00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about keeping your dog at a healthy weight no matter what. This is a touchy subject, but it's one that I feel like, well, I kind of have to touch That's probably not how I should have worded that anyway. How hefty our hounds are is an important aspect of dog ownership, and it's one that gets people, you know, kind of a little bit fired up. It's also just one of those deals where you gotta set aside your ego and your undying love for your dogs and learn how to keep them at a healthy weight all year long. That's what I'm going to talk about right now here on the old Blue Marble we call home. We consider gravity to be one G. That makes sense since we would use Earth's gravity as a measure by which to understand gravity anywhere, and not say I don't know Jupiter's gravity, which would do us no good and get real confusing. In a hurry, that Newton fellow, who supposedly got knocked in the head by a granny Smith which led to his creation of the universal law gravitation, figured out that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force that is proportional to its mass. This is also inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects. Now, to muddy the water's further, that wild haired German named Einstein hit us with his general theory of relativity way back in nineteen oh five, which means he was way way way ahead of his time and his thinking. That theory described gravity as a distortion in the fabric of space time, where anything with mass literally warps space and changes time. I'm too dumb to explain what that really means, although I've tried to understand it so many times. A good way to think about it, at least for me to get, you know, kind of through the mental sludge that clouds even my kindergarten math skills, is to imagine drawing a straight line a sheet of paper. Then you simply twist the paper. That's well, kind of a terrible explanation on how gravity bends space and forces objects to fall or get pulled in a certain direction, but it kind of works. All of those rockets you see getting launched these days from NASA or SpaceX or companies like rocket Lab, they all have to get going nearly seven miles a second to escape Earth's gravity. Imagine the fuel and thrust to carry a multi ton payload away from Earth at that speed. That's why it costs like ten grand to get something the weight of a normal bottle of water into space. Fuel is expensive and it takes a lot of fuel to move something that fast in that direction. Gravity is no joke, and it's in the deer hunting world where I used to hear a lot of white tailed junkies talk about it in a way that demonstrated they had no idea what they were talking about. Back when full body safety harnesses were replacing the options of either no harnesses or the waste belt style harnesses that often kept people from hitting the ground but also forced them to hang upside down until they died. Those kind of safety harnesses, people often just said they would scramble like a crazy squirrel if they started to fall back. Then as if go stand on a trap door and do your best to hold yourself up once it drops away. I once had a pair of screw in tree steps pull out at the exact same time, and let me tell you, my reflexes weren't even close to good enough to help me, and the busted rib I got from the whole deal was a good reminder of that. A general non scientific rule that I just made up says that the heavier things are, the more gravity wants to give those things a great, big gravity hug. You can't escape it, and neither can your dog. In fact, if you want to find out how a lot of hunting dogs and probably a fair amount of non hunting dogs get injured, it's usually something stupid like jumping off of truck tailgate and landing. Wrong. With puppies, it's often when a young kid holds them and immediately drops them when they start to squirm or get a little nippy. Even a drop of a foot from a toddler can injure a pup. What's worse is that the heavier a dog is, the higher the likelihood they might hit the ground hard and in a way that might injure them. Now waight is a touchy subject with dog owners because no one thinks they have an overweight or an underweight dog. As someone who spent so much time at the game fair in the suburbs of the Twin Cities for years, giving seminars and looking at hundreds of labs in golden and gsps and various other breeds of dogs, I can tell you that a lot of people have their blinders on when it comes to their dogs. Underweight dogs are a thing, but that's an easy remedy typically if there are no underlying health conditions, which is my way of saying that if you have a chronically underweight adult dog, you better get it to the vet before deciding it just needs some more kibble. Underweight pups, you know, they're somewhat more common because some puppies just don't seem like they can eat enough to keep up with their growing and often moving bodies. Again, though, underweight as a diagnosis is hard to pin down, and you might want to ask your vet where your pup is at before you go on this journey alone and think you can solve it just by yourself. Now, a good way to think about dog weight is just to simply look at them. Underweight dogs will show their ribs when they move. Now, with some pointers, this is kind of just what they look like, but you don't want to see the ribs protruding so much that they are super obvious. If you can see the outline of a dog's vertebrae, it's back, or its hips protrude sharply. Then you're generally looking at an underweight dog. Head to the vet and get ready to offer that dog some more food. Now, overweight dogs, they're a different story. They are everywhere, and this is not a good thing. Let's say you have a dog that should be fifty pounds, a nice little English lab female. But what if that dog is fifty five