August 21, 2024 • 19 mins
On this week's episode, Tony explains the process for keeping all dogs at a healthy weight throughout the year, even when activity levels fluctuate and caloric needs fluctuate.
Connect with Tony, Cal, and MeatEater
MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips
MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube
Shop Cal's Merch
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about keeping your
dog at a healthy weight no matter what. This is
a touchy subject, but it's one that I feel like, well,
I kind of have to touch That's probably not how
(00:24):
I should have worded that anyway. How hefty our hounds
are is an important aspect of dog ownership, and it's
one that gets people, you know, kind of a little
bit fired up. It's also just one of those deals
where you gotta set aside your ego and your undying
love for your dogs and learn how to keep them
at a healthy weight all year long. That's what I'm
(00:44):
going to talk about right now here on the old
Blue Marble we call home. We consider gravity to be
one G. That makes sense since we would use Earth's
gravity as a measure by which to understand gravity anywhere,
and not say I don't know Jupiter's gravity, which would
(01:07):
do us no good and get real confusing. In a hurry,
that Newton fellow, who supposedly got knocked in the head
by a granny Smith which led to his creation of
the universal law gravitation, figured out that every object in
the universe attracts every other object with a force that
is proportional to its mass. This is also inversely proportional
(01:29):
to the square of the distance between two objects. Now,
to muddy the water's further, that wild haired German named
Einstein hit us with his general theory of relativity way
back in nineteen oh five, which means he was way
way way ahead of his time and his thinking. That
theory described gravity as a distortion in the fabric of
(01:51):
space time, where anything with mass literally warps space and
changes time. I'm too dumb to explain what that really means,
although I've tried to understand it so many times. A
good way to think about it, at least for me
to get, you know, kind of through the mental sludge
that clouds even my kindergarten math skills, is to imagine
(02:12):
drawing a straight line a sheet of paper. Then you
simply twist the paper. That's well, kind of a terrible
explanation on how gravity bends space and forces objects to
fall or get pulled in a certain direction, but it
kind of works. All of those rockets you see getting
launched these days from NASA or SpaceX or companies like
(02:33):
rocket Lab, they all have to get going nearly seven
miles a second to escape Earth's gravity. Imagine the fuel
and thrust to carry a multi ton payload away from
Earth at that speed. That's why it costs like ten
grand to get something the weight of a normal bottle
of water into space. Fuel is expensive and it takes
(02:57):
a lot of fuel to move something that fast in
that direction. Gravity is no joke, and it's in the
deer hunting world where I used to hear a lot
of white tailed junkies talk about it in a way
that demonstrated they had no idea what they were talking about.
Back when full body safety harnesses were replacing the options
of either no harnesses or the waste belt style harnesses
(03:19):
that often kept people from hitting the ground but also
forced them to hang upside down until they died. Those
kind of safety harnesses, people often just said they would
scramble like a crazy squirrel if they started to fall back.
Then as if go stand on a trap door and
do your best to hold yourself up once it drops away.
(03:40):
I once had a pair of screw in tree steps
pull out at the exact same time, and let me
tell you, my reflexes weren't even close to good enough
to help me, and the busted rib I got from
the whole deal was a good reminder of that. A
general non scientific rule that I just made up says
that the heavier things are, the more gravity wants to
(04:01):
give those things a great, big gravity hug. You can't
escape it, and neither can your dog. In fact, if
you want to find out how a lot of hunting
dogs and probably a fair amount of non hunting dogs
get injured, it's usually something stupid like jumping off of
truck tailgate and landing. Wrong. With puppies, it's often when
(04:23):
a young kid holds them and immediately drops them when
they start to squirm or get a little nippy. Even
a drop of a foot from a toddler can injure
a pup. What's worse is that the heavier a dog is,
the higher the likelihood they might hit the ground hard
and in a way that might injure them. Now waight
is a touchy subject with dog owners because no one
(04:45):
thinks they have an overweight or an underweight dog. As
someone who spent so much time at the game fair
in the suburbs of the Twin Cities for years, giving
seminars and looking at hundreds of labs in golden and
gsps and various other breeds of dogs, I can tell
you that a lot of people have their blinders on
(05:06):
when it comes to their dogs. Underweight dogs are a thing,
but that's an easy remedy typically if there are no
underlying health conditions, which is my way of saying that
if you have a chronically underweight adult dog, you better
get it to the vet before deciding it just needs
some more kibble. Underweight pups, you know, they're somewhat more
(05:28):
common because some puppies just don't seem like they can
eat enough to keep up with their growing and often
moving bodies. Again, though, underweight as a diagnosis is hard
to pin down, and you might want to ask your
vet where your pup is at before you go on
this journey alone and think you can solve it just
by yourself. Now, a good way to think about dog
(05:51):
weight is just to simply look at them. Underweight dogs
will show their ribs when they move. Now, with some pointers,
this is kind of just what they look like, but
you don't want to see the ribs protruding so much
that they are super obvious. If you can see the
outline of a dog's vertebrae, it's back, or its hips
protrude sharply. Then you're generally looking at an underweight dog.
