Honestly Evaluating Your Cairn's Nutritional Needs Written and copyrighted by Diane Jessup
I love science, but I’m not particularly good at math, so this article will have the minimum of scientific formula for things like determining “Resting Energy Requirements” (RER) and so forth for your dog. For those of you who want to dig deeper I will provide links. Here you will find straightforward tips to manage your cairn terrier’s diet in a proficient manner through all stages of his or her’s life. I will not be advising you to “feed Bobby exactly ¼ cup twice a day” – advice like that is useless due to the many factors which influence your dog’s caloric needs.
I’m going to assume most folks reading this keep cairn terriers as pets. Very rare are owners who use their cairns for real work, sport or breeding however the information here will assist you no matter what your dogs do.
Have you noticed how, every few years like clockwork, dog food companies will have advertising blitzes concerning how you are pretty much the worst dog owner on the planet because you feed – exactly the food that they proclaimed was the best five years ago! It’s as predictable as it is deceptive and I will help you avoid the claims and misrepresentations designed to shame you into buying their brand of food. A more complete look at these “fads” can be found HERE. (Note: the current deceptive “fad” is that your dog should only eat “soft” food.)
The factors you must consider when determining your cairn terrier’s diet are:
* Age* Adult Size (compared to other breeds)
* Reproductive Status
* Environmental Factors (heat/cold/stress)
* Activity Level
* Emotional Constitution
Science has some pretty snazzy formulas to tell us exactly how many calories a day they think a dog needs. However, there are so many variables such formulas become useless. For the nerds among us who wish to play around with these formulas, you can find one by googling Pet Nutrition Alliance Calorie Calculator. If you fool with them, you will quickly see how wildly varied the results you get will be.
So instead of using actual caloric numbers (which would be inaccurate) I will be using average percentages above and below the normal diet of a normal pet dog. This will result in your being able to determine whether your cairn needs an extra measure of kibble with one tablespoons of lard or rather a wee bit less kibble and some green beans chopped in. I’m offering you common sense, usable and easy to understand feeding advice – not a PhD in canine nutrition. Humans have been feeding dogs for at least 20,000 years without a caloric calculator.
A couple of points:
• Not all stress is bad. A dog freaking out watching a squirrel out the window is stressed, but it is not a negative. Stressors mentioned in this article should not all be considered “bad”. Stress does influence your dog’s caloric needs.
• Smaller dogs have faster metabolisms than larger dogs but even among small dogs there will be great variation between individual metabolic rates (“emotional constitution”).
• We all owe a debt of gratitude to both the sled dog and racing greyhound sports for the most intensive and important research done in canine nutrition. Both sports want peak performance and that is only achieved with the very best of care and nutrition. These dog sports are not “cruel”.
• Dogs do not need carbohydrates in the way humans do. Dogs use fat as their “gasoline” and while they can utilize carbs for long-term power source (as in endurance events) it is not essential.
Factors That Affect YOUR Cairn’s Nutritional Needs
AGE:
A puppy’s nutritional needs are up to 3 times that of an adult house dog. To build bone, muscle, blood, brains – all require the pup get good food and plenty of it. During weaning (3 to 6 weeks of age) a pup should be allowed to eat all it will at each feeding; it will stop when full as long as food is offered at least four times a day.
At 10 months of age your cairn’s metabolism will show down, and this is the time the dog food companies tell you to change from “puppy food” to “adult food”. However, if you use a high-quality food such as Diamond Pro89, you can feed the same food thru the entire life of the dog. A properly balanced “adult” dog food, with the addition of some milk and raw muscle meat will give a puppy all the nutrition it needs. IF you free feed you will not have to try and determine how much to reduce caloric intake from pup to adult – the dog will do that for you. A free-fed pup/adult eats exactly how much they need. Learn about free feeding HERE.
