Are You Feeding Enough to Your Pet? – Part 2
💜💜 Joy Paw 💜💜
Like human, we need to feed our pet to meet their Daily Energy Requirement as well.
Daily Energy Requirement (DER) represents the average daily energy expenditure of any animal, dependent on life stage and activity. It includes activity necessary for work, gestation, lactation, and growth, as well as the energy needed to maintain normal body temperature. The optimal way to determine the correct DER for your pet is to do a Nutrition Assessment.
You can always use this standard formula to calculate the energy requirements of the average adult dog: 70*(body weight in kilograms)0.75 = daily caloric needs. However, individual situations are various based on the life stage, activity, and breed.
Example 1:
Let’s see the DER difference between the age 2 and age 7 of the large breed dogs
|
Life Stage
|
DER (with Same Weight and Less Active)
|
|
Age 2
|
1,659 Kcal/day
|
|
Age 7
|
1,327 Kcal/day
|
Example 2:
The DER difference between the normal cat and obese prone cat
|
Activity
|
DER (with Same Weight)
|
|
Moderate
|
585.6 Kcal/day
|
|
Moderate but obese prone
|
512.4 Kcal/day
|
In the above two cases, even though both pets have the same weight, their DER needs are still different based on the different conditions. This variance is hard to tell from the DER guideline and the food manufacturer’s feeding guideline.
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