It dawned on me that using cat pellets as treats is a great way to give teeny-tiny treats and thus not affect weight gain. I wanted to use pellets as treats because they're easy to carry around and I can keep a stash in my car. (Snowie doesn't normally eat pellets; he eats raw meaty bones.) I wanted to buy the Orijen fish pellets because Snowie LOVES fish. But the shop didn't have the dog pellets and since I was only using them as a treats I thought the cat pellets would be fine. Oh boy I had no idea how TINY the pellets are!! Very annoying for administering by hand (they tend to scatter all over the place -- and yes they stink!) but brilliant for scent work! I use them for that fun balls-in-the-cookie-baking-tin game I learned here on the forum some weeks ago and I also use them for sniff-n-search games (Snowie must wait till I put a few pellets around the room and then he sniffs them out). They are so tiny that I hardly think they're adding any calories to his diet. Thought I'd share it here cos we all worry about our poor Labs and their waistlines!
We use puppy kibble or small dog kibble for training for the same reason - more bang for your buck per kilojoule
Coco had put on 1kg at his weigh-in last week, and I was feeling he wasn't looking as sleek as usual. We took sliced, raw carrot out for training treats on our walk yesterday - he loves them. I thought I'd heard sometime in my distant past that cat food isn't good for dogs, I don't know.
Cat food is very high protein, so that is probably the reason you heard. Wish my dogs like carrots, he will eat pineapple, pears, courgetts, broccoli stalks, but turs his nose up at carrots!
Snowie adores raw carrots -- for munching while lying on his bed! I've just looked online at the cat and dog foods for this particular food (Orijen fish) and they're almost identical. I'm not worried if cat food is not recommended for dogs -- for the few pellets I give Snowie, it hardly matters. He gets such a diversity of treats -- my sister-in-law changed her dog's food and I took a sandwich bag of the pellets she was throwing out (Hills Science) and use those for our walks (reinforcing recall) cos the pellets are much bigger and easier to give, and they don't leave my hand smelling fishy! Ideally I wouldn't be giving Snowie pellets -- I don't like the idea of such processed food -- but convenience does win sometimes!
