First of all, if you’re at all interested in this topic, you really ought to check out Dogs, Dog Food, and Dogma, my book about the science (and business) of canine health and obesity.

If you don’t think it’s the most honest, rigorous, in-depth, and all-around helpful book you’ve ever read on the topic, I’ll refund 100% of your purchase price, no questions asked.

 

Some guided introspection for you this morning:

When you go to fill up your dog’s food bowl, how do you know when to stop? Think about it and be honest with yourself.

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Are you just filling the bowl to its brim, relying on the assumption that your dog’s daily caloric needs and the volume of a bowl you randomly purchased magically match-up?

 

Maybe you’ve got a magical scooper or measuring cup that relies on the same principle.

Maybe you you’re just plopping an oversized bowl of chow down in the morning and letting your dog’s hunger and appetite tell him when to stop, assuming that those internal drives won’t push him to consume more than he needs.

Maybe, like I did for ages, you’re relying on information set forth by the food manufacturer on its packaging.  You know those recommendations were written by a for-profit corporation with a direct interest in selling you as much food as possible, but at some point you just started going along with it anyways and now it’s a habit.  You never really stopped to think about how absurd it would be if it you looked to McDonald’s to tell you how many calories you should eat in a day or to Phillip Morris to tell you how many cigarettes you should smoke every hour.

Or maybe you’ve gone through a process of critically evaluating the amount of food you’re feeding your loving companion.  You’ve spoken with your vet, located some helpful online resources backed by good science, and done some number-crunching by analyzing your dog’s size and activity levels, all in an effort to determine the optimal amont of food your dog needs on a daily basis.

The point here is that no one deliberately feeds their dog too much food.

We all — myself included — have a tendency to think that we’re right and so we develop some internally-coherent logic to support our habitual actions.  While they sound ok in our heads, the truth is that all too often those stories aren’t logical — they’re skewed by all kinds of things we never take notice of.

It’s scary and it’s painful, but when it comes to something as important as the amount of food we’re feeding our dogs, it pays to force yourself and others to look critically at the validity of your internal decision-making logic.

Oftentimes we’ll find that the story we’ve been telling ourselves to guide our behavior has some serious holes in it.

Does yours?  Are you brave enough to find out by exposing it to the readers of this blog?

Have a nice Saturday,

Coach Dan

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[Like this post? Want to learn more about how to keep your dog healthy and happy? Check out Dogs, Dog Food, and Dogma, my book from Present Tense Press. Kirkus Reviews calls it “remarkable,” “eye-opening,” “scandalous,” and “impressive.”]