Learn what bloat looks like before your dog has it

Gastric dilatation volvulus, GDV, is the one where every hour counts and where a lot of owners lose the hours that mattered because it looked like an upset stomach. The stomach fills with gas and then rotates on itself. Once it twists, nothing can leave in either direction, blood supply to the stomach and spleen gets cut off, the dog goes into shock. Untreated it kills, and not slowly. The sign to burn into your head is unproductive retching. The dog heaves over and over and nothing comes up. Along with that: a hard swollen belly, especially behind the ribs, pacing and unable to settle or lie down, heavy drooling, standing with the elbows out and the neck stretched, pale gums, collapse. A dog that's vomiting and actually producing vomit is usually a much less frightening situation than a dog heaving up nothing at all. Risk concentrates in deep chested dogs. Great Danes are the extreme case, then standard poodles, weimaraners, german shepherds, dobermans, setters, boxers, akitas, basset hounds. Older dogs are higher risk, and so are dogs with a close relative who has bloated. It does happen to mixed breed and smaller dogs, just a lot less often. If you've got a high risk dog, ask your vet about a prophylactic gastropexy, which tacks the stomach to the body wall so it can't rotate. It's commonly done at the same time as a spay or neuter, which is the cheap way to get it, and for something like a Great Dane it's a reasonable default rather than a paranoid one. The feeding advice you'll run into, smaller meals, slow feeder bowls, not exercising hard right after eating, is worth doing and the evidence behind individual pieces of it is mixed. Worth knowing the raised bowl advice actually reversed in the research, so don't buy an elevated feeder as a bloat measure. Mostly though this comes down to recognition. If your dog is heaving and nothing is coming up, go now. Don't wait to see how it looks in the morning.