(06:16):
Head to the vet and get ready to offer that
dog some more food. Now, overweight dogs, they're a different story.
They are everywhere, and this is not a good thing.
Let's say you have a dog that should be fifty pounds,
a nice little English lab female. But what if that
dog is fifty five pounds. It won't look super fat,
(06:39):
but it's ten percent overweight. Now what if that dog
gets to sixty pounds. Again, you might be able to
look right past the body shape to believe that the
dog is good enough shape. But that's twenty percent overweight,
which is a lot. Obese and overweight dogs live shorter
lives than their healthy weight counterparts. One study that I
(07:01):
found showed that this is a good way to shave
off about two years of a dog's life, which is
fourteen years and dog years. I also don't know a
single dog owner who wouldn't give a hell of a
lot to have two more years with their four legged bestie.
If you've ever put a dog down, ask yourself what
(07:21):
you would have paid in that moment to have another
twenty four months with that dog. Now, how do you
know your dog is overweight? Well, if someone you haven't
(07:43):
seen in a while calls your dog big chungus or
a first, your dog is one heck of a chonkster.
You might want to take the hint. A less insulting
way to figure this out is by looking at your dog.
Is there a noticeable cut right in front of the
hip but behind the ribs? Healthy dogs have trim look
to them, But maybe you have a shaggy haired golden
(08:03):
or some other breed where it's just not as obvious.
Then you got to feel their sides. Can you feel
the ribs? That's good. You don't want to be able
to see them, but you should be able to run
your fingers along their side and feel the ribs under
their skin. If you can't, like there's just a little
too much patting there, your dog is probably carrying too
(08:24):
much weight. Now, this is where people get defensive. But
it's not about us. It's not about you. It's about
the health of your dog and the reality that like
thirty to forty percent of domestic dogs are at some
level of being too heavy. It's that common and it's
not good, and no, you shouldn't hunt them into shape.
(08:46):
That would be like you deciding, after having not run
a single mile since middle school, to go from the
couch to a half marathon this week. Now, if that
isn't a recipe for some type of injury, I don't
know what is. The same rule apply to dogs, too,
although they are naturally a hell of a lot more
athletic than most of us are. So when people begrudgingly
(09:07):
accept the fact that their dog could stend to lose
a few lbs, they often question how their super active
dog could get overweight in the first place. After all,
they are feeding, you know, responsibly. So let's go back
to that imaginary fifty pound female lab I mentioned earlier
that dog, depending on activity level, will probably require about
(09:30):
seven hundred and nine hundred calories a day, you know,
maybe seven hundred in January and nine hundred in August
when the preseason training is really humming along. Now, that's
a pretty easy target to hit with dog food, because
you should be able to measure daily feedings in cups.
Hit that mark and it's all good, right. Well, if
you've ever done any kind of diet where you had
(09:52):
to track your own calories. You know, it's not so simple.
It's all of those pesky in between calories get you.
It's not the chicken and rice and broccoli you have
for lunch. It's the seven handfuls of m and ms
you have well binging Yellowstone at night, or the granola
bars you just kind of absent mindedly munch on between
(10:13):
your meals. For dogs, it's the treats. It's the pizza
crust we give them because they are just so damn
cute when they beg Now here's where things get tougher
to decipher. I'm just going to use this as an example,
but there are treats out there that promise health benefits
like I don't know, cleaner dog teeth and oral health
(10:35):
is a big issue with dogs, so it only makes
sense to give them something that will keep their chompers
clean and working properly. That's healthy, right, Well, some of
those treats come in at about eighty calories. That's around
ten percent of what that little lab would need for
the day. If that's just bonus calories, then you're adding
(10:55):
an extra five hundred and sixty calories a week just
sneaking into your through the idea of keeping your dog healthier.
