Feeding Guidelines

Why is it important I feed the right amount?

Health and wellbeing are best in lean, fit dogs
Excessive weight puts unnecessary strain on the heart, muscles and joints
Excessive weight increases the risk of diseases like cancer, diabetes, Cushing's Disease and liver disease

Feeding Guide according to your dog’s life stage

(Amount of food per day, as a percentage of their body weight, this can be divided into 1-3 meals per day)

Treats are food!

Treats are great aids for training and rewarding your pet, but they do contain calories!
Remember to take this into account when you calculate how much food to feed your pet

Add the weight of your treats to the total weight of his/her daily meals

Feeding guide

The feeding guide is just that - a guide. So it's the daily recommended amount to feed based on an average dog’s lifestyle and metabolism. However, every pet is an individual with a different basal metabolic rate (the rate at which the body uses energy, while at rest, to maintain vital functions such as breathing and keeping warm), different exercise regimes, different home lives - for example some dogs don’t leave the house, some run around in the garden for hours. So all of these factors can influence how much you should feed.

We recommend starting off feeding the recommended amount and then monitoring your pet’s Body Condition Score to determine if this amount is right (see below). Note - this can also change throughout the year, often in winter our pets exercise less but expend more energy keeping warm.

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How to tell if your dog is overweight

We use Body Condition Score (BCS) - See charts below
It’s a scale of 1 to 9
Your dog or cat should score between 4 to 5 on this scale
Every number above 5 on this scale is approximately equal to a 10% increase in body fat

5/9 is 10% body fat - this is ideal
6/9 is 20% body fat
7/9 is 30% body fat - this is considered to be obese
8/9 is 40% body fat
9/9 is 50% body fat

Our nurses offer weight clinics and you can pop in and weigh your pet as often as you like!!

Intermittent fasting

Recent research and the current thinking is that:

Dogs and cats should be fasted for 24 hours at least once a week and preferably twice a week
This helps with weight management by mobilising body fat reserves
It also helps the intestine and the microbiome rest and reset

If you’d like to know more about why we thing you should feed raw and for some answers to some commonly asked questions before / during and post transition then visit our Raw Food Facts page.