WEIGH IT UP! ★
Dr Jacqueline Boyd poses the question: what is a healthy body weight for your dog?
We’ve already established that helping your dog to keep a trim waistline and a healthy body weight is critical to his overall health and happiness. It can even help him live longer, and remain fit and active in his more senior years.
If, however, your dog has been piling on the pounds, it can affect his ability — or even desire — to exercise; his joints have to cope with all the excess weight, and this can increase the potential problems from painful conditions such as osteoarthritis. Even carrying just a little extra weight can affect your dog’s ability to regulate his body temperature and increase his chances of developing certain diseases.
So, this month, let’s explore and review some of the tips and techniques we can use to monitor and manage our dogs’ weight.
WEIGH IN WITH BODY WEIGHT GUIDES
There are guides that provide estimated body weights for particular breeds, from puppyhood to grown adults. They are a useful starting point for what might be typical for your dog. However, if you have a mixed breed, it can be more difficult to find accurate guides of this sort, so sometimes you have to work on estimates based on your dog’s size or possible ancestry.
Regular weighing remains the best way to track what is actually happening with your dog’s weight. Keeping regular records of body weight is also critical and can quickly highlight even small changes in weight, long before those changes would be visible. This is important because early management changes will be much more effective than waiting until there is a really significant problem.
WHAT ABOUT BODY CONDITION SCORING?
One tool that can be really effective in assessing your dog’s overall shape is body condition scoring (BCS). A number of BCS charts are available and provide diagrams or photos as well as written descriptions to help you assess what ‘number’ your dog is. There are even now breed-specific BCS charts that are really useful
for breeds and types that are traditionally difficult to score, such as Pugs.
Using BCS charts means that you score your dog visually, based on his overall shape. Typical advice is that he should have a visible abdominal ‘tuck’ when viewed from the side, and when viewed from above, he should have a clear ‘waist’.
It is also useful to actually get your hands on your dog when condition scoring; this means that you can feel their condition and get an idea of how muscular they are, or if they are a little ‘softer’ than ideal! If you can feel your dog’s ribs with just light pressure, then he is likely to be in good condition. If, however, you need to prod deeply, there could be a layer of fat that might signal a larger potential problem.
Getting into a routine of visually and physically scoring your dog’s condition can help monitor his weight AND form part of your everyday health checking, looking for lumps, bumps, or even injuries.
WHY DOES WEIGHT VARY?
Weight can be an issue for many reasons. In simple terms, excess body weight occurs because more calories are consumed than are burned off through activity. Where there is low body weight, more calories are being burned off than eaten. And we are often one of the biggest problems in managing our dogs’ weight because, for many reasons, we overfeed them.
The problem is that when overfeeding is combined with low levels of activity, then it is surprisingly easy for our dogs to pile on the pounds. This means it is really important that we balance our dogs’ food intake with their activity, even amending it on a daily basis in some cases. It is now possible to get an idea of your dog’s calorie expenditure using activity monitors on their collars. These can be a valuable part of your armoury in weight management.
Your dog’s basic biology can also affect his likelihood to have weight ‘blips’. Younger animals can sometimes struggle to maintain weight — lots of activity and playing, combined with growing, sometimes means they simply burn calories off! Active breeds and personalities are similar. One of my own young, male spaniels is consuming twice the calories that one of my older girls of the same size is eating. This can also work the other way too — more relaxed breeds or types might naturally be less active and more likely to gain weight. It is also important to remember that spaying and neutering also reduces the daily calories needed by a dog, so dietary amends should always be made afterwards to limit the potential for weight gain.
“Get into a routine of visually and physically scoring your dog’s condition...”