In a bag of those treats, you're looking at about
a month's worth of them. That's an extra twenty five
hundred and sixty calories for the month, which is going
to translate to about two thirds of an extra pound
of weight. Since the dogs need to eat about thirty
(11:16):
five hundred extra calories to gain a single pound, not
a huge deal, right, Well, what about that pizza crust.
It's pretty easy to get to forty or fifty calories
and just pizza crust, which is the matter of flipping
your dog a snack and him eating it in half
of a second. Now, on that day, between a healthy
treat and a little indulgence because that dog's begging for it,
(11:39):
you're at fifteen percent extra on the calorie intake. What
about a slice of wheat bread eighty calories again, about
ten percent of what that little lab would need. This
is sort of a death by a thousand paper cuts
kind of thing, where we don't really see any one
small event as a big deal to our dog's health.
(12:02):
But it's the habits. It's those small events that stack
up on one another that equal real weight on a dog,
and when it does, that dog has a greater chance
of developing diabetes and heart disease, and arthritis and joint issues,
high blood pressure, and some forms of cancer that you
really don't want to have to deal with. Now you
(12:22):
might think, well, I can get away with spoiling my
sweet little pupster because she works hard in training and
she never stops moving. It's true that activity level matters
a lot in the whole body weight equation. But it's
also true that we often give our dogs calories they
don't need that are also chock full of a bunch
of stuff they don't need. And it's also true, as
(12:45):
I mentioned earlier, that we are terrible at judging the
physical fitness of our own dogs. We're too biased, just
like with ourselves. But it's not about us, as I mentioned,
and this is a point I feel I really need
to drive home. Our pets are subject to our shortfalls
in a variety of ways. We see this with socialization
(13:07):
and discipline, we see it with training, and certainly with
their physical wellbeing. They don't have a choice, really, other
than to eat what we give them, and if we
don't give them the right food in the right amounts,
that's on us. For whatever reason for making them less healthy.
Now there's another aspect of maintaining proper dog weight, which
(13:30):
is hard to understand. We think, well, my dog is
training more, so it deserves more food or treats. Maybe
what you have to do is make this less academic.
Stop thinking about what your dog might need because of
what you might need on any given moment of the day,
and start reacting to their body condition. The body doesn't lie.
(13:52):
A dog's weight and its shape don't lie. Now, this
is where it gets even a little bit trickier. If
you have to put weight on. It's about gradually increasing
food availability to get the dog to a healthy condition.
With taking weight off, there are a lot of options
and a lot of companies looking to make some money
off of you, just like in the human health world
(14:14):
when it comes to diets, and this is not a
fast process, and it's a bad idea to try to
make it one. To lose a pound of weight, your
dog generally needs to get to a thirty five hundred
calorie deficit. This won't happen in three days, or at
least it shouldn't. To take ten pounds off of a dog,
(14:34):
you're looking at a thirty five thousand calorie deficit. That's
a month's long process. Now, you might get there by
offering up less kibble, or switching to a lower calorie
formula a kibble, or increasing exercise, but most likely it'll
be a little of all of the above over a
long time. Now, for dogs that are just slightly pudgy,
(14:57):
this isn't a huge ask. It's a tweak to a
few things in your day to day life, and then
something that might happen within a month or two, but
a real reduction in way you're looking at managing your
dog's diet and exercise not only for months, but really forever.
Healthy weight is a moving target, and even if you
(15:18):
manage to thread the needle and hit it perfectly this month,
that doesn't mean you can just go back to the
old habits as soon as the scale reads the right
poundage in the right moment. This is a lifestyle issue,
and that means it never really goes away. Now it
is easier to commit to and stick to once you
start to figure out what amount of food and exercise
is necessary to keep your dog at a healthy weight.
(15:40):
On paper, that's simple enough, but then you think about
asking your kids to feed the dog. They might not
measure that cup of kibble quite as closely as you do,
or they might think it's funny to flip your beloved
hunting dog a few half eaten chicken nuggets at dinner time.
Owning a healthy dog takes a whole family committed to
this same goal, which isn't as easy as it sounds.
