New puppy food change

[viktoria]

Our whippet puppy is nearly 9 weeks old and we picked him up from the breeder 5 days ago. He was fed on raw food but partly as my partner is vegetarian, and rather not handles raw meat, we decided to change the food to Lilys kitchen.
The puppy hasn't really taken to it. I know whippets aren't really as food driven as for instance Labradors are. But he seems ravenous in the morning but then eats less than 100g. Can somebody give me advice if that is sufficient?
He used to be fed twice a day on raw food and we initially tried that with Lilly's but he would only eat about 20g, so now we leave his food out all day. I was thinking of changing that to just 1 hour per feed, morning and evening.
He does a fair bit of nipping as well and I'm unsure if it's just because he's a puppy or because he is hungry.
We do also give a small amount of ham as treats (we keep that to less than 15% of his food for the day) when training and he is very keen on that.
So, are we doing everything wrong, or just parts of it...?

[Noitsnotteatimeyet]

Any food change should be done very gradually and it's usually better to keep puppies on the food they've been used to at the breeders at least initially otherwise the poor things are coping with several huge changes all at once

Puppies of that age have tiny stomachs and ideally should be having four small meals a day. Our puppy barely ate anything for the first few days but we'd put his food down, and if he'd not eaten it after 20 minutes took it up and tried again later.

Ham is very salty so not ideal, try little bits of sausage or cooked chicken instead for treats

The nipping is because she's a puppy... but being hungry won't help her general mood

You sound like very novice dog owners (I don't mean that in a nasty way) - a really good source of information and advanced is the Facebook group Dog Training Advice and Support m.facebook.com/groups/374160792599484?ref=bookmarks

They have very helpful admins who are qualified behaviourists and trainers and have loads of informative files

[bodiddly]

Hi, my pup is raw fed as the breeder had weaned him on to raw. I looked into changing him over and bought the vet recommended dry food. He just didn't get on with it in the same way. Don't get me wrong he still ate it as he eats anything but the raw literally disappeared from his bowl in about 5 seconds. Do you really need to swap your pup over? You can buy frozen blocks or complete meals with the right proportion of bone and offal? I understand as a vegetarian you might find it a bit grim but dogs are!

[viktoria]

Thanks for the replies. Very useful. Yes, we are novice dog owners - even though we both had dogs when we were kids, but on both sides our parents really did the work/training etc.
Will replace the ham with chicken. I will have a look at the Facebook page.
And we might have to look into going back to raw food. We just want the puppy to be healthy and happy.
Thanks so much for your advice.

[BiteyShark]

We had something similar when we got our puppy. The breeder had him on a mix of dry and wet and had used some water to soften the dry food. I tried to change him over to a different dry food I had chosen but he didn't take to it so went back to the original dry food. He didn't even want that and I tried everything to get him to eat more. Eventually worked out through trial and error that he didn't like the dry food being softened plus also finds that he eats more with a little veg mixed with it so I think u need to experiment to see what they actually prefer.

My puppy also eats far less than the food packet states he should have for his age but as he keeps putting weight on I am not worrying about the amount.

[Yourownpersonaljesus]

I am vegetarian and feed my dog raw. I buy the Nutriment complete food which also contains bones and veg. It's really not that bad if you use the complete stuff - I couldn't DIY. My dog started on kibble but we changed her over to raw at about a year old. She wasn't that fussed about the kibble but loves her raw food. She's also very healthy on it.

[SheldonsSpot]

Puppies have tiny tummies and you should be feeding four small meals a day, leave it down for 10 minutes max - otherwise if your puppy has food down all day he'll be grazing so will never really get very hungry.