Dr. Greenway discusses how many treats to give a dog or cat and how to use them for training purposes. Topics covered in this video include, behavior training, low calorie treats, obesity, treat monitoring, giving attention, and incorporating treats in your pet’s diet plan.

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TRANSCRIPT:

I get a lot of questions about how many treats a dog should get, when to use them. I think we use them a lot for behavior training. If you’re ever doing that, you definitely want to get some sort of treat that you can give very, very small pieces of. You don’t want something very calorie-dense because if you’re going to be using a lot of them for training purposes, then you’re going to be contributing a lot of calories to that dog’s intake for the day.

What I find is everyone loves to feed a pet, so when you have friends over or family over, they all love to feed the dog or cat treats and we’ve really got to watch out for this. It’s another reason why if we give a treat, it should be a treat that’s very low-calorie. It doesn’t have to be that rich. They like taking treats from our hands so it doesn’t have to be something rich or enticing, they just like the attention that they’re getting when they get that.

I don’t like people to use too many treats throughout the day between meals. If you want to use treats often, you’re definitely going to want to understand how many calories are in that treat and you want to build it into your diet plan and make sure you’re not going over your dog’s daily calorie intake. You can use our weight management tool to determine how many calories a day your pet should get so that you’re not going over that and contributing to obesity and the diseases that come along with it. You can find more information here at healthcareforpets.com.