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Okay, this is going to be long, I'm sorry! But I'm at my wits end and you guys always give the best input. So I just adopted a dog a few weeks ago, and I have had problems with her diet since day 1. The rescue we got her from was feeding her Purina One Chicken and Rice, and after her first vet check-up we started to transition her to something better, and formulated for skin and coat health. The best we could find at the time was Nutro Ultra. She's pretty picky and won't eat more than a few kibbles at a time, and my guess was that it's because she had been free-feeding for her whole life. I tried to get her on a schedule, but she would just repeat the "sniff the bowl, eat 1 or 2 kibble if prompted, go lie down" routine. She's pretty scrawny so I got worried and just let her eat, because she just needed to eat.  Our next guess was that she might be reluctant to eat dry dog food because it's hard. She has a pretty hosed up jaw, like a combination underbite/overbite, a misaligned jaw, a snaggletooth, and one chipped tooth. Here's a picture to give you an idea of how bad it is:  I watched her eating a dry kibble and she has to shift her jaw over and crunch pretty effortfully to eat just one kibble. We got a different brand that's supposed to be easy to chew, Pedigree Small Breed Easy to Crunch. She basically ignored it. So my dad suggests softening the food up, so I put a little water on her Nutro Ultra (I wasn't too keen on the Pedigree anyway) and microwaved it for a few seconds, then stirred it up with a spoon. She liked that and ate it for a while, but eventually went back to not eating much at all. She'll also occasionally eat it if it has sat for a while and reabsorbed the water, so that the kibble are puffy and soft. Going off of this, we went and got her a tin of Nutro wet food, and she scarfed it down faster than I've ever seen her eat. Great! But, feeding her wet food everyday isn't good idea, right? I honestly have no idea because our last two dogs just gobbled down whatever my dad gave them. We've never had a picky eater. I was trying to feed her 30 mins to and hour before our walks, but she wouldn't eat then. I thought maybe the walk would stimulate her appetite, but that didn't work either. Oh, and I don't think she's having stomach problems, because her BMs are normal and consistent, and she has an appetite. She begs for table scraps like a normal dog (I don't feed her table scraps, though). She gets a little piece of chicken or bacon every night when I put her in her crate and she gobbles those down, so it's not that she isn't hungry, but that she won't (or can't due to teeth?) eat dog food. Double Plus Good fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Aug 13, 2013 |
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Aug 13, 2013 05:03
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 08:26 |
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Dr. Chaco posted:As long as her stomach and your wallet can handle it, there's nothing inherently bad about an all-canned diet, if that's what it takes for her to eat. As far as her teeth, they don't chew with the ones you photographed, but if her jaw is mis-aligned the chewing teeth in the back could be messed up as well. Did the vet evaluate her teeth, both for alignment and any other issue that might make it difficult to chew (such as a painful fractured tooth way in the back)? Honestly, I've seen dogs with pretty messed up jaw/tooth alignment eat just fine (think of all the smash-faced breeds with their requisite under-bites, and the long-nosed dogs and their stretched-out jaws), and I've seen nasty dental problems lurking in the back of mouths that look just fine in the front. I'll get the vet to do a more thorough check on our next visit! The last time we went was her first and it was just a general checking over, plus the vet was preoccupied with her ears (which had a pretty bad infection). The benefit I've read for dry food is that the crunching is good for their teeth, which is what I was worried about her missing out on. Is there a way to stretch a can of wet food, by maybe mixing it with some kibble or something?
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Aug 13, 2013 06:20
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