As your dog ages, and a Cairn is considered “elderly” by nine years of age, as long as you have been feeding a quality food with highly digestible protein, there is no reason to change the feed. Years ago, it was though older dogs could not “handle” higher protein levels, but newer research indicates that maintaining moderate to high levels of digestible protein is beneficial in a number of ways. Adult Size: I mention this only because smaller dogs have higher caloric needs than large breeds. Reproductive Status: Research indicates that spaying or neutering a pet may reduce its Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), the minimum calories the body burns at rest for vital functions like breathing, circulation, and cell production. These processes make up to 60-70% of a dog’s daily energy needs. My own experience is that altering a young adult dog has very little effect on its energy level or ability to perform in work or sports. I find that most people alter their pets around 9 to 12 months, a time when the dog’s growth rate, and hence caloric needs, drops significantly. They don’t adjust the dog’s caloric intake, and when the dog puts on weight, they blame the surgery instead of the lessening caloric need. Another reason to free feed; the dog knows what it needs! Environmental Factors: For dogs living outside, very hot or very cold weather has a drastic influence on caloric needs. The house dog in a climate controlled environment may not be affected by weather at all. While the cairn was bred to have a sturdy, weather resistant coat, sadly an increasing number are being bred with soft, wispy hair that does not provide weather protection and these animals are much less impervious to weather. If your cairn spends considerable time outside in cold or hot weather you may need to factor this in. I’d like to mention that for other breeds, such as short-haired dogs, cold weather can be a significant stressor. Shivering warms the dog up by forcing rapid, involuntary muscle contractions that generate heat as a byproduct, but that requires energy. Also, very hot weather which causes a dog to excessively pant which not only burns extra calories but puts the dog at risk of dehydration. Activity Level: Here is where some folks really kid themselves. Not so much cairn owners but those of sporting and working breeds often overestimate just how active their pets truly are. A daily walk or two, a weekend hiking, an agility class once a week – these do not an “active” dog make. All good activities for your cairn but not enough “activity” to require a special “high performance” dog food. Diamond Pro89 is certainly a high enough protein/fat diet for any activity level your cairn comes in at. How can one diet be compatible with different stages and activity levels? Because given sufficient nutrients (not too many, not too few) and ease of digestibility, healthy dogs will just “throw away” any excess they don’t need. There are dogs who will react to a protein level higher than its needs by feet licking, hotspots and other signs of the food being “too hot” (a term used in horse care). These are dogs being fed far more protein than they require for their activity level. These animals should be kicked back to a feed with 26% protein and 16% fat to see if this fixes the issue. Here at DanBar all dogs are fed Diamond Pro89 from the time it is blended into paste with raw liver, raw eggs, whole milk and a couple Pet Tabs for weaning, straight through to old age. Not because I get a “kickback” or other compensation from Diamond but simply because in a life spent caring for dogs from pets to elite athletes this food has given me the most consistent quality over a long time. Emotional Constitution: Or, in other words, is your dog “high strung” or “phlegmatic”. Obviously the higher strung your dog the higher its caloric intake will be. It takes energy to patrol from window to window, alerting everyone to all those “threats” to which peaceful neighborhoods abound. Dogs are emotional creatures, and even the amount of worrying a dog does, while motionless, affects metabolism. What Your Cairn Needs • Carbohydrates: Contrary to what so many dog food companies want you to think, your cairn does not need avocados, blueberries, “ancient grains” or any other source of carbohydrates. Testing done on sled dogs has proven that even during intense endurance events, the dogs were able to run perfectly well on a diet with zero percent carbs. Just because our domestic dogs have evolved specific carb digesting genes to survive on human provided diets does not mean they will suffer without them. However, some carbs in your dog’s diet certainly won’t hurt it. (By they way, for those who claim corn or wheat or “X” cause allergies in their dogs, Ohio State Veterinary School states “with regard to corn as an allergen, few veterinarians or veterinary nutritionists believe that corn is a highly allergic food.” For more on “allergies” go HERE. Bottom line, the “grain” or “grain free” argument is marketing pure and simple with the pending lawsuits against dog food companies to prove it. • Protein: The building blocks of muscle and nerve development and repair, as well as other important biological functions. Dogs can also utilize it as a slow to generate energy source. Some large-breed dogs have to be fed protein poor diets to stunt their rapid growth as pups. Luckily the cairn terrier is a “natural” dog that does not require any such human manipulation to regulate its proper growth rate. • Fat: Think of fat as doing for your dog what sugar does for you. It provides