(16:03):
And the same goes for treats. If you're super disciplined
on what your dog gets, but your wife is a
sucker for those big, sad brown eyes and a thin
thread of drool leaking from your dog's jowels, it's time
for a tough conversation. We think food equals love with dogs,
but it doesn't. We aren't some old school Southern family
(16:25):
getting together on a Sunday to mow down on grits
and fried chicken and gallons of gravy. This is a
creature you love more than anything that doesn't know anything
about diet on exercise. It's totally subject to your whims
and guidance to whatever you provide. Everyone in the family
or your dog's life has to be on the same page.
(16:48):
If it seems like I'm being too dramatic here, ask
your vet the next time you bring your dog in.
Just how many dogs here she sees on any given
week that are overweight. It's a huge ish, no pun intended.
While we might feel like we are punishing our dogs
by carefully tweaking their diet to dial in their weight,
we aren't. We are helping them to live longer and
(17:11):
have a better quality of life. Overall. We are helping
them hunt through another pheasant season, or grouse season or
duck season without having to retire early due to serious
joint pain or something worse like cancer. It's our responsibility
to them, and in return, they'll usually forgive you for
cutting them off of the dog biscuits and the pup
cups full of ice cream and anything else that really
(17:34):
really they want a little taste of. We have to
look at them. We have to feel their ribs. We
have to observe their energy levels while they're training or
going for a walk. We have to take their vets
opinion on their health seriously, even though we might take
it a little too personally. If the report isn't that
we are dealing with the canine equivalent of Olympic gold medalist,
(17:56):
think about that as we creep from late summer into
early fall, where a lot of us will ask our
dogs to hunt doves or woodcock or early season teealer geese.
Think about that whether you have a high drive pointer
or a couch potato mutt who is mostly good for
a snuggle on the floor in a short walk around
the block, think about it for them, not for us,
(18:19):
and think about coming back in two weeks because I'm
going to talk about how dogs don't teach dogs a
freaking thing, yet we kind of think they do. That's it.
I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Houndation's podcast. As
I always, thank you so much for listening for all
your support. If you want some more dog training advice,
or maybe you want to read an article about upland
(18:39):
hunting or white tail hunting. Maybe you want to find
an interesting podcast like Clay Newcomb's Bear Grease to just
fill in your drive time on the way to work,
head on over to the meadeater dot com. There's so
much different content there to help you kill your days,
burn some time on that drive and learn a thing
or two. And again, as I always just thank you
(19:02):
so much for your support. We all here at Media League,
we truly appreciate it, so thank you.
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about keeping your
dog at a healthy weight no matter what. This is
a touchy subject, but it's one that I feel like, well,
I kind of have to touch That's probably not how
(00:24):
I should have worded that anyway. How hefty our hounds
are is an important aspect of dog ownership, and it's
one that gets people, you know, kind of a little
bit fired up. It's also just one of those deals
where you gotta set aside your ego and your undying
love for your dogs and learn how to keep them
at a healthy weight all year long. That's what I'm
(00:44):
going to talk about right now here on the old
Blue Marble we call home. We consider gravity to be
one G. That makes sense since we would use Earth's
gravity as a measure by which to understand gravity anywhere,
and not say I don't know Jupiter's gravity, which would
(01:07):
do us no good and get real confusing. In a hurry,
that Newton fellow, who supposedly got knocked in the head
by a granny Smith which led to his creation of
the universal law gravitation, figured out that every object in
the universe attracts every other object with a force that
is proportional to its mass. This is also inversely proportional
(01:29):
to the square of the distance between two objects. Now,
to muddy the water's further, that wild haired German named
Einstein hit us with his general theory of relativity way
back in nineteen oh five, which means he was way
way way ahead of his time and his thinking. That
theory described gravity as a distortion in the fabric of
(01:51):
space time, where anything with mass literally warps space and
changes time. I'm too dumb to explain what that really means,
although I've tried to understand it so many times. A
good way to think about it, at least for me
to get, you know, kind of through the mental sludge
that clouds even my kindergarten math skills, is to imagine
(02:12):
drawing a straight line a sheet of paper. Then you
simply twist the paper. That's well, kind of a terrible
explanation on how gravity bends space and forces objects to
fall or get pulled in a certain direction, but it
kind of works. All of those rockets you see getting
launched these days from NASA or SpaceX or companies like
(02:33):
rocket Lab, they all have to get going nearly seven
miles a second to escape Earth's gravity. Imagine the fuel
and thrust to carry a multi ton payload away from
Earth at that speed. That's why it costs like ten
grand to get something the weight of a normal bottle
of water into space. Fuel is expensive and it takes
(02:57):
a lot of fuel to move something that fast in
that direction. Gravity is no joke, and it's in the
deer hunting world where I used to hear a lot
of white tailed junkies talk about it in a way
that demonstrated they had no idea what they were talking about.
