had to take Jasmine's health care in my own hands. I learned the hard way that merely seeing a vet is not always enough. There is more to finding a good vet than finding the closest clinic down the street. And, sadly, there is more to advocating for your dog's health than visiting a veterinarian. It should be enough, but it often is not. With Jasmine, it took five years to get a diagnosis. Unfortunately, other problems had snowballed for that in the meantime. Jasmine's health challenges became a crash course in understanding dog health issues and how to go about getting a proper diagnosis and treatment. I had to learn, and I had to learn fast. Helping others through my challenges and experience has become my mission and Jasmine's legacy. I now try to help people how to recognize and understand signs of illness in their dogs, how to work with their veterinarian, and when to seek a second opinion. My goal is to save others the steep curve of having to learn things the hard way as I did. That is the mission behind my blog and behind my writing. That is why I wrote Symptoms to Watch for in Your Dog, which has turned out being an award-winning guide to dog owners. What I'm trying to share encompasses 20 years of experience.

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