Nutrition and Weight Control

What we feed our pets plays a major role in keeping them happy healthy every day.
The 3 major issues we face when feeding our pets:

What to feed - Balanced diet
How much - Correct amount to maintain correct weight
How to keep teeth and gums healthy - Feeding hard, chewable food

When you ask different pet owners what they feed their pets you will get a lot of different answers. The most important is to provide a balanced diet for your pet. This can be easily done by feeding a high quality pet food such as Hills Science diet or Royal Canin. These diets provide all the nutrients and energy your pet needs in a simple easy dry food. Also being a dry food means that when they chew on the dry food it helps clean their teeth.

A balanced diet can also be obtained by feeding fresh meat, rice, pasta, potatoes and variety of different coloured vegetables and or liver. Please ask one of your Vet Med vets to help formulate a fresh balanced diet as it not as easy as you first may think especially in fast growing puppies.

How much you need to feed your pet depends on a number important factors:

Your pet's age
Your pet's weight
Type of food being fed

Young growing pets need more energy than adult pets as they are growing and laying down muscle and bones, where as older or lazy pets need a lot less energy. For example a 5 kg growing puppy needs the equivalent daily energy as 10kg adult dog.

The ideal weight for our pets is when you can easily feel but can’t see ribs and spine. If you can’t feel their ribs then your pet is over weight. They require increased exercise and a decrease in their current food intake or swapping to a lower energy food.

If you can see the ribs or spine either you are under feeding your pet or more likely they have a disease causing weight loss and should be checked by one our Vet Med vets as soon as possible

Hills Science diet and Royal Canin are called premium pet foods because they are energy dense and get their energy from animal protein not from vegetable protein. You need to feed less volume of premium pet foods to achieve the same energy content. In simple terms you feed your pet less Hills premium pet food and they defecate less, so you have to pick up less solid feaces.

Keeping your pets teeth healthy is a combination of feeding hard food such as dry food and raw bones along with regular dental checks with your Vet Med vet.

Raw NOT cooked bones are one way of keeping your pets teeth & gums healthy. The physical abrasion of chewing through the bone helps break off and remove calculus and tartar build up on teeth. Raw bones are less likely to splinter compared to cooked bones which have been dehydrate and can splinter.