best dog food for breeding dogs
Best Food for Breeding Dogs
What is the best food for breeding dogs? Today well look at a complete but easy natural diet for dogs and dog health supplements for breeding dogs.
Scientific studies have proven what all seasoned dog breeders know: nutrition can make or break the health and fertility of your stud dogs. It can even restore fertility in some dogs.
Best Food for Breeding Dogs
Ive already recently shared what I dont like about commercial foods for dogs and about whats important to include with our dogs food. And Ive also talked about whats important to make sure were not feeding our dogs because theyre toxic and can harm their reproductive performance and health.
I will show you a diet that is is high in the very minerals, fats, and vitamins that breeding dogs need.
This diet has been keeping my dogs healthy for decades. And the best food for breeding dogs is also what I tell my owners to feed their pet dogs. Most vets are going to say that you have to feed commercial dog food. Ive got four children and wonder why the doctor never said You have to feed commercial, processed food to your child to make sure it grows up healthy? That doesnt happen. What do they say instead? They say feed a variety of whole foods, dont they? So thats what were going to talk about today. What whole foods can we feed our dogs for a healthy life and good reproductive performance?
Natural Diet for Dogs
The basis, the foundation of the diet is based on trying to feed as natural a diet for dogs as we possibly can.
We know that only 12,000 years ago, dogs were wolves and were gradually domesticated into all the different breeds we see today. Thats a blink in the eye in evolutionary terms.
The premise of the natural dog diet is to feed them what millions of years of evolution have prepared them to eat and thrive on natural food.
What is a natural diet for dogs?
Its the whole animal: It includes the fur, the bones, the ears, the cartilages, the hooves, the guts, and all the organs.
Another thing to understand is that when a dog eats a whole animal, the vegetables its getting is actually in the form of digested food in the animals gut. Basically poop, right?
What can we do to try to simulate as natural a diet as we can, which does include vegetables of course, and bones?
The first thing I based my diet on to make it real simple, is chicken drumsticks. So half the diet should be chicken drumsticks and have them whole with the bone in it. Were talking about food grade, human quality, fresh chicken drumsticks; very unlikely to give your dog any problems with bacterial contamination. I like drumsticks more than other meaty bones because it has a nice balance of bone, to meat, to fat and will provide your dog with a lot of its vitamin and mineral and fat requirements.
And never feed raw bones on their own because they need that meat and that fat present to lubricate the bone through the gut. If you just feed bones, then you can end up with impaction, made up of bones that all collect up in the gut because theres nothing to slide them through. So dont just feed bones. And make sure all the bones you ever feed are always raw and naturally shaped, not artificially shaped like lamb chop bones, for example, got it?
So half the diet is chicken. The other half of the diet is no chicken whatsoever.
A problem that we see in dogs is itchy skin. 80% of the time itchy skin is caused by food allergy. And food allergy often arises because they have, for example, commercial food or home-cooked food that rely on just one kind of meat. Relying on one kind of meat protein is a recipe for allergies developing. This is why we have to be very careful not to give any chicken whatsoever for the other roughly half of the diet.
What I recommend as the best food for breeding dogs
Well, we can start with one meal a week of whole sardines.
So I buy the frozen sardines and I defrost them for my dogs and each 10-kilo, 20-pound dog gets about three or four sardines. Theyre thawed out, but theyre still raw and most dogs dont particularly like them. If they dont eat them, thats fine. I just dish them up to them the next day. And this gives them a bit of a fast, which is also very good for their guts.
Sardines provide some very essential nutrients that you wont get anywhere else in the diet. They are the way to get B12 and vitamin D. And it is actually the only meat which has a lot of vitamin D in it. Its also an excellent source of folate which is very important for breeding dogs, and selenium. So, if you dont feed sardines once a week, you might be missing out on those things.
Lamb Liver
The other thing that I feed once a fortnight is lamb liver or lambs fry, you might know it as. Now you can use beef liver, but Id rather give lamb because, at least in Australia, lamb tends to be straight off the paddock, straight through the abattoir, and straight on to the butcher shop. Whereas beef is very often finished off in feedlots where they might be given antibiotics and grain. So lamb is the cleanest liver and liver is a very nutritious food.
So 140 grams once a fortnight, and dont overfeed liver. Because if you do, youre going to be overdosing with vitamin A and in higher doses, like super high doses, vitamin As quite toxic. How I think about it is the liver is only a small part of an animal. So only feed it as a small part of the diet, right. Does that make sense? Cool.
Red Meat and Vegetables
For the rest of the time, I like to give red meat and mix it up. So sometimes beef, sometimes deer, or in Australia we use kangaroo. Theyre very similar to venison, very lean. You can use other red meats, horse meat, goat meat, beef, whatever.
Its important they get the vegetables as well. Studies show that they really do make a difference to dog health! So we add in green and orange vegetables.
For orange vegetables you can sometimes use pumpkin, then next time use carrot or sweet potato. Same with the green vegetables: sometimes it can be spinach or kale, next time cabbage, next time silver beet. Just mix it up and use different ones each time so you get a nice balance of nutrients going into your dogs. Be careful though not to double up on the high Vitamin A containing green and orange vegetables (download the FREE Best Food for Breeding Dogs Guide for more information).
