A Seven-Day Guide to Changing Your Dog's Diet

There are times where you will need to change your dog's diet. Your vet is the best adviser on how to do so. Proper method of changing or switching your dog's diet takes time. But it is wise to maintain your dog's diet if it is working well with it as consistency is helpful to maintain dog's health.

Why should we change our dog diet gradually but not instantly?

There are several time and occasions that you will need to switch your dog's diet so you will need to understand the correct way in order to ease your pet through the transition. This is because the gradual change will reduce the stress and change dog's system and digestive tract.

Sudden change of their daily diet will burden our dog's stomachs and eating habits. The minimum of four days period of changing the main ingredients in dog's diet will be advised. But it is preferable to be done in longer period of time. As dog are different from human where they cant tell that they are not comfortable with the food and they need time to adapt to the new food.

During the first day of the change, make sure there are some old foods left. Start off with three quarters of the old food and only quarters of the new food.

Repeat this for the second day.

During the third day, the food will be best to be half old food and half new food. Repeat this proportion for the fourth day.

When it comes to the fifth day, you can now add in a quarter of new food where the proportion should be three quarter of new food and only quarter of old food. And repeat these for the sixth day.

The last day (seventh day) you can feed him with totally new food. So the best period of time to change the dog diet will be a week times.

This is the standard procedures of changing dog food. But there are some breeds of dogs that need longer period to adapt to the new food. Observe your dog appetite when the proportion of food change is being made. As mention above, dogs are given two days to adapt to the changing of food proportion. If you observe unusual situation such as lose of appetite or improper health condition give them longer time to adapt. Extend the period from two days to the few days until they can get used to the food proportion. ( have normal appetite)

The longest time for changing your dog's diet is recommended to be 14 days. If it is more than that you might need to consult your vet.

Abruptly change your dog's diet might lead to the complications of stomach cramps, heartburn, indigestion, diarrhea, vomiting and loss of appetite.

There are a lot of dog owners who do not realize that feeding your dog with a variety of menu wills actually hurting your dog. Where, they will be at the high risk of having chronic indigestion, finicky eating habits or chronic diarrhea. So please do not save a few bucks (buying variety of discount dog food) and hurting your dog.

Love your dog as you love your children as they are part of your family.