# Am I feeding my dog too many treats?



## GatsbysMom (Jul 20, 2009)

Hello, I have a 55 pound rescue mix... he's tall and lean, kind of like a saluki's body type. He's more active than the average city dog (I think): he gets four to five walks 15-30 minute walks during the day, and about 45 minutes to one hour of off-the-leash running with other dogs in the park.

I live in a one-bedroom urban apartment so he doesn't have a lot of room to roam around when he's indoors.

I've been feeding him Nutro but am transitioning to Chicken Soup because you wonderful ladies and gentlemen so highly recommended here. I feed the suggested amount of Nutro: 3 cups.

I also give him, for training and rewards:

3-5 tartar treats (Nutro)
3 peanut butter treats (Trader Joe's)
1 "dental stick" (basically just a beef-flavored chew that supposed to help with tartar, it's about 1 inch circumference and 4 inches long)

Is this too much? Should I be feeding him more kibble for meals and less treats? I'm trying to train him, so that's my excuse for all the treats...


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## Kina_A (Jun 8, 2009)

Treats can be a wonderful tool when training your dog. What I do is I buy soft chews (the Wellness ones) cut them into smaller pieces. 

I limit my dogs treats to 10 per cent of their daily calorie intake. 

Hope this help.

My vet also told me that a denta stix is a meal in itself!


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## MafiaPrincess (Jul 1, 2009)

I remove the cookies I feed from my dogs over all meals for the day. When I fed kibble, if I was going to go train I'd decide fairly equivalent amounts of extra I was giving them and remove kibble to compensate.

These days I feed raw and it takes a little more effort to take away from their daily intake depending upon what I'm feeding but I still do it. I give healthier things for anytime treats. Smudge is a huge fan of fruits and veggies so he can have a slice of cucumber now and then etc.


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## Michiyo-Fir (Jul 25, 2009)

I second the wellness soft treats by the way. They have Wellbites (grained) and PureRewards (grainless).

What I find with my dog is that when I feed too much treats, she eats less kibble. She's not a food lover and definitely won't keep eating and eating like some dogs do. But if your dog has that problem, I guess my reason doesn't work well. 

Mine only eats as much as she needs and I never worry about her getting fat, actually I worry about her losing weight more than gaining. 

One of the reasons I don't like giving a lot of treats is because some cheaper treats are made with really filler ingredients. They're pretty much useless to the dog so I try not to feed too much of it in one day. That's why I stick to meat treats, no cookies, no biscuits (my dog will hardly eat them anyways).


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## paux (Jul 26, 2009)

I hardly ever give my dog treats. I reserve treats strictly for training purposes or for distraction when I leave for school. I find it to be either pointless or counter productive to give a dog treats for any other reason.

Also, I use hotdog slices for treats. Nakoa wouldn't accept any other "dog" treats after she tried hotdog. But it's great for the both of us. Because hotdogs are made for human consumption, all the ingredients are human-grade and on top of that, hotdogs are also very inexpensive.


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