For an athlete dog, nutrition is as importance as the training activities to be carried out. In fact, only when the physical preparation reaches an appropriate level and is supported by an equally adequate diet, your canine athletes will be able to obtain their goals. We discuss some of the requirements of fooding your athletes.

There is no binary figure or calculation that can tell you for certain the age at which your puppy or kitten is considered to be an adult dog or cat, or when they will themselves feel like an adult dog or cat, or be viewed as such by other dogs and cats. The development from puppy and/or kitten to adult is not necessarily linear, and it will pass through a range of stages that each individual dog and cat will reach at different points of their lives. We discuss their growth phase in general terms.

The senior (geriatric or post-maturity) stage follows on from the maturity phase and continues until death. In small breeds of dogs this phase begins around 7 to 8 years of age, at 5 years in large and giant breeds and 7 years in cats, if we consider modern day veterinary guidance. We discuss this life stage in greater detail.

Toy breeds, which often have tiny appetites and small stomach capacity, may also benefit from being fed a calorie-dense food but a careful watch should be kept on their weight and body condition score. We discuss these breed in short.

From a nutritional perspective, high-performance dogs include canine athletes, pregnant bitches and lactating dams. You might wonder why pregnant and lactating dogs rank along with athletes as high performance? As we’ll elaborate on in this article, pregnancy and lactation place extreme nutritional demands on a bitch’s body – more than at any other time in her life.