Nutrition is important for puppies to ensure long-term health and proper body weight. Determining calories and nutritional requirements can be tricky, because a tiny Chihuahua eats far less than a huge Irish Wolfhound. But regardless of the breed, your puppy may miss its rapid growth potential without proper nutrition. It is important to consult with your pet nutritionist to know more about the correct growth rate of your puppy and what type of food you should be feeding him.
With that being said, we are going to take a look at some useful nutrition and care tips for puppies.
1. Feed the mother well
Newly born puppies completely depend on their mother for nutrition via her milk. If the mother is poorly fed, it may cause low milk yield or milk with inadequate nutritional content. For puppies, the pre-weaning period is the most critical with about 20% mortality rate. Puppies need antibodies and colostrum from breast milk for immunity and optimum development. The size of the litter determines the nutritional needs of the mother, because she needs to feed more puppies. Larger breeds also need more calories and nutrients for better growth.
2. Worming
It is important to treat puppies for worms early on, as they may get passed down from their mother during feeding. It is a good preventative measure.
3. Highly digestible food for weaned puppies
Puppies are usually weaned around 4 weeks after birth. Because their teeth are still erupting, puppies should get a moist diet that they can chew easily. Easily digestible food can also prevent stomach upsets. Frequent diet changes are inadvisable to avoid unwanted issues, like diarrhoea. Puppies should also get adequate calories to ensure steady growth. During the post-weaning phase, your puppies grow most rapidly. Depending on the breed, your puppies may need plenty of calories and calcium to ensure ideal growth of muscle and bone tissues. If you puppies are highly active, caloric intake requirements will be even higher. An ideal diet for growth should be to start them on bitch milk replacement or goats milk for 1 week before mixing with raw food which is energy-dense and given multiple times each day. Gradually reducing the milk and increasing the raw food quantities over a couple of weeks.
