Most feeding advice treats a dog as one animal with one requirement. In practice the same dog needs four different things across its life, and the transitions are where households get it wrong, usually by changing the food and not the amount, or the amount and not the food.
What follows is the shape of it. Specific products and quantities are a conversation with your vet, particularly for a dog with any medical condition.
Puppies
Growth is expensive. A puppy needs a complete diet formulated for growth, not an adult food in a smaller portion, because the calcium, phosphorus and energy balance is different and matters for skeletal development.
For large and giant breeds, use a food formulated specifically for large-breed puppies. Growing too fast is a risk factor for developmental joint disease, and these diets are designed to produce steady growth rather than maximum growth. Keeping a large-breed puppy lean is one of the most useful things an owner can do for its joints at nine years old.
Feed three to four meals a day at first, reducing with age. Follow the packaging guide for the expected adult weight, then adjust by hand: you should feel the ribs easily and see a waist. A roly-poly puppy is not a healthy one.
The transition to adult food is later in big dogs. Small breeds are generally there around a year; large and giant breeds often continue on a growth diet for considerably longer. Ask your vet for your breed.
Adolescents
Between roughly eight and eighteen months, appetite and activity both swing. Two things go wrong here. Owners keep feeding the puppy amount into an adult body, or they cut suddenly at the switch to adult food and the dog loses condition.
Neutering usually happens in this window and reduces energy requirements, sometimes noticeably. Reduce the measured portion in the week after surgery rather than months later once the weight has appeared, which is the commonest route to a permanently overweight adult.
Adults
Two meals a day suits most dogs. Weigh the food, count treats inside the daily total rather than on top of it, and check condition by hand monthly. Expect to feed ten to twenty per cent below the packaging guide for a neutered dog living a normal city life, because that guide is written for an active, entire animal.
Change food gradually over seven to ten days. A sudden switch produces digestive upset and makes it impossible to judge whether the new food suits the dog.
Pregnancy and nursing
A pregnant or nursing bitch has dramatically higher requirements in the later stages, usually met with a growth-formulated diet fed to appetite, under veterinary guidance. This is not an area to improvise, and the amounts involved surprise people.
Older dogs
Senior is not a diagnosis, and a dog does not need a senior diet on a birthday. What changes is individual: some older dogs gain weight as activity falls, others lose muscle and need more protein, and many develop conditions, kidney disease, heart disease, arthritis, that make a specific therapeutic diet the right answer rather than a general one.
The useful habits: weigh the dog every three months rather than once a year, because gradual loss is invisible day to day; check condition by hand; and raise any change in appetite, drinking or weight with your vet rather than adjusting the food yourself. Unexplained weight loss in a dog eating normally is always a veterinary question.
Practical adjustments that help an old dog eat well: a raised bowl for a stiff neck, softening dry food with warm water if the mouth is sore, smaller and more frequent meals, and a dental check, since a painful mouth changes eating long before the dog refuses food.
Treats, across every stage
Ten per cent of daily calories is the ceiling, and they come out of the ration rather than being added to it. Use part of the measured daily food as training rewards; keep high-value food for recall and veterinary visits, where it earns its place.
Avoid the routine toxic items at every age: chocolate, xylitol in anything sugar-free, grapes and raisins, onion and garlic, macadamia nuts and cooked bones. And avoid chews harder than you could dent with a thumbnail, which fracture teeth at any life stage.
Things that are not life-stage questions
Grain-free is a marketing category rather than a nutritional one, and it is not automatically better; a complete diet appropriate to the life stage is what matters. Supplements are rarely needed on top of a complete food unless a vet has recommended them for a specific reason, and some are actively harmful in excess, calcium in growing large-breed puppies being the classic example.
Home-cooked diets can work and are easy to get wrong: if you want to feed one long term, have it formulated by a veterinary nutritionist rather than assembled from the internet.
Two practical rules that cover most of it
First, every transition, puppy to adolescent, neutering, adult to senior, illness, change in activity, is a moment to recalculate the portion, not only to change the bag.
Second, the dog in front of you outranks the chart on the packaging. Ribs easily felt, a waist from above, a tuck from the side, checked once a month by hand. That is the measurement that matters, and it works at every age.
If someone else feeds your dog on weekdays, write the weighed amount, the times and the permitted treats down and hand it over. Double feeding by two people who each assumed the other had not is common, entirely avoidable, and worth several hundred grams a month.
General information for dog owners in Luxembourg, not veterinary or legal advice. For your own dog, ask your vet, a qualified behaviourist or your commune. How this journal is written and checked.
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