Back when full body safety harnesses were replacing the options
of either no harnesses or the waste belt style harnesses
(03:19):
that often kept people from hitting the ground but also
forced them to hang upside down until they died. Those
kind of safety harnesses, people often just said they would
scramble like a crazy squirrel if they started to fall back.
Then as if go stand on a trap door and
do your best to hold yourself up once it drops away.
(03:40):
I once had a pair of screw in tree steps
pull out at the exact same time, and let me
tell you, my reflexes weren't even close to good enough
to help me, and the busted rib I got from
the whole deal was a good reminder of that. A
general non scientific rule that I just made up says
that the heavier things are, the more gravity wants to
(04:01):
give those things a great, big gravity hug. You can't
escape it, and neither can your dog. In fact, if
you want to find out how a lot of hunting
dogs and probably a fair amount of non hunting dogs
get injured, it's usually something stupid like jumping off of
truck tailgate and landing. Wrong. With puppies, it's often when
(04:23):
a young kid holds them and immediately drops them when
they start to squirm or get a little nippy. Even
a drop of a foot from a toddler can injure
a pup. What's worse is that the heavier a dog is,
the higher the likelihood they might hit the ground hard
and in a way that might injure them. Now waight
is a touchy subject with dog owners because no one
(04:45):
thinks they have an overweight or an underweight dog. As
someone who spent so much time at the game fair
in the suburbs of the Twin Cities for years, giving
seminars and looking at hundreds of labs in golden and
gsps and various other breeds of dogs, I can tell
you that a lot of people have their blinders on
(05:06):
when it comes to their dogs. Underweight dogs are a thing,
but that's an easy remedy typically if there are no
underlying health conditions, which is my way of saying that
if you have a chronically underweight adult dog, you better
get it to the vet before deciding it just needs
some more kibble. Underweight pups, you know, they're somewhat more
(05:28):
common because some puppies just don't seem like they can
eat enough to keep up with their growing and often
moving bodies. Again, though, underweight as a diagnosis is hard
to pin down, and you might want to ask your
vet where your pup is at before you go on
this journey alone and think you can solve it just
by yourself. Now, a good way to think about dog
(05:51):
weight is just to simply look at them. Underweight dogs
will show their ribs when they move. Now, with some pointers,
this is kind of just what they look like, but
you don't want to see the ribs protruding so much
that they are super obvious. If you can see the
outline of a dog's vertebrae, it's back, or its hips
protrude sharply. Then you're generally looking at an underweight dog.
(06:16):
Head to the vet and get ready to offer that
dog some more food. Now, overweight dogs, they're a different story.
They are everywhere, and this is not a good thing.
Let's say you have a dog that should be fifty pounds,
a nice little English lab female. But what if that
dog is fifty five pounds. It won't look super fat,
(06:39):
but it's ten percent overweight. Now what if that dog
gets to sixty pounds. Again, you might be able to
look right past the body shape to believe that the
dog is good enough shape. But that's twenty percent overweight,
which is a lot. Obese and overweight dogs live shorter
lives than their healthy weight counterparts. One study that I
(07:01):
found showed that this is a good way to shave
off about two years of a dog's life, which is
fourteen years and dog years. I also don't know a
single dog owner who wouldn't give a hell of a
lot to have two more years with their four legged bestie.
If you've ever put a dog down, ask yourself what
(07:21):
you would have paid in that moment to have another
twenty four months with that dog. Now, how do you
know your dog is overweight? Well, if someone you haven't
(07:43):
seen in a while calls your dog big chungus or
a first, your dog is one heck of a chonkster.
You might want to take the hint. A less insulting
way to figure this out is by looking at your dog.
Is there a noticeable cut right in front of the
hip but behind the ribs? Healthy dogs have trim look
to them, But maybe you have a shaggy haired golden
(08:03):
or some other breed where it's just not as obvious.