pounds. It won't look super fat, but it's ten percent overweight. Now what if that dog gets to sixty pounds. Again, you might be able to look right past the body shape to believe that the dog is good enough shape. But that's twenty percent overweight, which is a lot. Obese and overweight dogs live shorter lives than their healthy weight counterparts. One study that I found showed that this is a good way to shave off about two years of a dog's life, which is fourteen years and dog years. I also don't know a single dog owner who wouldn't give a hell of a lot to have two more years with their four legged bestie. If you've ever put a dog down, ask yourself what you would have paid in that moment to have another twenty four months with that dog. Now, how do you know your dog is overweight? Well, if someone you haven't seen in a while calls your dog big chungus or a first, your dog is one heck of a chonkster. You might want to take the hint. A less insulting way to figure this out is by looking at your dog. Is there a noticeable cut right in front of the hip but behind the ribs? Healthy dogs have trim look to them, But maybe you have a shaggy haired golden or some other breed where it's just not as obvious. Then you got to feel their sides. Can you feel the ribs? That's good. You don't want to be able to see them, but you should be able to run your fingers along their side and feel the ribs under their skin. If you can't, like there's just a little too much patting there, your dog is probably carrying too much weight. Now, this is where people get defensive. But it's not about us. It's not about you. It's about the health of your dog and the reality that like thirty to forty percent of domestic dogs are at some level of being too heavy. It's that common and it's not good, and no, you shouldn't hunt them into shape. That would be like you deciding, after having not run a single mile since middle school, to go from the couch to a half marathon this week. Now, if that isn't a recipe for some type of injury, I don't know what is. The same rule apply to dogs, too, although they are naturally a hell of a lot more athletic than most of us are. So when people begrudgingly accept the fact that their dog could stend to lose a few lbs, they often question how their super active dog could get overweight in the first place. After all, they are feeding, you know, responsibly. So let's go back to that imaginary fifty pound female lab I mentioned earlier that dog, depending on activity level, will probably require about seven hundred and nine hundred calories a day, you know, maybe seven hundred in January and nine hundred in August when the preseason training is really humming along. Now, that's a pretty easy target to hit with dog food, because you should be able to measure daily feedings in cups. Hit that mark and it's all good, right. Well, if you've ever done any kind of diet where you had to track your own calories. You know, it's not so simple. It's all of those pesky in between calories get you. It's not the chicken and rice and broccoli you have for lunch. It's the seven handfuls of m and ms you have well binging Yellowstone at night, or the granola bars you just kind of absent mindedly munch on between your meals. For dogs, it's the treats. It's the pizza crust we give them because they are just so damn cute when they beg Now here's where things get tougher to decipher. I'm just going to use this as an example, but there are treats out there that promise health benefits like I don't know, cleaner dog teeth and oral health is a big issue with dogs, so it only makes sense to give them something that will keep their chompers clean and working properly. That's healthy, right, Well, some of those treats come in at about eighty calories. That's around ten percent of what that little lab would need for the day. If that's just bonus calories, then you're adding an extra five hundred and sixty calories a week just sneaking into your through the idea of keeping your dog healthier. In a bag of those treats, you're looking at about a month's worth of them. That's an extra twenty five hundred and sixty calories for the month, which is going to translate to about two thirds of an extra pound of weight. Since the dogs need to eat about thirty five hundred extra calories to gain a single pound, not a huge deal, right, Well, what about that pizza crust. It's pretty easy to get to forty or fifty calories and just pizza crust, which is the matter of flipping your dog a snack and him eating it in half of a second. Now, on that day, between a healthy treat and a little indulgence because that dog's begging for it, you're at fifteen percent extra on the calorie intake. What about a slice of wheat bread eighty calories again, about ten percent of what that little lab would need. This is sort of a death by a thousand paper cuts kind of thing, where we don't really see any one small event as a big deal to our dog's health. But it's the habits. It's those small events that stack up on one another that equal real weight on a dog, and when it does, that dog has a greater chance of developing diabetes and heart disease, and arthritis and joint issues, high blood pressure, and some forms of cancer that you really don't want to have to deal with. Now you might think, well, I can get away with spoiling my sweet little pupster because she works hard in training and she never stops moving. It's true that activity level matters a lot in the whole body weight equation. But it's also true that we often give our dogs calories they don't need that are also chock full of a bunch of stuff they don't need. And it's also true, as I mentioned earlier, that we are terrible at judging the physical fitness of our own dogs. We're too biased, just like with ourselves. But it's not about us, as I mentioned, and this is a point I