Dog Care - Feeding Tips

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Hi, I am Dr. Candy Olson from Greenbriar Animal Hospital. Were shooting a series of videos on tips for how to care for your dog at home. This section is tips on feeding, and weve got a bunch of information for you; in general for puppies, to adults, to senior dogs. One of the important things about food for dogs is you want to try and get the best food that you can afford. There are a lot of good premium foods out there. The decision about whether you get a certain brand or another, do a little bit of research, experiment, and see what youre comfortable with. If you have any questions about food, ask your veterinarian, they can give you a lot of good information. As far as the general type of food is concerned, the big thing for dogs is that dry food is what has all the calories. So, if your dog is underweight, barely managing to keep weight, dry food is good. If youre on the other end of the scale and your dog is really struggling and is heavily overweight, you want to give it a lot less dry food and replace that dry food with something thats lower in calories and still healthy. You really have three options for that lower in calories and still healthy kind of thing. The first thing that you can do is replace it with some canned food. Canned food in general is much lower in calories, especially if its the kind of diet canned food. This food right here, for example, this is a prescription food that is made for dogs who are overweight and need to lose weight. Its very yummy, one of the best tasting foods, we practically never had a dog turn it down. The difference in calories here is, this is a regular dog food, kind of standard sort of calories, and this is a regular dry food standard sort of calories. These two cans have the same amount of calories as this can, which has the same amount of calories as three quarters of a cup of this dry. Now, I dont know about you, but if I was a dog I would want that rather than that, its just not very much. Its tough for dogs because the thing with dogs is theyre supposed to be hungry, theyre supposed to live hungry, thats a dogs natural state. Its people that get involved in this that are always, oh, you shouldnt have to be hungry, giving him stuff, and they dont get enough exercise so they get overweight, and you get in this whole vicious cycle. Its tough to be strict enough, to say no, youre supposed to be hungry, you dont get to eat anything more. So, working this volume thing and being able to give them more without giving them more calories is a whole lot easier. So, you can do the diet canned food, it works great. You can also take half of their dry food away and replace it with vegetables. Things that you would consider to be free, more or less calorie free, if you were on a diet; carrots, green beans, cauliflower, that kind of stuff. If you do that, you do want to stay away from canned vegetables, because even the low sodium canned vegetables are very high in salt, and thats not good for dogs.

You want to do fresh or frozen. I get those big bags, frozen bags of veggies, and take a handful, put them on a paper plate, nuke them in the microwave for 30 seconds maybe, just until theyre no longer icy. Mix them in with my dogs food, she loves them. Dogs are like people, they develop particular taste. These are all things that you can do to help them lower the calorie level, and if your dog is having problems with being overweight, increasing the exercise helps a little bit too, but a lot of the problems the dogs are prone to if they get overweight mean that you cant do their exercise, so a lot of times youre just looking at how can I cut back the calories? How can I keep them healthy? A couple of other things for dogs is a lot of pet food manufacturers say that you should feed puppy food for the first year. For most dogs, unless you have giant breed dog like a Great Dane or St Bernard or something like that, thats actually way more calories than they need. A current recommendations is for most dogs when you puppy reaches between four and five months of age, its time to switch to adult food. As far as homemade food, dogs are little tricky getting a homemade diet thats just exactly balanced. There are some recipes and your veterinarian can probably steer you to some that are correct and balanced and have varied ingredients, but theyre pretty complicated. They have stuff like bone meal tablets and sardines and vegetable oil, and there is usually 10 or 12 ingredients, and so its really important if youre doing a homemade diet for your dog to make really sure that its proper and complete with all the vitamins and minerals, because its actually pretty difficult to do.

One quick mention here, there is a little bit of information out there and recommendations to feed your dog a raw diet. As veterinarians we really dont recommend that, me in particular, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it tends to cause a lot of problems with the dogs digestive system. It is very easy to cause infections and problems, because the raw food picks up bacteria very easily. The third thing is, which is one of the biggest things, is the risk for people to develop problems from it. It is extremely easy to develop problems with E. coli and Salmonella and that kind of thing from handling the raw food, and so that is definitely not something that we can recommend, it tends to cause a lot of problems. But if you do have any questions about diets or food that you would like to try, you think, is this a good food, is this a bad food, talk to your veterinarian and get some more information, because theres a lot out there. One of the frustrating things for me as a veterinarian is in commercial pet foods, whether youre at a grocery store or a pet store or ordering online, there is very little information about calories, anywhere. Its not one of the things thats required to be on the label, so they dont put it on the label. But there is usually a website or an 800 number that you can contact and find out, what are the calories in this food? Whats the comparison? Sometimes you will be really surprised and find out that this adult food and this adult food made by the same company can be almost identical, where they can be really different in calories or content, and yet it doesnt really indicate that on the label, so its worth checking out.

Thats some basic information on feeding tips for dogs. Were going to go over some specific things for handling your overweight dog next.

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