Chunky

Silas tipped the scale at 34.2 pounds this weekend. 34.2! This is up two pounds from a year ago, and almost a pound in the last month.

This is not typical doggie-eats-pizza-scraps-and-gets-fat stuff. He hasn’t had a bite of people food, with so few exceptions that I could count them on my fingers, since probably February.

I can guess our three biggest problems right off:

1) Pork. Silas loves pork, but it is significantly fattier than turkey. 4oz of country style pork rib, which is not even the fattiest pork he eats, has 12 grams of fat (although Silas gets less than that, because human nutrition data doesn’t count the bone.). 4oz of pork tail, a rare treat, has 38. 4oz of dark meat turkey, even with the skin, only has about 8 grams of fat. Without the skin, how we usually serve it, it has 4. I’m not opposed to fat per se, but it is very calorically dense.

2) Freeze dried food. We’ve been using Primal’s Turkey and Sardine Freeze Dried food as some of our treats. When I do this, I will break off a little piece. When my husband does it, he will hand him a whole cube. A whole cube is equivalent to one ounce of Primal’s frozen raw food. Silas only eats 12 ounces of food a day. Two extra ounces is proportionately a lot.

3) Over feeding. I mentioned here that we had to put Silas on three meals a day. No big deal. My husband feeds him at 6:30am, and I feed him at 2pm and 9pm. Silas needs to eat about four ounces per meal. The problem is that raw food doesn’t always break down that way. Sometimes the smallest unit that you can cut is still over 4 ounces. I need to start watching for that and docking his other meals. He usually gets his meal with bone right before bedtime, and often I don’t realize until then that I can’t give him less than 6 oz of dinner. Also, weighing out three meals gives you lots of chances to say, “Oh, 4.5 ounces is close enough.” It apparently isn’t.

On the other hand, this is a great thing. Silas is eating, and he’s happy about it. He’s not turning down meals because his stomach hurts. I just need to watch him more closely; he’s never been excited about food before.