October
2008
What to Feed Your Puggles
Well, we’ve had another substantial lapse between post. Could be laziness, could be puggle blog neglect, could just be that we are so darn busy (not likely). Anyways… we just got back from taking our dogs to the vet for check-ups and were shocked to hear that our puggles are on their way to becoming overweight. Not our puggles! It’s true. Who’d have thought?
We didn’t realize that pet obesity was such a big problem. Apparently nearly half of all the dogs that our veterinarian sees are overweight (and most of the owners don’t even recognize it). Similar to human obesity, pet obesity can lead to arthitis, heart and lung diseases, and a host of other serious conditions. Gracie is just slightly (and I do mean slightly) above where she should be but Duke is about 10% overweight. They don’t look overweight do they? We didn’t think so, lol. The vet proceeded to tell us that we needed to monitor the amount of calories the dogs ate and immediately I thought “Great. I can hardly monitor the calories I intake, let alone the dogs too.” He then handed us a pamphlet that explained how many calories a dog should consume per day to maintain a healthy weight. This is roughly how it looked:
| 10 lbs. | 220 - 300 calories |
| 20 lbs. | 350 - 450 calories |
| 50 lbs. | 750 - 1000 calories |
He also handed us a guide that showed how many calories are contained in a cup of some of the most popular dog foods. We found a similar guide you can view online here.
I knew that puppy food was higher in fat content but what I also learned from browsing the guide is that most of the premium dog foods contain more calories than the cheaper options. We were feeding our 15-20 lb puggles over 450 calories per day in dry food alone; not to mention the treats we were giving them. We still have quite a bit of the food that they are currently eating but once that is gone, we will be shopping for another low-calorie option.
So what are you feeding your dog(s)… and is it in your dog’s best interest?
AJ 
Gracie turned one this past Thanksgiving and boy has that little puggle come a long way. She’s all grown up now; literally… she won’t get any bigger. We gave her a little extra kibble for breakfast that morning as a special treat so that she wouldn’t hound us for scraps all day while we prepared Thanksgiving dinner (pun intended). Then we all gathered for family pictures, and as you can tell from the picture on the left, Gracie was thrilled to wear her birthday hat.
