Food glorious food! Clearly Oliver Twist didn't have a dog with a dicky tummy. For so many of us, getting our dog's diet right can be a long, stressful and often expensive affair so why is it so difficult? In this article we'll be looking at the three cornerstones of dog feeding - what, when and how much.
Well, as much as I'd love to say 'you should feed brand x', I'm afraid it's never that simple. Different dogs do better on different diets so there's never any guarantee that brand x is going to suit your individual dog no matter how good its ingredients are. But don't despair! By reading labels and knowing what to look for, finding the right food can be made a whole lot easier, and this is where I can help.
Firstly, you will need to choose which category of food you would prefer to feed: wet, dry or frozen complete foods or meat and mixer. No one category is necessarily better as each includes both good and bad examples. Each type of food has its own pros and cons and the choice of which to feed is really down to which suits you best.
Complete foods are by far the most popular choice for dog owners in the UK. In order to be 'complete' they must contain every nutrient required by a dog in sufficient amounts to keep the dog healthy which means they can be fed alone. Complete foods can be dry, wet or frozen.
Complementary foods are usually wet or frozen foods that don't contain the full range of nutrients required by a dog or contain them in inappropriate proportions. For this reason they need to be fed alongside a mixer biscuit or complete food.
Mixers are essentially cereal based filler biscuits, occasionally with vegetables or herbs. They are nutritionally incomplete (they don't contain all of the nutrients required by a dog) and so have to be fed alongside a wet or frozen food. Like all dog foods, mixers range from very good quality to very bad.
The majority of British dogs are fed on dry complete foods. Their popularity certainly owes a lot to their convenience as they don't need any preparation and don't have any special storage requirements.
Dry foods are made from dried and ground ingredients and can be cooked in a number of ways:
Dry foods can be fed alongside or mixed with both wet foods and frozen foods. When mixing complete diets, you should take care not to feed too much. The easiest way would be to feed half of the suggested feeding amount of the first food with half the recommended amount of the second.
Wet foods are also very popular and can be found in tins, trays and pouches. Wet foods don't require any added preservatives as the cooking process kills all micro-organisms within the sealed containers. Wet foods can be complete or complementary. Since wet foods contain a large amount of water, the feeding amounts are much higher than those of dry foods which often makes them more expensive to feed.
In the last few years, frozen foods have really started to take off. Freezing is the most natural way of preserving nutrients, although the difficulty of transporting the foods and thawing them over-night makes them the least convenient category of pre-prepared dog foods. Both raw and pre-cooked frozen diets are available and like wet foods, there are both complete and complementary varieties. Also like wet foods, frozen foods contain a high proportion of water.
Once you have decided which category of food you would prefer to feed, we can help you select some of the best varieties from the hundreds that are available. Enter your dogs details here to get started.
Even with our help though, all we can do is make an educated guess as to what food is likely to benefit your dog. All dogs are different and while some dogs will flourish on apparently low grade foods, others might have difficulties on even the highest quality diets. Your dog's health should, therefore, always be the final indicator of a food's suitability.
Feeding the right amount is just as important as feeding the right food. All dog foods have feeding guidelines on the packaging. You should always start by following the guidelines for your dog's weight. Your vet will be able to tell you your dog's weight or you can stand on the scales whilst carrying your dog to calculate it at home.
Once your dog is settled on to a food, keep an eye on his weight as this is the easiest way of telling whether or not the feeding amounts are correct. Compare your dog's body shape to the dogs pictured above. Your dog is at his ideal weight when you can feel, but not easily see, the last two or three ribs and when there is an easily identifiable waist line when looking down from above. If your dog is gaining excessive weight, please take a look at our guide for dogs that are prone to weight gain. If your dog is too thin on the other hand, try increasing the feeding amounts by 10% or changing to a higher calorie diet.
Occasionally, dogs fed too much do not gain too much weight, but instead develop digestive problems or other health issues. If