Then you got to feel their sides. Can you feel
the ribs? That's good. You don't want to be able
to see them, but you should be able to run
your fingers along their side and feel the ribs under
their skin. If you can't, like there's just a little
too much patting there, your dog is probably carrying too
(08:24):
much weight. Now, this is where people get defensive. But
it's not about us. It's not about you. It's about
the health of your dog and the reality that like
thirty to forty percent of domestic dogs are at some
level of being too heavy. It's that common and it's
not good, and no, you shouldn't hunt them into shape.
(08:46):
That would be like you deciding, after having not run
a single mile since middle school, to go from the
couch to a half marathon this week. Now, if that
isn't a recipe for some type of injury, I don't
know what is. The same rule apply to dogs, too,
although they are naturally a hell of a lot more
athletic than most of us are. So when people begrudgingly
(09:07):
accept the fact that their dog could stend to lose
a few lbs, they often question how their super active
dog could get overweight in the first place. After all,
they are feeding, you know, responsibly. So let's go back
to that imaginary fifty pound female lab I mentioned earlier
that dog, depending on activity level, will probably require about
(09:30):
seven hundred and nine hundred calories a day, you know,
maybe seven hundred in January and nine hundred in August
when the preseason training is really humming along. Now, that's
a pretty easy target to hit with dog food, because
you should be able to measure daily feedings in cups.
Hit that mark and it's all good, right. Well, if
you've ever done any kind of diet where you had
(09:52):
to track your own calories. You know, it's not so simple.
It's all of those pesky in between calories get you.
It's not the chicken and rice and broccoli you have
for lunch. It's the seven handfuls of m and ms
you have well binging Yellowstone at night, or the granola
bars you just kind of absent mindedly munch on between
(10:13):
your meals. For dogs, it's the treats. It's the pizza
crust we give them because they are just so damn
cute when they beg Now here's where things get tougher
to decipher. I'm just going to use this as an example,
but there are treats out there that promise health benefits
like I don't know, cleaner dog teeth and oral health
(10:35):
is a big issue with dogs, so it only makes
sense to give them something that will keep their chompers
clean and working properly. That's healthy, right, Well, some of
those treats come in at about eighty calories. That's around
ten percent of what that little lab would need for
the day. If that's just bonus calories, then you're adding
(10:55):
an extra five hundred and sixty calories a week just
sneaking into your through the idea of keeping your dog healthier.
In a bag of those treats, you're looking at about
a month's worth of them. That's an extra twenty five
hundred and sixty calories for the month, which is going
to translate to about two thirds of an extra pound
of weight. Since the dogs need to eat about thirty
(11:16):
five hundred extra calories to gain a single pound, not
a huge deal, right, Well, what about that pizza crust.
It's pretty easy to get to forty or fifty calories
and just pizza crust, which is the matter of flipping
your dog a snack and him eating it in half
of a second. Now, on that day, between a healthy
treat and a little indulgence because that dog's begging for it,
(11:39):
you're at fifteen percent extra on the calorie intake. What
about a slice of wheat bread eighty calories again, about
ten percent of what that little lab would need. This
is sort of a death by a thousand paper cuts
kind of thing, where we don't really see any one
small event as a big deal to our dog's health.
(12:02):
But it's the habits. It's those small events that stack
up on one another that equal real weight on a dog,
and when it does, that dog has a greater chance
of developing diabetes and heart disease, and arthritis and joint issues,
high blood pressure, and some forms of cancer that you
really don't want to have to deal with. Now you
(12:22):
might think, well, I can get away with spoiling my
sweet little pupster because she works hard in training and
she never stops moving. It's true that activity level matters
a lot in the whole body weight equation. But it's
also true that we often give our dogs calories they
don't need that are also chock full of a bunch
of stuff they don't need. And it's also true, as
(12:45):
I mentioned earlier, that we are terrible at judging the
physical fitness of our own dogs. We're too biased, just
like with ourselves. But it's not about us, as I mentioned,
and this is a point I feel I really need
to drive home. Our pets are subject to our shortfalls
in a variety of ways. We see this with socialization
(13:07):
and discipline, we see it with training, and certainly with
their physical wellbeing. They don't have a choice, really, other
than to eat what we give them, and if we
don't give them the right food in the right amounts,
that's on us. For whatever reason for making them less healthy.
Now there's another aspect of maintaining proper dog weight, which
(13:30):
is hard to understand. We think, well, my dog is
training more, so it deserves more food or treats. Maybe
what you have to do is make this less academic.
Stop thinking about what your dog might need because of
what you might need on any given moment of the day,
and start reacting to their body condition. The body doesn't lie.
