[Doc E]

I read a post (?somewhere?) on the net where the poster surmised that because wild canines only hunt when they are hungry, that witholding food the morning before a HT or FT might make the dog perform better.

What do you do?

 

[Andy Carlson]

I feel like I always do. Breakfast is their smallest meal and I feed so early that they have plenty of time for digestion before they run. Maybe dogs and people aren't the same, but I have a problem with low blood sugar so I have to eat lots of small meals. I feel that feeding will keep their blood sugar where it should be and the more normal the routine the better.

Andy

 

[Russ]

I feed a little less on the morning of a test, trial or day of hunting. Some of my dogs will not eat at all due to the excitement.

Russ

 

[Doc E]

Related subject

Because dogs digest food much slower than humans (dogs take some 12 to 16 hours to fully digest a meal), I would think (just thinking here - no evidence) that unless a food contained a significant amount of sugars, that a dog wouldn't get much "energy" from a food for a number of hours after eating? I don't know though.

In other words, a dog's energy levels on Saturday, actually come from the food he ate on Friday night, and not from the food he ate on Saturday morning.

 

[Jesse Higgins]

Doc, there was an article in RJ last year that indicated that you are correct (I think it was Mike Lardy's column). The study that was the basis of the article was performed by an animal nutritionist who was also a first class musher. The research was done on sled dogs and the findings suggested that a diet high in protien & fat (30/20 or there abouts) enabled the dogs to better store and retrieve energy from muscle tissue if the dogs system wasn't attempting to draw energy from the digestive system simultaneously. The research concluded that feeding only the night before would better enable the dog to draw on the reserves the day of high activity and that the dog would acutally have more energy than if it were fed a few hours prior.

The research also suggested that this regimen made the dog less succeptible to injury.