I’m infamous among my friends and colleagues for asking people if they are aware that their dogs are overweight. It’s because I have seen firsthand how fat dogs suffer in their senior years when they are too heavy to exercise without pain! And their burden of carrying extra pounds makes the ordinary aches and pains of arthritis even worse.
AND YET, I have to give myself a stern talking-to from time to time about helping my older dog stay trim.
Like many of us, when 9-year-old Woody was young, I could feed him any amount of food and he would just burn it right off; he was a highly active, athletic dog. But he’s older now, and his metabolism has slowed. He gains weight really easily now if I take my eye off the ball and slim him a few too many training treats, table scraps, and (especially), a little too much kibble in his bowl twice a day.
For years now, I’ve been using the same coffee cup to scoop the food for both he and 3-year-old Boone. Boone is a little smaller than Woody, but for the past few years, he has been receiving the same-sized scoop of kibble—initially because he was a growing puppy, and growing dogs need more calories per pound of body weight to support that growth, and more recently, because he’s naturally much more active than Woody is.
Woody used to run everywhere he went—even just from the sofa to the kitchen! But today, he only occasionally launches into a brief burst of zoomies; he tends to walk with the humans on our hikes, rather than with Boone and any other younger dogs who run ahead and run back and run ahead again for the entire hike.
So Woody is definitely burning fewer calories than Boone is, and for the past six months or so, I’ve really needed to reduce his portion of food a little, to prevent his weight gain. All I really need to do is scoop a tiny bit less for Woody’s serving than I scoop for Boone’s bowl—big deal! Except, I can’t seem to do this consistently! And the problem is that dang coffee cup!
Like most coffee cups, it contains more than an actual cup of food, which was fine when that exact amount of food—heaped maybe just a tad above level—held just the right amount of food to hold Woody’s weight steady. But today, Woody really should be getting a little less than a level scoop in that cup—and there is my problem. How many pieces of kibble is the difference between a heaped cup, a level cup, and just a bit less than a level cup? How much less should he be getting?
The answer is: The amount should not be measured in cups—a coffee cup or any other kind! I need to start weighing both dogs’ food—not relying on a hurried glance to calculate the right amount. And the stupid thing is, I already have a kitchen scale that would make this task simplicity itself!
To make sure I absorbed the lesson I already know (but have been ignoring), I weighed the amount of food in my coffee cup/scooper when it was slightly heaped full of the kibble I am currently feeding, the amount of a level coffee cup full, and the amount I have been trying to feed (a little less than a full coffee cup). I also counted the individual pieces of kibble that made up each difference. My results:
A heaped cup (my coffee cup/scooper) contains 7.02 oz of the kibble I am currently feeding; a level coffee cup contains 6.28 oz, which is 0.74 oz less. (For the record, one level measuring cup contains 4.37 oz of this particular kibble.)
