Dog Owner's Home Veterinary Handbook.pdf - Mr. Walnuts

302 •DOG OWNER’S HOME VETERINARY HANDBOOK
Insulin Overdose
An overdose of insulin causes the blood sugar to drop to levels well below normal.
This is called hypoglycemia. Suspect this if your dog appears confused,
disoriented, drowsy, shivers, staggers about, collapses, falls into a coma, or has
seizures. Insulin overdoses are associated with improper administration, using
the wrong syringe (resulting in too high a dose), or changing the type of
insulin. To treat an insulin overdose, see Hypoglycemia, page 507.
Feeding and Nutrition
Dogs have fewer taste buds than humans do (about 2,000, compared with our
12,000), and thus have relatively insensitive palates. Dogs can discern sweetness,
sourness, bitterness, and saltiness. It is probably accurate to describe a dog’s
sense of taste as being able to discern pleasant, unpleasant, and indifferent.
Nonetheless, dogs do show a preference for certain foods. In side-by-side
comparisons of various dog foods, 80 percent of dogs showed definite likes and
dislikes. Incidentally, the more expensive foods were not necessarily the tastiest.
PROTEIN AND DOG FOOD
Pet food manufacturers have made feeding your dog a relatively simple task.
You need only decide which brand to buy, how much to feed, and whether the
dog likes the food. The cost is often the final consideration, but don’t let that
override nutritional quality.
Federal law requires that all pet food manufacturers provide a list of ingredients
on the package. However, a list by itself gives only a rough idea of the
quality of the food. For example, protein in dog food is derived from meat and
poultry, meat byproducts, poultry byproducts, fish byproducts, soybean meal,
and cereal grain such as corn or wheat. These various protein sources are not
all of the same quality and digestibility. The mere fact that beef or some other
protein is mentioned on the package is no guarantee of quality—it may indicate
levels as low as 3 percent.
However, if the product’s name contains the words “beef,” “chicken,”
“lamb,” “fish,” and so on, 95 percent of the dry weight of the product must be
derived from that protein source—although in a variety of forms, including
byproducts and digest. (If the product’s name is something like “beefy chunks,”
it means the manufacturer has sidestepped the 95 percent requirement.)
A high-quality diet should furnish a proper balance of essential amino
acids. Ten amino acids cannot be manufactured by the dog and are considered
dietary essentials. These ten essential amino acids are arginine, histidine,
isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan,
and valine. The quality of the protein in the food depends on the right