HOW CAN I IMPROVE MY POMERANIAN’S DIET?
Lately we have attended with Colette a series of informative talks organized by Espacio Animal, a shop specialized in natural therapies and positive education located in Madrid, Spain. These talks, besides being useful to keep increasing our knowledge, are for charity, since the money collected goes to an animal protection association.
In one of these talks, the expert in veterinary nutrition and dietetics Mónica González Tovar analyzed the different kind of food and proposed us practical suggestions to improve our pets’ diet, no matter what diet we are following, dry, wet, dehydrated or raw.
Which are the main characteristics of our pets’ food? The main characteristics that must be analyzed to establish the quality of the food are: water, consistency, composition and processing.
- Water: To avoid kidney fatigue in our dogs, what would be ideal is that the food that we give them contains 60-70% of water. Wet food contains about 60-70% of water, however the fodder, being a dehydrated food, only contains 8-12%. How can we increase this percentage of water if they eat fodder? We can add home-made broths, mix the fodder with wet food, and even put several bowls with water throughout the house to encourage them to drink often.
- Consistency: Bones, tendons or muscles would be the ideal food consistency for our small carnivores, and thus prevent them mainly periodontal diseases. Fodder doesn’t clean the teeth and carbohydrates that it contains favor the dental tartar build up. On the other hand, the wet food is not good either because it doesn’t make them chew. What can we do to improve their dental health? Give them once a week “recreational bones”, that is to say, raw bones, which taking into account the size of our Pomeranians could be beef or pork ribs. The “recreational bones” provide them not only dental benefits, massaging their gums, but also mental benefits, by secreting endorphins while eating them. Attention! Pork bones must be frozen for at least three weeks to avoid trichinosis.
- Composition: To have a balanced diet, our dogs should eat around 70-90% of animal proteins and fats. The truth is that much food that we give to them contains a much higher proportion of vegetal protein and carbohydrates than animal protein and fat. In another post we will put close attention, because it is a very broad topic, on the composition of different fodders that we find in the market and we will teach you some tricks to better understand the labels; so now we will simply tell you that to complete and improve their diet, we can give them sardines in olive oil low in salt, two mussels a day or salmon oil or krill oil.
- Processing:The current food processing has influence in the high percentage of dogs suffering from cancer and obesity. Between 30 and 40 % of cancer cases could be prevented with a change in diet. In order to reduce the chances of our dog from getting cancer and to improve their life quality, we can complete their diet with green leafy vegetables, such as lettuce, chard, spinach or kale. Trick! If, like Colette, your dog doesn’t like raw vegetables, you can blend them and mix them with a little of yogurt…sure he or she loves it! 🙂
PomPomDog wants to thank Mónica for sharing her knowledge with us in such an interesting talk. If you still feel like to know more about this topic, soon there will be new posts about diet in PomPomDog, but meanwhile you can subscribe on her website www.monicagonzaleztovar.com and so receive tips on natural diet for your pets.
What kind of diet do your Pomeranians follows?
We encourage you to tell us in the comments of this post. Thank you very much!
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