ready energy for brain function, maintenance, thermoregulation and sustained or endurance-like exercise. I myself thrive on the “carnivore diet” for a couple years now (fatty red meat, eggs, water) as I cannot tolerate sugars, and the importance of fatty red meat as a source of energy for your brain is well documented. Because dogs do not rely heavily on carbohydrates for ready energy, low fat diets are terrible for dogs unless they have rare and very specific diseases such as pancreatitis and hyperlipidemia. So! How Much Do I Feed My Cairn? First, I’m going to make a pitch that you “free feed” your dog. This takes all the guess work out of feeding for the simple reason a dog will eat what it needs when given the chance. The only real caveat is that free feeding works best if this is how the dog was raised by the breeder and maintained by the new owner. Free-feeding allows a dog to understand that eating is not a “hysterical” event and they needn’t gobble it down (reducing risk of bloat in breeds prone to that sort of thing). You can read more about Free Feeding HERE. If for whatever reason you want to tie yourself down to feeding schedules and impatient, demanding dogs (LOL!) here are the guidelines. Puppy – when you bring your pup home now is the time to start free-feed if you can. If not, a pup 8 to 16 weeks of age should be fed 3 times a day. From 16 weeks to 6 months twice a day. I suggest keeping a dog on twice daily feedings for life if you are unable to free-feed. Now is also the time to switch the puppy over to whatever food you are going to feed (no one listens to their breeder, this I know). Do you need to do all this gradual switch over from old to new food? It depends on how knowledgeable your breeder was. Do they listen to the old myths about “never switch up foods” or do they understand that the more varied the pup’s diet, the less stomach issues the pup will have later in life? Breeders who feed their pups a wide variety of food (and I mean wide) along with probiotics will produce pups which have superior digestive robustness. Meaning that if they accidentally grab a piece of something off the kitchen floor you won’t be in for days of diarrhea. An 8-week-old pup should have been exposed to at least three different types of dry dog food, raw red meat, raw liver, raw eggs, whole milk, bones, chicken, pizza bones – you name it. It does nothing but good to get those little tummies used to everything. I swear by this method – and to all those who poo-poo the idea I will put the number of dogs I have had with “sensitive stomach” and “allergies” (zero in 50 years) to those who criticize the method without trying it. A puppy should not be allowed to be grossly fat; this is hard on joints. But neither should it be thin. When you bring a young pup home I suggest you start with one third cup of dry kibble (I suggest Diamond Pro89 blended a bit to break up the chunks for young pups) mixed with a bit of raw liver, hamburger or whole milk, at the three meals a day and adjust for each individual pup by watching its weight gain. See HERE why you absolutely do NOT want to feed your cairn “wet food” of any type as the main meal. If you are free-feeding, offer a bit of raw liver, hamburger, raw or boiled egg or whole milk once a day as a treat. And I heartily suggest you do this in conjunction with training the recall! Pro-Tip: if you are taking your puppy to training classes (and hopefully you are, and hopefully it is a positive based class using food as reward) be sure to skip the meal before the class. A pup can think better, feel better, move better and won’t fall asleep in class if he is a bit hungry. Teenager – as your pup turns 6 to 10 months, he will still have above “normal adult” level nutritional needs, but not as extreme as the puppy stage he just came through. Non free-fed dogs should drop to 2 meals a day. Remember to still “mix it up” to keep that stomach robust; don’t forget to add a bit of milk, cottage cheese, a raw egg, scraps from the table to his diet at least a few times a week. As growth rate slows, pups can start to put on weight, so monitor carefully. Adult – let’s call 12 months “adult”. Your cairn will continue to grow, not so much in height but in “bulk”. Males especially will become broader and will grow a thick “mane”. This all takes the same great nutrition he has been getting, just not as much. Foods vary so greatly there is no one measurement I can give you to say “this is how much to feed”. A low-quality food with a low digestibility will require as much as twice as much volume to feed a dog who is eating a high-quality, digestible food. One added benefit of highly digestible feed is that stool volume will be less as more of the food is utilized. Elder Cairns - When your cairn reaches ten years of age his or her metabolism will slow down (often sometimes before ten). This will cause for a slight reduction in caloric intake but not a reduction in quality of food. Highly digestible food is more important than ever. IF you have fed your dog a correct diet all its life it should not have any dental issues. But with the prevalence of tooth destroying soft foods, there is always the chance that elderly cairns may experience dental issues. Cairns are stoic - it may be difficult to tell that your cairn is having dental pain so be mindful of how they chew and any hesitation to "chow down" of dry dog food, indicating pain. If you rescue a cairn or otherwise have an elderly cairn that had dental issues it may become necessary to soften the dog's food, but this should be avoided if at all possible.
