My free-fed dogs act starving. How can I manage their constant hunger?

Try spacing out the food over three feeds a day. You can also try to add extra fiber to the food, such as bran, in order to bulk it up and make her stomach fuller. Make sure the food you are feeding (I am not familiar with it) is labeled as a complete puppy food for medium breeds. If not, I would change over to a food by a company that offers scientific formulas such as Iams. Hills, Purina ProPlan, etc. Make sure you transition slowly over about a week's time. Take Calli to your vet for a weigh-in and find out if she is a proper weight. Hunger is not necessarily correlated with not being fed enough. If she is the proper weight but keeps begging for food it is rather a behavioral thing.

Do you think her body weight is appropriate? If she is underweight, she can eat more. If she is normal, you may consider putting her food in treat or puzzle toys so that it takes her longer to eat. She may also be looking for attention. Help her get in more play time or do obedience training to give her mind something to do. If she still seems really hungry, you can try feeding a weight loss food at higher amounts - they usually have more fiber so that it fills the dog up without adding extra calories.

Although its a little hard to tell from the photo both of your pups look to be lean with good muscle mass. To assess body condition what you want to look for are a waist behind the ribs when viewed from above, and that you can feel but not see the spine and ribs. Young active dogs are certainly apt to be a bit leaner. You could certainly consider a diet for active large breed dogs, especially for the Dane mix. To figure out how much to feed you need to know two things. First, you need to find out how many calories are in a cup of your current food. This is sometimes written on the bag or you can go online to the foods website and typically find it. It would be written kcal/cup for dry or kcal/can for canned. Second, you need to figure out what the energy requirements for your dogs are. This will be different for different weights of dogs and for dogs with different lifestyles. A good website to go to to help you with this is the Ohio State University Pet calorie calculator. If you Google OSU dog calorie calculator it should pop up. This will show you how to calculate the energy requirement for your dogs based on their weights, and let you know what factor to multiply by for their lifestyle. Then basically when you know how many calories they should be taking in per day you can figure out how much to feed. Keep in mind if you do this and change the amount you are feeding, if you are seeing weight loss or excessive weight gain you will have to adjust the plan as it's not a perfect system. I hope this helps and thank you for using Petco Pet Education Center, formerly Petcoach!

What a great picture of Alfie! The calorie contents of different foods vary so it's hard to say without knowing what brand of food he's getting. However, in general, a 60lb pit bull will require more food than a 60lb dog of a different breed. They tend to be very heavily muscled which burns a lot of calories, and they also tend to be very energetic. He's also young so will require more food than a senior dog. One cup of dry food 3 times a day might just not be enough for him. I would recommend increasing his canned food to one can twice a day, or you can try adding 1/2 cup dry food at feedings. Watch him to make sure he's not gaining too much weight. Also, if he still seems hungry, you may want to have him checked over by his veterinarian. Intestinal parasites and certain metabolic diseases can cause them to be excessively hungry. And some dogs are just hungry all the time, not matter how much they just ate (kind of like people). The last thing you can try is adding water to his food to bulk it up and make him feel fuller. You can also feed him vegetables such as lettuce, carrots, celery, and cucumbers to give him high fiber/water, low calorie treats.

It sounds like you are doing a lot of things right already! If you can find a version of the salmon food that is "light" or for "weight management" I would switch to that because it has less calories per cup. I usually recommend feeding roughly 1/2 cup of food per 20# of dog for the whole day. You can divide this in to 2 meals if that's what your dogs are used to. If your dogs still seem hungry you can mix in some canned green beans (no salt added) to the food. These have very little calories and lots of fiber so they make them feel more full. It's also important that you cut out any treats that are human food as well. Keep up the exercising too. Good luck.

Pro Plan is actually a good dog food. So unless your dogs have a problem with the food, I would not change. If you do indeed need to change dog food you can change to Royal Canine, Hill´s or Iams or any other reputable feed brand. Make sure you get a complete food for the size of your dogs. There is so much choice that it would be too much to list. I do not recommend Blue Buffalo as I have seen quite a few dogs on that brand who are not doing so well. Yes, definitely stay away from grain free dog food.

Hello, you could try adding fiber to her diet or switching to a food with more fiber to create a filling effect for her. This will also cause voluminous stools but will help make her feel more full. The added fiber will not provide additional calories as this fiber is undigestible. Hope this helps and best of luck.