Adding fat/calories to a diet

BradA1878

So Luytiy currently gets 10 cups of food a day, plus some extras. He eats Acana and some can food mixed in as well as sweet potato. The total caloric consumption is 3000+ calories!

The past few weeks/months he has been going through a growth/maturing phase. He has filled-out a lot, his legs are thicker, his chest is wider, and his head is HUGE now.

With this change he has started becoming nutty about food. He gets so over-excited about it we have to crate him anytime we do anything food related. This alerted us to the thought that he may be hungry, even tho he eats so much. So we have been adding more puppy can food to his diet in the hope it would give him more fat, we also have upped his food a bit.

He is in fact getting thinner we confirmed that today by feeling his ribs and comparing the previous results, so we need to add some more fat to his diet and/or up the amount of food we feed him. We would like to do both but we have no idea how to add fat to his diet without changing his kibble (which we would prefer not to do).

We dewormed him in case he had a tapeworm or something - still he is thin.

We add Sweet Potato to his meals as well as puppy can food, it seemed to help before he went through this growth phase as he had started to look less thin... but now he is thin again. The dog eats like a can of puppy food + 10 cups + a cup of sweet potato a day! (Broken up into 3 meals)

Any ideas on something else we can add/replace that would provide a higher amount of fat? We are kinda at a loss at this point. We thought about Avocado (only the pit and skin is bad for dogs).

Any thoughts?

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TeamLaika

Any of the edible vegetable oils are safe to give and will be a calorie boost without additional bulk material. I have top dressed Guska's meal with olive oil to put weight on him in the past. (He is not a particularly enthusiastic eater and loses patience if I just give him more food.) He gained about 4 pounds in 2 months and looked good. No GI upset. I didn't really measure it...it was a good 'glug' on top of his food. How's that for preciseness? Probably 3-4 tablespoons though.

The other suggestion would be stuff that would put weight on us...like pasta. I use frozen cheese tortellini all the time as training treats.

PLwarped59

The only thing I can think of other than something like olive oil, as suggested, would be to use actual fat. Fryer lard.

JessicaRabbit

More sweet potatoes!
Odin eats 10lbs of sweet potatoes a day.
Chris transitioned him back to kibble (he can't afford to cook for a 200lb dog) Odin is 2 and is eating 6 cups kibble, 2lbs sweet potatoes. and 1 large patty of Natures variety raw 2x a day.
When I needed Miko to gain weight, we were giving her an additional cup of sweet potatoes twice a day.
My vet was giving her patient (GSD, who was way underweight) half a dozen sweet potatoes a day.

So what I am saying I guess is MORE SWEET POTATOES (toss in a couple fish oil capsules for fun too)

tsukitsune

Do you want to add fat? Or calories?

Are you sure its not just a growth stage in this larger breed of dog? What does his breeder think? Do they eventually fill out?

I know this suggestion is probably a huge dent in your food budget, but ground meat (red) is generally pretty high in fat while being generally low in nutritional value. Any red meat by-product part (cooked) is pretty higher in fat than poultry or fish. Look into nutritiondata.com for ground red meat, beef heart, pork parts, etc.
Eggs, cooked, are also higher in fat.

Another thing I've heard, people trying to put weight on their dogs relatively fast, is feeding them Satin Balls. It was suggested to me for Hanzo, but I'm glad I took the slow and steady route with him! Maybe these will work well in your scenario, though.
http://www.holisticdog.org/Nutrition/Satinballs/satinballs2.html

Sangmort

Wow. Big boy!!!


Must be easier to feed a lion! ha! ~

BradA1878

Jen - Good point, I guess I mean calories and not fat. When we spoke to Stacey, Masha's breeder and Luytiy's importer, she mentioned that she had to add some fat to her pups diet... so that is where the fat Q came from... but really it's calories that will add weight.

This is a phase, a growing phase, but we still need to get a little weight on him. He will continue to fill-out till 3-4 years. He is just turning 2 now.

Sarah - We had not considered pasta at all - that's a GREAT idea! We're not really concerned with adding grain to the CO's diets so pasta may be a good bet. Also, we will try some extra oils tho we add fish oil already.

Jessica - I knew you'd say that! lol. We talked about adding more sweet potato, your info helps a lot as we didn't know how much was too much.

JessicaRabbit

I know Chris was warned highly against grain in Odins diet. Since CO's are also Molassers something to consider.

lindsayt

Ike, who is intact if that makes a difference (it seems the males seem to burn fat faster), was losing weight, getting ribby and his coat looked shitty so I looked into adding more fat to his diet. No parasites. He eats Orijen. He is mostly a house pet and his calorie needs aren't great, so I imagine L being outside more watching/gaurding your place 24/7 must account for enormous calorie requirments.

I switched Ike from the fish, to the chicken (supposedly fattier), and increased chicken jerky snacks.

I consulted a friend who runs working Border Collies for her sheep, and she recommended adding a supplement that mushers use for their dogs "Red Paw Fat", if not switch off of grain free temporarily. As dogs use fat for energy more like we use carbs, some of the fat supplements now are very specialized for working dogs. Some people will buy rendered animal fat (yuk), but you can get rendered chicken and beef fat from butcher shops, sometimes kosher. You can add this straight to the feed or melt into warm water (assuming the dog does not have a malabsorbtion disorder or pancreatitis). It looked like an ok option. I however, tripled the amount of salmon oil liquid in his diet instead as a first step in addition to increasing his feed and he put on 1lb in a week. A big difference in that time in his coat and feel.

I would also remove canned food, it may seem like added calories, but it's mostly water so it takes up more room in his system without adding the additional calories that a concentrated dry kibble or meat/fat meal would have. Hope that helps, poor L.

tsukitsune

Well, I guess if you consider healthy ways for most mammals to add calories to their diet, you can consider the following:
olive oil
peanut butter
avocado (w/o skin, pits like you said)
steamed/dried fruits, veggies add calories w/o fat
beans (not sure which ones work well in dogs, though I know a GSD breeder feeds a lot of garbanzo bean treats to her dogs to beef them up)

cottage cheese and puppy (dry) food and/or those satin balls were all suggested to me when I started asking rescue folks how they help dogs gain weight after being a stray.

Adding extra grains or pure fat fillers will cause him to gain weight as fat and not as healthy muscle mass. Is there a canine nutritionist you can utilize? I know dogs process cooked fat much differently than raw fat, just as they utilize energy differently via fats than carbs (as Lindsay said).