Dog obesity is animal abuse

[Spanielstail]

I saw a friend yesterday who I haven't seen for some time. Her dog has absolutely ballooned. It looks rectangular when you look down on it it's got so wide. She walks it an insufficient amount for its breed and it's quite apparent she doesn't know what that breed's purpose is. It's a dog bred to run for hours but she gives it 20 minutes round the village.

It makes me so sad seeing so many dogs waddling about as they are fed rubbish, walked too little and their breed type is not understood by the owner. Don't own a Springer if you want to pavement walk around the block - a greyhound is a much better breed.

Aibu to think that more needs to be done to make owners to step up and stop abusing their animals. I think you should need a licence to own a dog at a minimum which gets revoked if you are found to not be caring for it.

Sad thing is rescue centres are already overrun but people can't keep being allowed to harm pets with obesity with no consequence.

I see loads of fat retrievers - incredibly greedy dogs. I don’t think ddog would ever stop eating.

Apparently retrievers are missing the gene which tells them they are full.

I know someone with two spaniels, which were basically quite fat. Straight line abdomen with a slight dip near the hind legs, broad backs, very full chests. They still ran around in the garden and chased balls, but they were podgy little darlings.

Then his wife got covid and was hospitalised for a fortnight, and he was frantic with worry; he sublimated this by going out for long walks with the dogs, two or three times a day.

The dogs got down to a reasonable weight for their breed.

So now he is back at work he employs a dog-walker, and they are staying in shape (literally) and seem so much happier that it would be funny, if it wasn't that they had been being unhappy and lethargic for several years first. And they adore the dog-walker!

I'd say that it's abuse. Every dog that MIL and FIL have had has been obese. They would feed them leftovers after every meal and even give the dogs cake. They are both morbidly obese themselves and I honestly think they were not able to recognise that their dogs were obese.