Doberman Forum : Doberman Breed Dog Forums banner

What to feed puppy?

2K views 12 replies 8 participants last post by  Rosemary 
#1 ·
No pup here, yet, but doing my research ahead of time. I see that many of you use and recommend the ProPlan food for your dobies, but it is designed for adult dogs. I was one of the 'boutique feeders' last time I had dogs, so I've been absorbing all of this new information that has come about in the past few years.

What do you recommend for puppies?

Of course, the food won't be changed from the breeder's feed until it has settled well into the new home.
 
#3 ·
I've gone back to not feeding any kind of puppy formula, neither large breed nor regular puppy food. I now just feed whatever the breeder was feeding for about a month and then transition to my go to adult which is either Purina ProPlan Focus Chicken and Rice or ProPlan Focus Sensative Skin and Stomach.

And if I've gotten an older puppy beyond feeding what the breeder was feeding for a month I usually start transitioning to one of the adult formulas I've mentioned above in a week.

dobebug
 
#5 ·
What is it about the protein that I am missing. I always understood that also, when I bought kibble, but here I am feeding 100% protein in the raw diet with no adverse effects.

Is it the quality or type of protein that makes the difference?

Inquiring mind here
 
  • Like
Reactions: LadyDi
#6 ·
Well, even raw diets aren't 100% protein. A chicken breast, for example, isn't 100% protein - it has some fat content, etc. I think this probably gets too far into the raw vs kibble debate for this thread, so I don't really want the thread to go off-topic. Personally, if I were going to feed raw, I would consult a veterinary nutritionist who is willing to balance the raw diet, but that's me (and I get that people don't, and their dogs seem to do just fine on it, but I personally know a raw fed dog who has nutritional DCM, and the owner has fed balanced raw for many years...she's really skilled at it, and every other dog has done really well, so...I'd be paranoid).

If you're asking about high protein and the correlation to fast growth, and knuckling over, and all of that...I've always wondered. I don't know if it's a true association, or if it happens with something in particular with THOSE puppies....I fed high protein foods to my dogs as pups and they did just fine. It's not what I'll do in the future, for a lot of reasons, but I kind of wonder if some puppies are just more prone to knuckling over than others, you know?

(I'm going to reiterate that I'm NOT anti-raw, I don't want that debate to happen in this thread, and I truly don't care what other people feed. To each their own.)
 
#7 ·
Thanks MC. I got online today to try and find answers myself to share. And, I thought too, I didn't want to hijack the thread. Someone ask years ago about this and I have been waiting for someone else to give the answer since I am lazy at times.

I got on a good Great Dane site and it answered a lot.

Basically in a nutshell protein for meat is very different. As you mentioned, the moisture content and the bone.
Also, protein can be labeled from beaks, claws, even leather so proteins per se are not created equal.
Plant protein in kibble is very different.
Dry dehydrated is in concentration form.
Raw is naturally low in protein.

So that is what I found without elaborating.

NOT promoting raw vs other.
 
#9 ·
I find it interesting, too. It's kind of fascinating - when you start to talk about kibble "quality" - some of the "high end" kibbles are actually WORSE because of the inclusion of plant based proteins. What the people formulating them truly don't understand is that including protein "meals" and including protein that many of us find unpalatable - beaks, heads, feet - those are good for dogs. "By-products" are actually good for dogs, nutritionally. We don't need to get into it here, but if you actually understand nutrition...anyway.

I have no problem with raw feeders who aren't militant raw feeders. You respect my choice, I respect yours :D

Yeah, MeadowCat, I'm not anti-raw either. I've been told by a variety of people and vets that most puppy kibbles have too much protein for large, fast growing breeds and that's why you get some of the problems.

I don't know--and I'm not a nutritionist but there really wasn't a "puppy" formulation in kibble around when I first had Dobes. They did fine on adult kibble (to which I've always added "stuff" (cottage cheese, yogurt, eggs and some sort of meat or fish). The thing I didn't have with those puppies was pano and I don't know what did that--except that vets have said that it is diets too high in protein. (I saw pano in puppies from a particular line of Dobes in at least a couple of occasions and I'm not sure if it isn't just a prediliction in those lines that made them prone to pano.)

And I have no explanation for the raw feeding and high protein--but since I feed kibble and felt that after feeding Large Breed formulas for several years I felt that puppies actually did better on adult formulas.
If there's ever a "next puppy" for me, I'll probably just feed the Proplan Sensitive Skin/Stomach or another Purina adult food. They all meet the guidelines for large breed pups.
 
#8 ·
Yeah, MeadowCat, I'm not anti-raw either. I've been told by a variety of people and vets that most puppy kibbles have too much protein for large, fast growing breeds and that's why you get some of the problems.

I don't know--and I'm not a nutritionist but there really wasn't a "puppy" formulation in kibble around when I first had Dobes. They did fine on adult kibble (to which I've always added "stuff" (cottage cheese, yogurt, eggs and some sort of meat or fish). The thing I didn't have with those puppies was pano and I don't know what did that--except that vets have said that it is diets too high in protein. (I saw pano in puppies from a particular line of Dobes in at least a couple of occasions and I'm not sure if it isn't just a prediliction in those lines that made them prone to pano.)

And I have no explanation for the raw feeding and high protein--but since I feed kibble and felt that after feeding Large Breed formulas for several years I felt that puppies actually did better on adult formulas.
 
#10 ·
If I didn't live where I have this convenience and opportunity I would be going the kibble route, too.
But, I do like to cook for my dogs and confess - only to DT of course, that I have cooked for my chickens, too.
Things like corn muffins and oatmeal.
 
#11 · (Edited)
Byproducts is the one I laugh about--years ago I found a site--it was in one of the Vet journals and it was written by a vet nutritionist and he was offering what amounted to a lexicon of what certain descriptions of stuff included in manufactured dry dog foods. Made a copy and actually took the time to type it into my computer (where the computer ate it when it ate it's own hard drive.

But one point the author made was that people freak out about the label byproducts--yeah sometimes it's beaks and incidental feathers, feet, whole heads but it also is liver, kidneys, heart, lungs--maybe isn't anything you want to eat but I eat some of them--well liver (I even like it although as a kid I thought my mother who fairly regularly served liver for dinner, was cruel.)

Yeah, and I learned more about proteins with my allergy cat--who was dying at two years because he couldn't eat any foods--over time he'd been an ordinary kitten who ate ordinary cat kibble, and slowly one by one he started to be unable to eat one kibble after another--they made him puke, they gave him diarrhea and he didn't keep them long enough for him to get any nutrition out of them.(that's also why when people tell me their four month old puppy is allergic to this and that I point out to them that the puppy has hardly been eating anything long enough for a true allergy to appear. At most it might be a sensitivity (and those often go away as the stomach a gut mature). So my vets and I learned all about real food allergies and why the two fully hydrolysed diets (Purina's is HA and Royal Canin's is HP and while Hills has a fully hydrolysed diet for dogs ZD the kibble for cats is not fully hydrolysed interestingly enough the canned ZD for cats is fully hydrolysed (and of course nothing is easy and the cat was one of several that didn't like wet food--only kibble.) That run on sentence/paragraph is specially for Mel.

Anyway the upshot of that whole sad story for my cat is that those two prescription diets have ALL the meat protein AND all of the plant protein, hydrolysed broken down into short links (protein is normally long links) which the animals body can't identify as an allergen.

Turned out foods that a fully hydrolysed are very useful for identifying real food allergies which are less common than most people realize.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top