Dog Food & Feeding

Is improving your health on your list of new year’s resolutions? This year, don’t forget to include your dog on that list as well. But first, find out which vitamins and minerals your canine needs and where to find them.

When Dr. Katy Nelson, DVM, was in veterinary school in Louisiana, she saw her share of dogs with bad eating habits. "Some of the little farm dogs down there are scavengers without real homes. Their coats are dry and prickly to the touch," she recalls.

Selecting the right kibble for your dog can be an overwhelming task. After all, there are dozens of choices on the market these days. To help simplify your decision, ask yourself these seven questions:

Vegan Amy Rader knows her dog, Henry, needs meat protein, but she hates the possibility that chemically processed additives are going into her 5-year-old beagle’s food. The new "natural" label on pet foods – and what that precisely means – has also puzzled the Seattle-based social worker. "It’s similar to buying organic for myself," explains Rader. "A lot of words that sound pretty good are on the packaging, but I’m not always sure exactly what they mean, and I end up spending way too long in the pet store."

Whether or not dogs can eat dairy products such as milk, Yoghurt and cheese is one of the most commonly asked questions from new dog owners. Unfortunately there is no concise answer to this, since individual dogs vary.

When Daisy Lehman of Cleveland brought home her pug puppy last summer, it was with explicit feeding instructions from the breeder. "He told me to transition slowly from the food he’d been giving her to the puppy formula I was planning to give her," says Lehman. The advice was sound, but Lehman was still not sure what this new puppy food should be.

The expression "eat like a dog" comes from the canines’ reputation for gulping down meals of all sorts in a matter of seconds. Their indiscriminate palate, however, isn’t helping their health, and veterinarians are noticing a rise in the number of dogs with food allergies.

When Jerome Kogan’s eight-year-old pug, Grady, begs for her dinner, it’s probably not because she’s concerned about her health. "Grady starts asking for dinner about 3 o’clock every afternoon," says the 39-year-old resident of New York City. "I try to hold off until 4, though sometimes her incessant whining gets to me, and I feed her earlier. She just really loves to eat."

Some dogs experience motion sickness. "We started taking our pug to my mom’s on Sunday mornings, and we’d get in the car more or less just after she’d finished eating. Three weeks in a row she threw up," remembers 30-year-old dog owner Casey Johns of Baltimore, Md. "We asked the vet about it, and he told us we needed to wait four hours after she ate to take her for a car ride. My husband and I don’t get car sick and can drive after eating with no problem, so it hadn’t occurred to us."

Veterinarian Trisha Joyce, DVM, of New York City Veterinary Specialists, has seen the consequences of canine protein deprivation. Six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Joyce headed to New Orleans to volunteer her time providing care for animals impacted by the storm. "The dog was like a skeleton with skin on it," she recalls. "Without the normal amount of protein, the body just begins to break down. The poor animal could barely walk."

When George Kantor took his pug Sadie to his mother’s country home for the holidays, the New York City psychologist forgot to bring his diminutive dog’s small-breed kibble. It was Christmas Eve, and the stores were closed, so he simply fed Sadie from the food bag of his mother’s standard poodle. "If you know pugs, they never turn down a meal, and Sadie is no exception," says Kantor. But the pug’s holiday meal soon turned sour.

Question: Is fat important to my dog’s health and, if so, what is the best kind?

When asked this question, I sometimes joke to the person inquiring that it’s good they’re going to start taking responsibility for their own emissions and stop blaming the dog!But seriously, frequent gas in your dog shouldn’t be ignored.It can be much more than just unpleasant aromatherapy.

Food is the foundation of health.How long an animal lives and, most important, the quality of its life, depend greatly on the quality and quantity of the food that it eats.Simply put, food is body-fuel, and provides the energy needed for an animal to maintain good health and condition.With regard to nourishment, quantity is not necessarily synonymous with quality.It is very possible for an animal to receive adequate quantities of food and yet still suffer degradation of health due to poor quality ingredients.

If you have children, then you know they’re a magnet for hovering hounds and mooching mousers. Living in a busy home that includes kids, pets, and adults, the line between who eats what can sometimes become blurry! Picking up dog or cat treats at the store can seem pointless if your furry family member is gobbling up whatever the kids are eating. And it can be frustrating to constantly guard the toddler from eating the pet’s treats!

Letting kids give your dog a treat is one way to help dogs become more comfortable around children.

This is by no means a list of everything on the planet that’s bad for dogs. But it’s a few of the things that should be avoided by themselves or as an ingredient in something else.

You take a daily vitamin for yourself, but have you thought about giving one to your dog? Veterinarian Shawn Messonnier, author of 8 Weeks to a Healthy Dog: An Easy-to-Follow Program for the Life of Your Dog (Rodale Books), says dogs benefit from vitamins just as people do.

In recent years, there has been a movement in the dog and cat world regarding feeding raw meat diets. There are many diets out there with the most popular being BARF by Dr. Ian Billinghurst.

How much do you know about what you are feeding your dog or cat? Advertisements show eye-catching colors, softened bits and gravies. These foods look wonderful and some are even made by well-known companies. But are these foods really the best quality?