Originally Posted by king2005
When my dogs eat kibble, they eat Acana Performance(the "Red" formula). It's designed for working dogs. Ozzy is a hard keeper. He gets dangerously skinny in a hurry, so much so that he has been tested for thyroid cancer. He eats Acana Extreme. It's an extremely high fat, high protein formula. It's also ridiculously expensive, almost 80 bucks for 35 pound bag. I buy the other stuff by the ton literally, so I have no idea what it costs a bag, but I think it's about 50 bucks. It might be cheaper down south. You might want to check out Red Paw too. It's a common sled dog food.
The majority of their diet is raw wild game meat. I dont' know any musher who feeds strictly kibble or raw; everyone I know mixes the two. Ozzy maintains his weight much better on raw meat than he does on any kibble. I get pure fat from a butcher for him too. Ozzy weighs 40 pounds(about 47 would be ideal). He eats more than my 130 pound malamute. Ozzy also gets fed twice a day, the only one of my dogs who gets breakfast.
Unfortunately, if it is pancreatitis, none of those options will work. The key to managing pancreatitis is limiting fat to just about nothing. My two chronic pancreatitis dogs eat Acana Senior. One, Earle, is also hypothyroid so keeping weight on him is not a problem! He has the opposite problem! Paxil has always been a hard keeper with a poor appetite. It's part of why her first musher rehomed her. He was a distance musher. A distance racing dog needs to eat no matter what, no matter where...Paxil just won't do that! I bribe her to eat occasionally with a couple tablespoons of senior canned food on top of her kibble, which is always soaked in water. Strangely, her appetite has increased this winter and she's holding her weight well. She eats pretty consistently lately. Odd because she's fully retired now and getting much, much less exercise than she did before, when she was my main leader.
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