It has been identified in the PDSA’s Animal Wellbeing (PAW) report that 35% of vet professionals believe that obesity will be one of the biggest health and welfare implications in ten years time if not tackled. With 83% of vets claiming there will be more overweight pets than healthy weight pets in five years time. We look at some of the key factors currently influencing pet health.
Complete and Balanced
How we feed ourselves is different to how pets are fed. The human diet is made up of many different food items each day, whilst pets are fed a routine food defined as a ‘complete food’.
A complete food has a composition which is sufficient for a daily ration, meeting the pet’s nutritional requirements for everyday health and wellbeing. Each complete food comes with a feeding guide on the amount to feed each day to ensure these requirements are covered daily by the ration.
Complementary foods
Other types of food include complementary food. Complementary food typically has higher levels of certain substances which is only suited as part of the daily ration in combination with a complete feed.
It is important that we continue to educate owners on how to maintain a complete and balanced diet. Many owners provide treats (complementary foods) to their pets however often do not consider reducing the total amount of complete food being provided from the daily ration. As a result this leads to overfeeding and inevitably contributes to the increasing problem of obesity.
In addition to this, diet goes hand in hand with exercise and it is very important that when feeding a complete diet the individual animals breed, age, and activity level is taken into consideration and pets are exercised daily.
Here at Deeping Kitty Kare we have a variety of recipes which are complete and balanced to suit puppies, kittens, adults, small & large breeds as well as senior and overweight pets.