How much should I feed my high-energy and possibly overweight dogs?

Question

Hey there, I was just wondering how much I should be feeding both my dogs? Kali is a German shepherd x Doberman x Great Dane (turned 1 last week) who has endless amounts of energy, I take her and Frosty for about an hour long walk in the morning and a run most evenings, also play fetch a few hours a day, her and Frosty also spend a fair amount of time playing every day. Frosty American bulldog x (turns 4 tomorrow)gets an evening walk after I run with Kali, but I think he’s overweight? Pet's info: Dog | Mixed Breed | Female | unspayed | 1 year old

Dr. B. DVM, DACVIM (Oncology) · Accepted Answer

Although its a little hard to tell from the photo both of your pups look to be lean with good muscle mass. To assess body condition what you want to look for are a waist behind the ribs when viewed from above, and that you can feel but not see the spine and ribs. Young active dogs are certainly apt to be a bit leaner. You could certainly consider a diet for active large breed dogs, especially for the Dane mix. To figure out how much to feed you need to know two things. First, you need to find out how many calories are in a cup of your current food. This is sometimes written on the bag or you can go online to the foods website and typically find it. It would be written kcal/cup for dry or kcal/can for canned. Second, you need to figure out what the energy requirements for your dogs are. This will be different for different weights of dogs and for dogs with different lifestyles. A good website to go to to help you with this is the Ohio State University Pet calorie calculator. If you Google OSU dog calorie calculator it should pop up. This will show you how to calculate the energy requirement for your dogs based on their weights, and let you know what factor to multiply by for their lifestyle. Then basically when you know how many calories they should be taking in per day you can figure out how much to feed. Keep in mind if you do this and change the amount you are feeding, if you are seeing weight loss or excessive weight gain you will have to adjust the plan as it's not a perfect system. I hope this helps and thank you for using Petco Pet Education Center, formerly Petcoach!

How much should I feed my high-energy and possibly overweight dogs?

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