As your dog ages, and a Cairn is considered “elderly” by nine years of age, as long as you have been feeding a quality food with highly digestible protein, there is no reason to change the feed. Years ago, it was though older dogs could not “handle” higher protein levels, but newer research indicates that maintaining moderate to high levels of digestible protein is beneficial in a number of ways. Adult Size: I mention this only because smaller dogs have higher caloric needs than large breeds. Reproductive Status: Research indicates that spaying or neutering a pet may reduce its Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), the minimum calories the body burns at rest for vital functions like breathing, circulation, and cell production. These processes make up to 60-70% of a dog’s daily energy needs. My own experience is that altering a young adult dog has very little effect on its energy level or ability to perform in work or sports. I find that most people alter their pets around 9 to 12 months, a time when the dog’s growth rate, and hence caloric needs, drops significantly. They don’t adjust the dog’s caloric intake, and when the dog puts on weight, they blame the surgery instead of the lessening caloric need. Another reason to free feed; the dog knows what it needs! Environmental Factors: For dogs living outside, very hot or very cold weather has a drastic influence on caloric needs. The house dog in a climate controlled environment may not be affected by weather at all. While the cairn was bred to have a sturdy, weather resistant coat, sadly an increasing number are being bred with soft, wispy hair that does not provide weather protection and these animals are much less impervious to weather. If your cairn spends considerable time outside in cold or hot weather you may need to factor this in. I’d like to mention that for other breeds, such as short-haired dogs, cold weather can be a significant stressor. Shivering warms the dog up by forcing rapid, involuntary muscle contractions that generate heat as a byproduct, but that requires energy. Also, very hot weather which causes a dog to excessively pant which not only burns extra calories but puts the dog at risk of dehydration. Activity Level: Here is where some folks really kid themselves. Not so much cairn owners but those of sporting and working breeds often overestimate just how active their pets truly are. A daily walk or two, a weekend hiking, an agility class once a week – these do not an “active” dog make. All good activities for your cairn but not enough “activity” to require a special “high performance” dog food. Diamond Pro89 is certainly a high enough protein/fat diet for any activity level your cairn comes in at. How can one diet be compatible with different stages and activity levels? Because given sufficient nutrients (not too many, not too few) and ease of digestibility, healthy dogs will just “throw away” any excess they don’t need. There are dogs who will react to a protein level higher than its needs by feet licking, hotspots and other signs of the food being “too hot” (a term used in horse care). These are dogs being fed far more protein than they require for their activity level. These animals should be kicked back to a feed with 26% protein and 16% fat to see if this fixes the issue. Here at DanBar all dogs are fed Diamond Pro89 from the time it is blended into paste with raw liver, raw eggs, whole milk and a couple Pet Tabs for weaning, straight through to old age. Not because I get a “kickback” or other compensation from Diamond but simply because in a life spent caring for dogs from pets to elite athletes this food has given me the most consistent quality over a long time. Emotional Constitution: Or, in other words, is your dog “high strung” or “phlegmatic”. Obviously the higher strung your dog the higher its caloric intake will be. It takes energy to patrol from window to window, alerting everyone to all those “threats” to which peaceful neighborhoods abound. Dogs are emotional creatures, and even the amount of worrying a dog does, while motionless, affects metabolism. What Your Cairn Needs • Carbohydrates: Contrary to what so many dog food companies want you to think, your cairn does not need avocados, blueberries, “ancient grains” or any other source of carbohydrates. Testing done on sled dogs has proven that even during intense endurance events, the dogs were able to run perfectly well on a diet with zero percent carbs. Just because our domestic dogs have evolved specific carb digesting genes to survive on human provided diets does not mean they will suffer without them. However, some carbs in your dog’s diet certainly won’t hurt it. (By they way, for those who claim corn or wheat or “X” cause allergies in their dogs, Ohio State Veterinary School states “with regard to corn as an allergen, few veterinarians or veterinary nutritionists believe that corn is a highly allergic food.” For more on “allergies” go HERE. Bottom line, the “grain” or “grain free” argument is marketing pure and simple with the pending lawsuits against dog food companies to prove it. • Protein: The building blocks of muscle and nerve development and repair, as well as other important biological functions. Dogs can also utilize it as a slow to generate energy source. Some large-breed dogs have to be fed protein poor diets to stunt their rapid growth as pups. Luckily the cairn terrier is a “natural” dog that does not require any such human manipulation to regulate its proper growth rate. • Fat: Think of fat as doing for your dog what sugar does for you. It provides