12 Feeding Your Puppy
Description
This article is from the Your New Puppy FAQ, by Cindy Tittle Moore with numerous contributions by others.
12 Feeding Your Puppy
Premium pet food tends to have higher nutritional value. In
particular, foods such as Science Diet, Eukanuba, Nature's Recipe.
This means you can generally feed your dog a smaller amount of food.
Also, they tend to be highly digestible which means that there is less
waste to clean up in the yard. For these two reasons, many people feed
their pets premium foods over grocery store foods. But the decision is
yours and many healthy, happy dogs have been raised on plain Purina
Dog Chow.
Feeding schedules
There are two methods you can use to feed your puppy: free feeding and
scheduled feeding. Free feeding is when dry food is left out all day
and the dog eats as it wishes. Scheduled feeding gives the dog food at
set times of the day, and then takes it away after a period of time,
such as a half hour. In most cases, you are best off feeding your
puppy on a schedule. This better controls elimination when trying to
housetrain. In addition, many dogs will overeat and become overweight
on a free-feed schedule. But for other dogs, such as dogs with gastric
problems or older dogs, frequent small meals may be better for them.
If you are unsure, you may want to discuss your particular situation
with your vet.
Dog food formulations
Read your labels, know your dog food products. There are different
kinds of dog food out there. Some are formulated very precisely for
different periods in a dog's life, and what is appropriate at one
stage is not appropriate at another. Others are generically formulated
and are supposed to be OK for any dog under any conditions. This means
that they are formulated up to the growing puppy level. There is
nothing wrong with either approach, unless the generically formulated
dog food comes out with a "puppy food" version. These are packed even
higher with extra nutrition, etc, than the puppy really needs, since
the original formulation was already sufficient for the puppy.
If you are using the latter type of puppy food, many veterinarians and
breeders (particularly of larger breeds) recommend that you NOT feed
it for the first year as is recommended on the bags of food. They
recommend that you feed puppy food ONLY for the first two months that
you have the puppy at home and then switch to adult food. A good "rule
of thumb" is to switch to adult food when the puppy has attained 90%
of its growth (exactly when this is reached varies by breed and size).
The nutritional formulation (especially the extra protein and calcium)
can actually cause problems in puppy development. The problem tends to
be with growth of bones vs. growth of tendons, ligaments, and muscle.
The growth rates are not the same and so the connections are strained
and if the dog jumps wrong or is playing too hard, the connections can
be torn. This typically happens in the front shoulder and requires
surgery and several months of confinement to repair. The added calcium
in puppy food may deposit on puppies' bones causing limping.
This is not a problem with the more closely formulated foods that have
adult foods that are specifically labelled as unsuitable for puppies
or lactating bitches.
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