Look how fat he is; he’s so cute!
Before you think this article may not be relevant, please read on to find out what constitutes a dog being overweight or obese — there is a good chance that your dog is unhealthy.
I frequently get told that my dogs are too thin.
Ironically, it is always by folks whose dogs are too fat.
A 2015 survey in the USA determined that over 50% of dogs are overweight or obese.
Have a look at the chart in this link. Where does your dog feature?
The health risks for overweight dogs are freely available online, and on charts in your vet’s reception area. So why do we overfeed our pets?
Just like humans, dogs are healthiest when at optimal weight.
There are proven and well-documented health risks associated with overweight and obese dogs. These include:
- Osteoarthritis
- Insulin Resistance and Type 2 Diabetes
- High Blood Pressure
- Heart and Respiratory Disease
- Cranial Cruciate Ligament Injury
- Kidney Disease
- Many Forms of Cancer
- Decreased life expectancy (up to 2.5 years)
Like humans, there is a balance between caloric intake and output for dogs. Basically, your dog needs to get rid of the calories that it is consuming via its food (input), through exercise (output). If the caloric intake exceeds the output, dogs become overweight.
For the mathematically inclined (I am not), here is a useful link for measuring your pet’s caloric requirements.
For most of us though, it is simply a case of understanding how our dog’s energy levels determine their food intake requirement.
We’ll start with exercise. What constitutes an “active” dog? Let’s use the example of a dog who goes for one on-leash walk a day and has say say 30 minutes per day of dedicated ball play. It is useful to read and digest this human caloric intake article, then consider your dog. Would he be Sedentary, Lightly Active, Active or Very Active? The part about going to gym a couple of times a week not making you Lightly Active applies to dogs as well. Just because a dog goes to the dog park on a Sunday and runs for a few hours, doesn’t mean that for the rest of the days in the week he is expending the same amount of calories.
Therefore, the dog that does daily walks, a bit of ball play, a bit of swimming is absolutely Sedentary. The dog who does all those things and attends daily daycare as well may be Lightly Active. Active and Very Active dogs are dogs who are running 20–30kms per day, are tracking long tracks in a working environment daily, are working livestock… And that is not what the majority of pets are doing during each day. They are mostly lying around waiting for us to return home, and if their owner works from home, they are mostly lying by your feet and following you to the toilet and back. As such, it can be said that in the normal pet home, Lightly Active, Active and Very Active dogs do not feature.
Of course there are breed, age and hormone considerations, etc. However, even a dog who appears to be Highly Active of their own accord (think Jack Russells and Border Collies who never seem to stop and relax) has the ability to be overweight, because even through all of its activity, its caloric needs are being over-provided in the way of food. Likewise, in the case of a dog prone to heat stroke etc (usually the brachycephalic breeds), the inability to perform hard exercise/the dog’s age/whether the dog is sterilised, is not an excuse for the dog to be overweight or obese.
What we should not do when it comes to food:
- Feed a dog as much as it will eat
- Add sauces and flavour items to food to get it to eat
- Project human emotion onto mealtimes (by either suggesting to the dog how boring that food must be; or adding yummies to override our feelings of guilt at dogs being left alone for the day while we are at work)
- Feed human food (this excludes formal raw feeding diets)
What we should do when it comes to food:
- Feed a measured quantity
- Feed a good quality food — whether kibble or raw food
- Feed a balanced food
- Correlate input with output
There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to how much food is required. This is where owners need to develop feel. As an owner you need to know what constitutes a healthy Body Condition Score as per the chart above.
If you feed according to what the bag says, you may well be “feeding the fat” as I call it. By this I mean that if your overweight dog weighs 30kgs, it doesn’t mean that you should be feeding the amount of food that the bag suggests for 30kgs. You should feed for the weight that your dog should be if he was in healthy shape.
Caveat: dogs that are obese need to go onto an approved weight-loss regimen. Suddenly halving the amount of food or trebling the exercise could be fatal for an obese dog. In the case of obesity you need to consult with your vet. Have a look at Obie, who was positively obese to the point of hardly being able to move.
In the case of chubbiness, you can help your dog to lose weight by increasing exercise, reducing the volume of food and substituting traditional dog snacks for healthy items such as carrots. You can also use treat dispensers such as the Kong Quest toys or Dog’s Life Dogs vs Aliens toys (ask for both brands at your vet or pet store) to keep the dog happy and entertained while receiving minimal calories.
If you have a dog that seems to inhale its food in one mouthful, use a slow feeder bowl or even a food dispensing puzzle. I know dogs that receive their full meals each day in the form of puzzles and I use the #7 design in the image below for some of my own.
You can even toss the food out onto the grass, or spread it across the kitchen floor so that the dog has to eat it bit by bit. This is a lot of fun for dogs, and it also encourages them to use their nose. Dogs are different to humans in that their vision is predominantly peripheral. As such, dogs don’t see things that are right in front of them (here’s a funny as hell video of dogs catching treats in slow motion). Here’s another one of a dog named Fritz learning to catch a treat, with a follow up video here. It is the same with dogs that accurately catch balls — they have learnt to predict the movement of the ball, so when the ball is changed for a Kong or other oddly-shaped toy, their ability to catch accurately is gone.
We’ve all seen dogs push their food out of their bowls and then afterwards, if they don’t use their nose, walk away leaving some stray food lying around, which we then lovingly point out to them. The simple reason is: they don’t see their food. So — putting the food on the floor (or using a treat puzzle, or simply hiding the food under upturned bowls etc) means that they need to sniff it out, which is mentally stimulating as well.
There are a plethora of dog foods available on the market, both commercial brands of kibble as well as balanced raw diets. All of these diets are specifically formulated to give your dog exactly what it needs, so adding tins or cooked food, or raw food as anything more than a treat, is simply throwing the balance out. Stick to the recommendations of the manufacturer and if you want to treat your dog, do so with something low in calories. If you simply can’t bring yourself to stop feeding tins, sauce or pouches to your overweight dog, at least reduce the kibble intake to compensate for all the calories you’re adding in even a spoonful of wet food.
An overweight dog is a dog who will tip off his mortal coil earlier than he needed to, and likely suffer one or more of the conditions indicated above as he gets older. We are not being kind to overweight dogs.
We all love our dogs and we want to share our oxygen with our dogs for the longest possible time. The one thing we are 100% in control of, is the amount of calories our dogs consume. Let’s use our brains wisely and do what is in the best interest of our dogs.
** I always welcome comments and discussion, please feel free to hit me up in the comments section!
