Scratchings-and-Sniffings

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How Much To Feed Miles? Posted: 07 Jul 2010 06:04 AM PDT My wife and I are having an ongoing disagreement over how much food we need to feed Miles to keep him in tip top shape. We are planning a seven day backpacking trip and I've been trying to figure out how much food Miles will be carrying in his pack. We disagree about how much food we need for ourselves, too. I tend to see backpacking trips as more about being out there than gastronomic adventures. Chris's biggest fear is that we run out of food. Mine is that we have some left in the pack when we get back to the trail head. I've been feeding Miles about four cups of Purina ONE a day. Two cups in the morning and two in the evening. That comes to about 1530 kcals a day. I figure that Miles is about seventy five pounds or 34 Kilos and that he qualifies as an active dog.   He gets at least an hour a day of strenuous exercise.   I did this for a week while Chris was in Hades, er, I mean Phoenix. Miles would snarf down his meals and he seemed to be fine. His body condition remained excellent and his energy level was great. Changes in body condition can take weeks to develop as opposed to days, by the way, so this observation is not relevant over such a short period.   When Chris got home she started feeding Miles her way. She likes to keep some in his bowl at all times. That's how Labs get fat, I explained. He will eat more than he needs if he has access to it.   I think you can see from this discussion that we are pretty typical dog owners. What is interesting to me is that this demonstrates precisely why dogs and cats often end up getting more food than they need.   On our bag of Purina ONE the recommendation for a dog between 75 and 100 pounds is 4 to 5 cups a day. I choose four as I mentioned. Here's the funny thing -- a prowl around the internet gives a wide range of recommendations and different interpretations of activity level. The key piece in figuring out how much to feed is the estimation of activity level.   It's easy enough to figure out how much energy a dog needs to maintain his weight if he's sleeping in a cage all day. This is called his Resting Energy Requirement or RER. The formula is 30Kcal X Kg of Body weight + 70. So for Miles that adds up to 30 X 34 Kg + 70 = 1,090 Kcal/ day. Easy enough, but here's the rub -- a neutered male at normal activity level requires 1.6 X RER or 1744 Kcals/ day Miles' case.  Miles is definitely more active than a "normal" dog; whatever that is. He often hikes three to four miles a day with Chris.    Activity level can lead to widely varying suggestions for how much to feed a dog. In our case, if we look at the RER tables and we assumed Miles did "moderate" work, the recommendation would be to feed him RER X 3 or a whopping 3270 Kcals /day. That's crazy and more than twice the amount he currently receives. A glance at another source for an active dog weighing 70 pounds suggests 1740 Kcals/day. Confused yet? I can certainly see how any dog owner might be confused.    For Miles it appears that my estimate is too low. Typical for a body dysmorphic food nazi like me.  He should probably be getting somewhere around five cups of food a day. In this case, he'd be getting 1915 Kcals/day. His Purina ONE lists 383 Kcals/cup on the bag. The variable is still activity level though.   On our backpacking trip we'll be doing five to ten miles per day and he'll be carrying a pack. He may do as much as 1.5 times the mileage with all the back and forth he does while we pathetic bipeds plod along.   Given all that, here's my plan. I'll pack six cups of food a day in his pack. On the first and last day of the trip he'll get three cups at home so we'll pack a total of six cups for those two days and he'll carry 30 cups of food for the entire trip. I'll unload six cups worth of stuff out of my pack and put it in Miles' pack, by the way. He won't complain. Aren't dogs great?   By the way, I did a little experiment. I secretly measured the amount of food Chris was giving Miles. I counted the cups she dumped in his bowl for three straight days. Guess what. She averaged five cups a day or just what he needs according to my estimates. Seems like women's intuition may be at play here. We should all be thankful for that.    Next post I'll give you my ideas on how you should run through the same process for your dog.

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