feel I really need to drive home. Our pets are subject to our shortfalls in a variety of ways. We see this with socialization and discipline, we see it with training, and certainly with their physical wellbeing. They don't have a choice, really, other than to eat what we give them, and if we don't give them the right food in the right amounts, that's on us. For whatever reason for making them less healthy. Now there's another aspect of maintaining proper dog weight, which is hard to understand. We think, well, my dog is training more, so it deserves more food or treats. Maybe what you have to do is make this less academic. Stop thinking about what your dog might need because of what you might need on any given moment of the day, and start reacting to their body condition. The body doesn't lie. A dog's weight and its shape don't lie. Now, this is where it gets even a little bit trickier. If you have to put weight on. It's about gradually increasing food availability to get the dog to a healthy condition. With taking weight off, there are a lot of options and a lot of companies looking to make some money off of you, just like in the human health world when it comes to diets, and this is not a fast process, and it's a bad idea to try to make it one. To lose a pound of weight, your dog generally needs to get to a thirty five hundred calorie deficit. This won't happen in three days, or at least it shouldn't. To take ten pounds off of a dog, you're looking at a thirty five thousand calorie deficit. That's a month's long process. Now, you might get there by offering up less kibble, or switching to a lower calorie formula a kibble, or increasing exercise, but most likely it'll be a little of all of the above over a long time. Now, for dogs that are just slightly pudgy, this isn't a huge ask. It's a tweak to a few things in your day to day life, and then something that might happen within a month or two, but a real reduction in way you're looking at managing your dog's diet and exercise not only for months, but really forever. Healthy weight is a moving target, and even if you manage to thread the needle and hit it perfectly this month, that doesn't mean you can just go back to the old habits as soon as the scale reads the right poundage in the right moment. This is a lifestyle issue, and that means it never really goes away. Now it is easier to commit to and stick to once you start to figure out what amount of food and exercise is necessary to keep your dog at a healthy weight. On paper, that's simple enough, but then you think about asking your kids to feed the dog. They might not measure that cup of kibble quite as closely as you do, or they might think it's funny to flip your beloved hunting dog a few half eaten chicken nuggets at dinner time. Owning a healthy dog takes a whole family committed to this same goal, which isn't as easy as it sounds. And the same goes for treats. If you're super disciplined on what your dog gets, but your wife is a sucker for those big, sad brown eyes and a thin thread of drool leaking from your dog's jowels, it's time for a tough conversation. We think food equals love with dogs, but it doesn't. We aren't some old school Southern family getting together on a Sunday to mow down on grits and fried chicken and gallons of gravy. This is a creature you love more than anything that doesn't know anything about diet on exercise. It's totally subject to your whims and guidance to whatever you provide. Everyone in the family or your dog's life has to be on the same page. If it seems like I'm being too dramatic here, ask your vet the next time you bring your dog in. Just how many dogs here she sees on any given week that are overweight. It's a huge ish, no pun intended. While we might feel like we are punishing our dogs by carefully tweaking their diet to dial in their weight, we aren't. We are helping them to live longer and have a better quality of life. Overall. We are helping them hunt through another pheasant season, or grouse season or duck season without having to retire early due to serious joint pain or something worse like cancer. It's our responsibility to them, and in return, they'll usually forgive you for cutting them off of the dog biscuits and the pup cups full of ice cream and anything else that really really they want a little taste of. We have to look at them. We have to feel their ribs. We have to observe their energy levels while they're training or going for a walk. We have to take their vets opinion on their health seriously, even though we might take it a little too personally. If the report isn't that we are dealing with the canine equivalent of Olympic gold medalist, think about that as we creep from late summer into early fall, where a lot of us will ask our dogs to hunt doves or woodcock or early season teealer geese. Think about that whether you have a high drive pointer or a couch potato mutt who is mostly good for a snuggle on the floor in a short walk around the block, think about it for them, not for us, and think about coming back in two weeks because I'm going to talk about how dogs don't teach dogs a freaking thing, yet we kind of think they do. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Houndation's podcast. As I always, thank you so much for listening for all your support. If you want some more dog training advice, or maybe you want to read an article about upland hunting or white tail hunting. Maybe you want to find an interesting podcast like Clay Newcomb's Bear Grease to just fill in your drive time on the way to work, head on over to the meadeater dot com. There's so much different content there to help you kill your days, burn some time on that drive and learn a thing or two. And again, as I always just thank you so much for your support. We all here at Media League, we truly appreciate it, so thank you.