How My Old Dog Started Getting Up Easier With VetIQ Chews

The four wooden steps off our back deck are not much of anything. Hattie went down them at a trot for nine years without appearing to think about it. Then in the fall of 2024 she started stopping at the top, front paws together, and looking at the yard like it was a decision instead of a place she already knew. That same fall is when the VetIQ Maximum Strength Hip & Joint soft chews first landed in our pantry, and that is where this actually starts.

I am not a veterinarian and I will not pretend to be one here. I taught high school PE and coached cross country for thirty-one years, and the only thing that ever made me useful in that job was watching how a body moves and writing down what I saw while it moved. So when our golden retriever started hesitating on those steps, I did what I used to do at practice. I got out the clipboard and started a line a day. How she got up. How she did on the deck. How far we walked.

The X-rays in September 2024 told us what we had already guessed at. Arthritis in both hips, worse on the left. Dr. Amsel has had Hattie since she was a puppy, and he said we could talk about injections or prescription pain medication somewhere down the road. For now he wanted her moving, he wanted her at 68 pounds and no heavier, and he wanted a joint supplement going into her breakfast. She has stayed at 68.

Dr. Amsel went over the VetIQ label before we opened the container, which is the only reason I trust the thing at all. Chicken flavor, soft chews, three a day at Hattie's weight, set on top of her kibble at seven in the morning. A container holds 180, so it lasts about two months at three a day. It lives in the pantry next to the flour, and Dan has learned to check the clipboard before he asks me whether she has had them.

Before I go any further I want to be straight with you about the evidence, because this is where most of what you read about joint products falls apart. Hattie is on five different things now and we added them months apart, one at a time. I cannot tell you which one did what. What I can tell you is what the clipboard says and when the line changed. That is the whole of what I know.

By December the clipboard read the same way three mornings running: she got up off the living room floor without the long pause first.

The first line on the clipboard to change was the getting-up line. Six to eight weeks in, somewhere around December 2024, she stopped taking that long breath before she pushed off the floor in the morning. It was not every day. It was enough days that I noticed it before I looked at the clipboard, and then found it had already been sitting there for a week. I have coached long enough to be suspicious of my own hopes, so I made myself wait another month before I believed it.

What did not change matters just as much. She is still slow coming up the deck steps. Down is steady now, which it was not before. Up is still slow, and on a wet morning it is slower. She has not jumped into the back of the Subaru since 2024 and she is not going to. Dan lifts her back end in and neither of us expects a chew to change that. If you are hoping for the dog you had at four years old, nothing in the pantry is going to give you that, and I would rather say so than sell you a feeling.

The walks are the number I trust most, because I could not fudge that one if I wanted to. In September 2024 we were doing about fifteen minutes on the rail trail near the house. By the summer of 2025 we were at twenty-five, and we have been at twenty-five since. Twenty-five minutes is not a triumph. It is ten more minutes than she had, and I will take ten more minutes.

On what is actually in them. The chews carry glucosamine, fish oil and krill, and MSM is in the name across the front of the container. That is the formula and I am not going to dress it up. It is not a pain pill and I would not describe it as one to anybody. Hattie has never had a bad reaction to it, her stomach has been fine for two years, and she takes it off the top of the bowl before she touches the kibble, which is more than I can say for the powder she gets at dinner.

The last thing about the routine is that consistency is doing more work here than any single ingredient. Three chews, every morning, on top of the food, same time. Miss one day and nothing happens. Miss a week and you have not run a test, you have just been irregular. I coached long enough to know that a program you follow three days out of seven tells you nothing about the program.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to get the X-rays first, because guessing is expensive and you will guess wrong. I would tell you that her weight is doing as much work as anything in that container, and that Dr. Amsel was right to be strict about it. Then I would tell you what we did, plainly. VetIQ went in first, in October 2024, three chews a day, and it is the only one of the five I can point at and say the getting-up line changed while it was the new thing on the counter. Give it two months before you decide anything. Keep one line a day on a piece of paper so that in eight weeks you are not arguing with your own memory. And if your dog is lame, or yelping when you touch her, or off her food, that is a vet visit and not a chew.

One more thing and then I will get off it. Hattie is ten. She is not going to be nine again, and I stopped expecting that somewhere around the second winter. What I wanted was for her to get off the floor without a pause and take herself down to the yard. Most mornings we have that. Not all of them. On a cold wet Tuesday we have none of it, and I make the note and we go a shorter way.