ready energy for brain function, maintenance, thermoregulation and sustained or endurance-like exercise. I myself thrive on the “carnivore diet” for a couple years now (fatty red meat, eggs, water) as I cannot tolerate sugars, and the importance of fatty red meat as a source of energy for your brain is well documented. Because dogs do not rely heavily on carbohydrates for ready energy, low fat diets are terrible for dogs unless they have rare and very specific diseases such as pancreatitis and hyperlipidemia. So! How Much Do I Feed My Cairn? First, I’m going to make a pitch that you “free feed” your dog. This takes all the guess work out of feeding for the simple reason a dog will eat what it needs when given the chance. The only real caveat is that free feeding works best if this is how the dog was raised by the breeder and maintained by the new owner. Free-feeding allows a dog to understand that eating is not a “hysterical” event and they needn’t gobble it down (reducing risk of bloat in breeds prone to that sort of thing). You can read more about Free Feeding HERE. If for whatever reason you want to tie yourself down to feeding schedules and impatient, demanding dogs (LOL!) here are the guidelines. Puppy – when you bring your pup home now is the time to start free-feed if you can. If not, a pup 8 to 16 weeks of age should be fed 3 times a day. From 16 weeks to 6 months twice a day. I suggest keeping a dog on twice daily feedings for life if you are unable to free-feed. Now is also the time to switch the puppy over to whatever food you are going to feed (no one listens to their breeder, this I know). Do you need to do all this gradual switch over from old to new food? It depends on how knowledgeable your breeder was. Do they listen to the old myths about “never switch up foods” or do they understand that the more varied the pup’s diet, the less stomach issues the pup will have later in life? Breeders who feed their pups a wide variety of food (and I mean wide) along with probiotics will produce pups which have superior digestive robustness. Meaning that if they accidentally grab a piece of something off the kitchen floor you won’t be in for days of diarrhea. An 8-week-old pup should have been exposed to at least three different types of dry dog food, raw red meat, raw liver, raw eggs, whole milk, bones, chicken, pizza bones – you name it. It does nothing but good to get those little tummies used to everything. I swear by this method – and to all those who poo-poo the idea I will put the number of dogs I have had with “sensitive stomach” and “allergies” (zero in 50 years) to those who criticize the method without trying it. A puppy should not be allowed to be grossly fat; this is hard on joints. But neither should it be thin. When you bring a young pup home I suggest you start with one third cup of dry kibble (I suggest Diamond Pro89 blended a bit to break up the chunks for young pups) mixed with a bit of raw liver, hamburger or whole milk, at the three meals a day and adjust for each individual pup by watching its weight gain. See HERE why you absolutely do NOT want to feed your cairn “wet food” of any type as the main meal. If you are free-feeding, offer a bit of raw liver, hamburger, raw or boiled egg or whole milk once a day as a treat. And I heartily suggest you do this in conjunction with training the recall! Pro-Tip: if you are taking your puppy to training classes (and hopefully you are, and hopefully it is a positive based class using food as reward) be sure to skip the meal before the class. A pup can think better, feel better, move better and won’t fall asleep in class if he is a bit hungry. Teenager – as your pup turns 6 to 10 months, he will still have above “normal adult” level nutritional needs, but not as extreme as the puppy stage he just came through. Non free-fed dogs should drop to 2 meals a day. Remember to still “mix it up” to keep that stomach robust; don’t forget to add a bit of milk, cottage cheese, a raw egg, scraps from the table to his diet at least a few times a week. As growth rate slows, pups can start to put on weight, so monitor carefully. Adult – let’s call 12 months “adult”. Your cairn will continue to grow, not so much in height but in “bulk”. Males especially will become broader and will grow a thick “mane”. This all takes the same great nutrition he has been getting, just not as much. Foods vary so greatly there is no one measurement I can give you to say “this is how much to feed”. A low-quality food with a low digestibility will require as much as twice as much volume to feed a dog who is eating a high-quality, digestible food. One added benefit of highly digestible feed is that stool volume will be less as more of the food is utilized. Elder Cairns - When your cairn reaches ten years of age his or her metabolism will slow down (often sometimes before ten). This will cause for a slight reduction in caloric intake but not a reduction in quality of food. Highly digestible food is more important than ever. IF you have fed your dog a correct diet all its life it should not have any dental issues. But with the prevalence of tooth destroying soft foods, there is always the chance that elderly cairns may experience dental issues. Cairns are stoic - it may be difficult to tell that your cairn is having dental pain so be mindful of how they chew and any hesitation to "chow down" of dry dog food, indicating pain. If you rescue a cairn or otherwise have an elderly cairn that had dental issues it may become necessary to soften the dog's food, but this should be avoided if at all possible.