Now, the way I feed that is I will actually steam the vegetables and then mix it in when cool into raw meat. Or you can buy the BARF mix of meat and vegetables made-up already. In these the vegetables are raw. Its OK now and then but I prefer not to feed raw vegetables because they have anti-nutrients in them that interfere with nutrient absorption from the gut.
Remember the vegetables that a dog will eat in the wild are already digested. Theyve been fermented in the gut of an animal, right? So the anti-nutrients would have been broken down by digestion. To try to simulate that, I like to slightly steam the vegetables first, or you can make up a stew, or you can buy stuff already made up.
DIY Dog Health Supplement
When you realize the best food for breeding dogs is natural and commit to follow this natural diet for dogs you will still need to supplement a few key nutrients. Luckily its easy to make natural stud dog health supplements to complete a natural diet for your breeding dogs with very simple ingredients!
The things that are low in this natural diet for dogs are vitamin D, vitamin E, and folate (B9). So how do I recommend you make that up? I recommended you do it with this simple mixture:
For the vitamin E, the richest source is sunflower oil, which is very easy to come by, inexpensive, and very, very rich in vitamin E.
Use mainly sunflower oil, and then for the other important nutrients Ive added a little wee touch of cod liver oil, which we need to boost the vitamin D up a little bit. As you recall, the sardines are a good source of that but dogs dont like eating loads of them. So to balance it out, add a bit more vitamin D through cod liver oil, but just a smidgen, because we dont want to overdo vitamin D. Like all nutrients Vitamin D can be really toxic in high doses. You need the right amount. Too little and it causes deficiency issues, too much and it causes toxicities.
The other magic ingredient that weve got in here is actually nutritional yeast. When you make this up yourself, youre going to have to shake it up before use because the nutritional yeast will sink to the bottom.
Now, why do we need the nutritional yeast in there? We need it to boost the folate.
Folate is really important for reproduction and nutritional use is the easiest way to get it. Dont just use any old yeast. It has to be nutritional yeast. Nutritional yeast has had folate added to it. Thats why its called nutritional yeast. I give you the doses of this and how to make this up, what proportions, in the FREE Best Food For Breeding Dogs & Dog Health Supplement Guide you can download by clicking here.
I know the natural diet for dogs that Ive given you is the best food for breeding dogs to keep them healthy and in peak fertility for you.
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Dog Breeding for Beginners: What You Should Know
There might be a lot of questions swirling around your head if youre planning for your first litter of puppies. Being a first-time breeder can be overwhelming if you dont know what to expect. But we tapped Margaret V. Root Kustritz, DVM, Ph.D., DACT, professor of small animal reproduction at the University of Minnesota, to answer some of the most asked questions that breeders have when breeding that promising next litter.
How Often Do Dogs Go Into Heat?
Bitches should have an obvious heat cycle by 24 months of age. Although bitches vary in the frequency of their heat cycles, an average female goes through heat about every seven months. A bitch is not considered abnormal unless she has not had an obvious heat cycle for one year.
Is It Okay to Breed a Bitch in Back-to-Back Heat Seasons?
That depends on how many puppies she whelped the first season and how well she maintained her body condition during pregnancy, whelping, and lactation. If she had several puppies and was thin by the time they were weaned, she probably cannot regain normal body condition before she is in heat again and thus should not be bred. If she had few puppies at the first breeding and is in excellent body condition, she potentially could be bred again. Every circumstance and every bitch should be evaluated individually.
What Do You Feed a Pregnant Dog?
A growth orperformance food is best to feeda pregnant bitch because they are nutrient-dense and thus require less food to sustain her increasing energy needs. Particularly later in the pregnancy when her uterus takes up much of the space of the abdomen, she may have trouble eating a significant amount of food. At whelping, a bitch should weigh 5-to-10 percent more than before breeding. Try to avoid obesity as it is associated with difficulty whelping, increased birth defects in neonates, and stillbirths. Likewise, a thin body condition can cause conception failure, loss of pregnancy, and low-weight pups.
How Soon Should Puppies Nurse After Birth?
Puppies cannot make their own antibodies at birth, so it is important that they receive their dams first milk, colostrum, which is rich in disease-protecting antibodies. Puppies can absorb these antibodies from their intestinal tract for only about the first 24 hours of life. Dont be concerned if your bitch does not nurse until all the puppies are born. This is a common behavior that generally causes no risk to puppies.
What Causes Small Litters?
The most likely culprit is breeding at the wrong time. The optimal breeding day for litter size is two days post-ovulation, as determined by your veterinarian based on progesterone measurements. Other possible causes of small litters are hypothyroidism, uterine infection, and advanced age of the bitch.
Was the Runt Conceived Later Than His Littermates?
Probably not. Runt puppies most likely are the same age as their littermates but had poor placentation. Bitches release all their eggs over a 24-hour span. Even if the conception of that small pup occurred later than the conception of the other puppies, all pups float around free for 17 days before implantation and formation of the placenta.