(13:52):
A dog's weight and its shape don't lie. Now, this
is where it gets even a little bit trickier. If
you have to put weight on. It's about gradually increasing
food availability to get the dog to a healthy condition.
With taking weight off, there are a lot of options
and a lot of companies looking to make some money
off of you, just like in the human health world
(14:14):
when it comes to diets, and this is not a
fast process, and it's a bad idea to try to
make it one. To lose a pound of weight, your
dog generally needs to get to a thirty five hundred
calorie deficit. This won't happen in three days, or at
least it shouldn't. To take ten pounds off of a dog,
(14:34):
you're looking at a thirty five thousand calorie deficit. That's
a month's long process. Now, you might get there by
offering up less kibble, or switching to a lower calorie
formula a kibble, or increasing exercise, but most likely it'll
be a little of all of the above over a
long time. Now, for dogs that are just slightly pudgy,
(14:57):
this isn't a huge ask. It's a tweak to a
few things in your day to day life, and then
something that might happen within a month or two, but
a real reduction in way you're looking at managing your
dog's diet and exercise not only for months, but really forever.
Healthy weight is a moving target, and even if you
(15:18):
manage to thread the needle and hit it perfectly this month,
that doesn't mean you can just go back to the
old habits as soon as the scale reads the right
poundage in the right moment. This is a lifestyle issue,
and that means it never really goes away. Now it
is easier to commit to and stick to once you
start to figure out what amount of food and exercise
is necessary to keep your dog at a healthy weight.
(15:40):
On paper, that's simple enough, but then you think about
asking your kids to feed the dog. They might not
measure that cup of kibble quite as closely as you do,
or they might think it's funny to flip your beloved
hunting dog a few half eaten chicken nuggets at dinner time.
Owning a healthy dog takes a whole family committed to
this same goal, which isn't as easy as it sounds.
(16:03):
And the same goes for treats. If you're super disciplined
on what your dog gets, but your wife is a
sucker for those big, sad brown eyes and a thin
thread of drool leaking from your dog's jowels, it's time
for a tough conversation. We think food equals love with dogs,
but it doesn't. We aren't some old school Southern family
(16:25):
getting together on a Sunday to mow down on grits
and fried chicken and gallons of gravy. This is a
creature you love more than anything that doesn't know anything
about diet on exercise. It's totally subject to your whims
and guidance to whatever you provide. Everyone in the family
or your dog's life has to be on the same page.
(16:48):
If it seems like I'm being too dramatic here, ask
your vet the next time you bring your dog in.
Just how many dogs here she sees on any given
week that are overweight. It's a huge ish, no pun intended.
While we might feel like we are punishing our dogs
by carefully tweaking their diet to dial in their weight,
we aren't. We are helping them to live longer and
(17:11):
have a better quality of life. Overall. We are helping
them hunt through another pheasant season, or grouse season or
duck season without having to retire early due to serious
joint pain or something worse like cancer. It's our responsibility
to them, and in return, they'll usually forgive you for
cutting them off of the dog biscuits and the pup
cups full of ice cream and anything else that really
(17:34):
really they want a little taste of. We have to
look at them. We have to feel their ribs. We
have to observe their energy levels while they're training or
going for a walk. We have to take their vets
opinion on their health seriously, even though we might take
it a little too personally. If the report isn't that
we are dealing with the canine equivalent of Olympic gold medalist,
(17:56):
think about that as we creep from late summer into
early fall, where a lot of us will ask our
dogs to hunt doves or woodcock or early season teealer geese.
Think about that whether you have a high drive pointer
or a couch potato mutt who is mostly good for
a snuggle on the floor in a short walk around
the block, think about it for them, not for us,
(18:19):
and think about coming back in two weeks because I'm
going to talk about how dogs don't teach dogs a
freaking thing, yet we kind of think they do. That's it.
I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Houndation's podcast. As
I always, thank you so much for listening for all
your support. If you want some more dog training advice,
or maybe you want to read an article about upland
(18:39):
hunting or white tail hunting. Maybe you want to find
an interesting podcast like Clay Newcomb's Bear Grease to just
fill in your drive time on the way to work,
head on over to the meadeater dot com. There's so
much different content there to help you kill your days,
burn some time on that drive and learn a thing
or two. And again, as I always just thank you
(19:02):
so much for your support. We all here at Media League,
we truly appreciate it, so thank you.
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.