Talk to me about food for a lab puppy

[SallyBear]

We are getting a Labrador puppy next week and even though the breeder will give me the food she gives them and quantities, I wondered about what other foods are recommended. BARF? What is that exactly?

My old Labrador had a diet of cooked meat, fish, vegetables and rice. She didn't really get much wheat - only in dig food if we had run low on home cooked stuff. I wanted to see what others are doing with regards to feeding their puppies, and how many meals a day?!

What colour is your boy Amy? Toby is a fox red colour. We get him in two Fridays time. He will be nearly 9 weeks then. DD is in hospital for five days from tomorrow, so we have had to delay getting him by a week.

Eden is well rated and has great ingredients, but to be fair Burns isn't bad anyway, it's a bit rice heavy for my liking, but it's a decent food and I know they have really good customer service.

It's such a mine field. My very old dog, long since departed, was fed on Bakers. It didn't agree with Sally, hence her leftovers diet. She did alright, Sunday roasts, mince and potatoes, chops, fish.

Mine are both black, was best thing for our dark carpet! I love the fox red ones, they are soo handsome. Sorry to hear that about your DD. How old is she? She must be really excited at Toby coming home soon!

DD is 13, sadly used to surgery but is very excited about Toby's arrival.

Hopefully he can cheer her up while she is recovering. My puppy whined nearly all night Sunday and then wasn't so bad Monday night but last night he started at 4am until I got up at 6.30 to feed him. It's nearly as tiring as a baby! He is very good in the daytimes at going out for toilets though, suppose its easier in the summer when back door is always open. With luck we can have them housetrained before it gets too cold!

Whatever you do in the long run, sticking with Burns puppy for the first month or two would help your pup settle in with no problems.

Even a change of water can upset a pup in the early days; the physical strain of leaving siblings, mum and home shouldn't be underestimated and as Burns is a pretty good food there is little need to change in haste.

What an interesting thread! I thought you just bought tins of dog food from the supermarket .

I was planning on a slow change over, as realistically he's only just been weaned. I do remember being given a bag of baby formula and told to add that with some warm water to dog food that Sally's breeder gave us. This was in 1999 though.. Sure that the advice is different now.

To be honest with you Burns is good enough that unless you want to change for a specific reason - I'd leave him on it.

Tab you are right of course. I will keep him on the Burns and see how he is coping on it. If he's not, then I will be looking at a different food and I like the look of the Eden. So I will wait and see. Thank you so much for your advice, its been really helpful and informative.

We are in the process of switching our 4 month old lab pup from Skinners to Eden.

He's been on it 100% for nearly 2 weeks now and his coat is lovely and glossy and he loves it. Have a problem with runny poo, which is just starting to improve now (although his poo was never entirely firm with Skinners anyway).

After a couple of weeks with the problem, I spoke to the guys at Eden and they recommended sticking with it (although they would) as he is switching from a grain food to a meat based food so its quite a shock to his system and will take more time to adjust.

Also think we were giving him a little too much to begin with, now giving him less than the recommended amount and keeping a close eye on his weight. He looked a bit disappointed with the portions to begin with but has got used to it, because the food is meat it doesn't swell in his tummy as much as the grain food did so he didn't feel as full iykwim.

They do a small kibble and medium kibble (same food), the small kibble at first is ideal for a puppy. I've just bought a sample of the medium kibble and think we will change to that for our next bag.

Hey SallyBear,

First off, congrats on your new pup!! Labs are SUPER adorable!!

BARF stands for Biological Appropriate Raw Food or Bones And Raw Food - it's basically 70% bones + meat (50% meat to bone), and 30% vegetables, dairy and that.

Either this or your breeder might have been referring to BARF world? You can check out their site here: barfmissioncontrol.com/.

Personally, between commercial raw food vs. home made food - I prefer the latter. I think when we switched Lucky (our Golden, he's now 8, but we switched to home made food quite a while back) to home made food, he became much healthier - especially when it came to his sensitive stomach - he used to have a real sensitive stomach when he was a pup and we paid regular visits to our local vet.

Interestingly enough, after switching over, his teeth became whiter (not noticeable at first, but it was literally gleaming white after about half a year, compared to the yellow-ish tint when he was on dry food?), and his coat became shinier.

Not entirely sure whether it can be attributed to the switch, but there's probably somewhat of a correlation there.

One resource we looked at, I highly recommend on my website here: dogfoodnomore.com/, where the author recommended loads of awesome recipes that are fast, easy to prepare, healthy and economic. We tried out a few and they were pretty good. You might find it interesting as well.

For us, our experience with home made food, or our preference is to cut back on the meat and focus on the greens, but we do give him rice as well. I think the important thing is to test it out and see what nutritional requirements your lab has in terms of carbs, protein, vitamins, minerals and fat (yeah...a small amount of that is necessary), since it's going to vary between every dog.

But if you're really intent on dry food, I recommend you check out the AAFCO guidelines - these really shed a lot of light on which types of dog foods are the best. You can also visit petforums.co.uk - there's a thread under dog foods and one member aggregated a list of the best brands out in the market today.

Cheers and good luck!!