Tech: A veterinarian explains how to tell if your pet is being overfed

Danny Tufaro, a veterinarian based in New York City, explains how to avoid the common mistake of overfeeding your pet.

Danny Tufaro, a veterinarian based in New York City, explains how to avoid the common mistake of overfeeding your pet. Following is a transcript of the video.

Overfeeding is a very big problem, especially in urban dogs, urban cats that don’t get that much exercise. Most people feel very, very bad if their animal is hungry when in fact that’s natural, to be hungry. People feel good when they’re hungry and they eat and nourish themselves. Some animals are fed free choice and it just blows everything out of proportion. They’re overweight, they’re more lethargic, they develop a host of other problems only due to the fact that the owner overfeeds.

Your dog or your cat should have a little bit of a waist. We call that a body condition score. A five out of nine is a perfect body condition score where the dog or the cat has sort of an hourglass figure and you can see some of the ribs. Your veterinarian can tell you whether your pet is overweight.

Another very common symptom of overfeeding is the bowel movement is normal in the morning and then during the course of the day it gets very soft. That’s a very, very easy way to determine that you’re overfeeding your pet. And that’s very common, especially with the more caloric, dense diets that are on the market. Different dogs have different activities, different foods have different caloric densities. So you have to try to maintain their weight, maintain they’re stool, and that’s really the way to do it.

Danny Tufaro, a veterinarian based in New York City, explains how to avoid the common mistake of overfeeding your pet. Read Full Story