March 28, 2012
How do you balance treats with food to keep your dogs at a desired weight?
Full Question:
Hi Cindy,I am interested to hear how you are balancing treats with food keeping Stella's desired weight in mind. I find I am having a very difficult time keeping my Cavalier's weight down. I train with her so I have to balance her meals with training treats. She is down to bare minimum with her kibble (grain free) supplemented with training treats throughout the day and I still have issues with her weight.
She is quite the active dog and gets her share of exercise in each day. For training treats, I will use the Bravo freeze dried hot dogs/trail mix, Bowser's Best Buffalo Bites, or Zuke's Mini Naturals (all being grain free and low fat). I will also heat up a fat free, beef hotdog, cut it up and put it in a baggie with kibble so that the taste of the hot dog seeps into the kibble to make it more tempting to her (although she loves her kibble plain too).
She is about 3 pounds overweight which for a small dog is a lot. I would like to find a solution to this as Cavaliers are prone to heart issues and I do not want to add to it. I appreciate your thoughts on this.
Cindy's Answer:
What kind of exercise is she getting? How is it structured and for how long?
I think most people would be surprised at how much of my day is invested in exercising my dogs. It’s a structured activity here that comes before training or anything else we do.
On days your dog is getting a lot of treats, let her skip meals or only use her daily food for her training. I'd also look at the size of the treats you are giving. For Stella, if I use Zuke's, I actually cut them in half with a pair of scissors. A little dog doesn’t need big pieces.
Once Stella reaches her full growth, on days she's getting trained, I'll likely only feed her during training if it appears she’s struggling with her weight. My dogs get tons of appropriate exercise and even my Corgi has never been overweight (which is pretty amazing, if you know Corgis). :)
I know from experience that those Bravo hotdog pieces are MUCH too big to use for a small dog unless they are broken or cut up into pieces about ½ the size of a pencil eraser.
Will your dog play tug? That's another option, don't use food only but use tugging as a reward as much as you can. It's calorie-free and it builds really nice engagement. If she won’t play tug, then I'd make that a training goal.
Cindy Rhodes
I think most people would be surprised at how much of my day is invested in exercising my dogs. It’s a structured activity here that comes before training or anything else we do.
On days your dog is getting a lot of treats, let her skip meals or only use her daily food for her training. I'd also look at the size of the treats you are giving. For Stella, if I use Zuke's, I actually cut them in half with a pair of scissors. A little dog doesn’t need big pieces.
Once Stella reaches her full growth, on days she's getting trained, I'll likely only feed her during training if it appears she’s struggling with her weight. My dogs get tons of appropriate exercise and even my Corgi has never been overweight (which is pretty amazing, if you know Corgis). :)
I know from experience that those Bravo hotdog pieces are MUCH too big to use for a small dog unless they are broken or cut up into pieces about ½ the size of a pencil eraser.
Will your dog play tug? That's another option, don't use food only but use tugging as a reward as much as you can. It's calorie-free and it builds really nice engagement. If she won’t play tug, then I'd make that a training goal.
Cindy Rhodes
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