Puppy vs. Adult food and Manufacturer's Guidelines

[PatrickJamie]

Alright, so it's not necessarily important or even good to feed a puppy the puppy formula. Fine. So, I'm looking at Chicken Soup's website with their recommendations for how much to feed depending on weight, age, etc. Anyway, the recommendations for the same weight of dog differ for the puppy formula versus the adult formula (see here).

So... do I get the adult formula and follow the recommendations for Bowser's weight on the adult package, or do I go along more with the puppy recommendations? Do the recommendations vary because the food is different (which it is), or because they're assuming you have a puppy with the puppy formula and an adult with the adult formula and their needs are different?

Or do I forget about all this and just feed him the puppy formulation and follow their recommendations there?

 

[gmacleod]

Generally speaking, a baby puppy needs roughly twice as much food per pound of body weight as an adult. So that would mean that a 10lb boxer puppy gets around double the amount of food as a 10lb adult chihuahua (NOT double the amount of an adult boxer). And that's approximately the difference you're seeing there on the Chicken Soup website. That multiplyer gradually decreases as the puppy grows until (at somewhere around 5-6 months) the pup is eating the same amount of food as recommended for an adult of the same weight.

So, if you choose to feed Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul, rather than the puppy, then you can either follow the puppy food guideline, or feed roughly double the amount recommended on the adult formula bag. Incidentally, in the particular case of Chicken Soup, the only difference between the puppy and adult formulas is that the puppy one contains a greater amount of chicken fat. Other than that, they're pretty much identical

 

[PatrickJamie]

Thanks for the info. So maybe it would be appropriate to just go with the puppy formula and those recommendations here, since it's so much the same anyway?