Hi! Sorry if this question feels disrespectful for your or the person who owns the dog - but looking at photos if Max, cocker-shiba mix that was submitted to you and posted recently, it looks a bit like he is a bit overweight. Can you confirm if this is true? Or, even better, maybe you can share how to identify if a small dog/dog is overweight? If I recall correctly, being overweight is potentially dangerous for a dog and it is hard to help/make a dog loose weight - I definitely remember reading a post about overweight animals that said that in case of hunger/starvation, dogs and cats start loosing muscle mass before fat. Can you confirm this?
Sorry is this is disrespectful/inappropriate! No hate/blame/etc towards the owner, I just saw the photos and was unsure if this is true and wanted to confirm if this is the case and how to correctly identify such things!
Oh oh, maybe you know answer to this question. If a dog is mix/mutt/nit a breed, is there a way to know their normal weight limits? I feel like the most sure way to check is the animal is under/overweight with not purebred dogs is to check for visual signsz but maybe you know something else.
Being overweight (or underweight!) can be bad for dogs, yep! But dogs can get to an unhealthy weight for so many reasons, lots of which are not the owners’ fault (e.g. the dog might be a recent rescue, might have health issues causing it to gain or lose weight, maybe the owner just didn’t know they were feeding the dog too much until the dog gained weight, maybe the dog is just older & getting chubby! it happens) so I’m not going to call out anyone for their dogs’ weight when they send in pics, just as a rule. Getting your dog to a healthy weight is a slow process and you should talk to your vet before putting your dog on a diet.
As far as how to check if a dog is at a healthy weight, your vet is always going to be the best judge of that! But as a basic guideline, if you run your hand along the dog’s side, you should be able to feel their ribs. If their ribs are visibly sticking out with not much fat covering them, they might be underweight (or they might just be a sighthound, whippets look underweight when they’re actually at a healthy weight, they’re just shaped different). If you can’t feel their ribs at all or you can just barely feel them, they might be overweight. Like this:
edit: oops, forgot to answer the bit about mixed breeds! Visual signs will probably be the best way to check if they’re at a healthy weight, but if you know what breeds they’re a mix of, you can probably average out the healthy weights for those breeds to get an estimate. If you have a dog that’s half chihuahua (which usually weigh 3-6 pounds) and half mini dachshund (usually 11 pounds or less) you’d probably expect that dog to weigh around 7-8 pounds, but each dog is going to be a little different!
