Nutritional Needs For Different Dog-types
While the first dogs were definitely kept as companions, it perhaps did not take long to comprehend the working value of this newly-made friend. Even before the history of dogs was recorded, these pets were helping man for a variety of purposes, mostly to hunt for food. In those days, nevertheless, hunting was not a sport, but severe hard work.
Nowadays the dog still helps man in his search for food, but the nature of the job has taken on a different form. The dog still helps man to hunt, but for a different cause. Whatever the reason or nature of the job, the performance of work always requires time expenditure of energy. As a result, each working dog’s primary dietary want is increased energy. Every time dietary energy is increased, those B-complex vitamins, minerals, and the water needed for burning the energy must as well be increased.
Except for this increased need for energy and the nutrients to burn it, working dogs need most nutrients at no greater levels than non-working dogs. When working dogs consume huge quantities of ordinary maintenance dog foods to get all of the energy they require, they regularly consume some of the nutrients in excessive amounts. Paradoxically, they may also consume such large quantities that the digestibility of all the nutrients in their diet are negatively affected and some nutrients may in fact be obtained in inadequate amounts.
In other cases, a working dog merely cannot, physically, eat all of a food required to supply its energy requirements. In these instances the dog suffers from the deficiency of total digestible energy, and loses weight. If the situation is allowed to continue, the dog will decrease its activities in order to reduce its caloric demands. If the dog is forced to continue working at the similar pace, it will lose weight faster and laster, and ultimately work itself to death.
Herd Dogs are the most frequent working dogs that are fed in the United States. Herd Dogs are dogs that wattle or protect animals use the slightest amount of extra energy of any of the working dogs. They rarely are required to use energy in excess of standard activity for any period of time. Even their short-term expenditures of energy are not very great. The only time herd dogs ever exploit large amounts of energy are when they are rounding up strays, lost or semi-wild animals running at large.
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