Hetty and the road to 10kg

At the start of the year, a dramatic haircut made us realise that Hetty the cockapoo was rather underweight.

So we set out to help her gain weight.

She’s not a particularly big cockapoo. She was just over 8kg and the vet told us that between 9 and 10kg would be the perfect weight for her.

Unfortunately, getting her to gain weight was easier said than done.

Because Hetty is a very fussy eater.

When she was a tiny puppy, we used to feed her half dry food and half wet food. Between four and five months, she had a couple of nasty tummy upsets and we got nervous about the wet food. So we switched her onto completely dry food.

When she was little, she ate it all. By the time she was about eight months, she was getting fussy. So we tried different varieties of food. And we tried mixing them. So for breakfast she would have two varieties and at teatime she would have another two varieties. But it was a struggle getting her to eat them.

So getting her to put on weight wasn’t easy!

To be honest, we mainly increased her treats. But five weeks after the dramatic haircut, she made it to 9kg. And a couple of weeks after that, at the age of 14 months, she had her first season. Dogs can go into season as young as six months. Larger dogs tend to be later, but you would expect a dog of Hetty’s size to have her first season by about nine months. Clearly being underweight had held her back.

When she went into season, she ate even less.

Most days, her breakfast would sit out all day. There was no point giving her a second meal when she hadn’t touched her first one. Sometimes she would eat her breakfast in the afternoon, sometimes she wouldn’t bother.

Remarkably, she only lost 200g when she was in season. But she didn’t eat any better when her season was over.

At this point, we decided it was time to reintroduce wet food. We put a little bit in with her dry food and Hetty was delighted. She still had some days when she hardly touched her food, but most days she ate her meat – being very careful to pick out the dry food she didn’t want. On good days, she would eat the dry food with the meat or go back to it later. But most days she would just eat the wet food and leave all the dry food.

The first wet food I bought was the same brand as the puppy food she’d had. There was six tins in the pack and three different varieties. When she got to the end of the pack, I bought a pack of 18 tins.

And she refused to eat it.

So we started buying different (more expensive!) brands of food. She would be very enthusiastic about a new food one day, but would be off it the next day. Remarkably, she managed to maintain her weight between 9.1 and 9.3kg.

So we decided to stop weighing her weekly. Two weeks later, she’d managed to lose 400g.

Then she had a phantom pregnancy.

This meant she ate even less than usual, but at least she was refusing to walk, so she was burning up less energy. Phantom pregnancies can last for three weeks, but thankfully Hetty’s was only a week.

Once she was over that, we decided we had to give up the dry food altogether.

I bought yet another brand of wet food (Pooch & Mutt) and gave her half a carton for her breakfast. And she wolfed it down! At teatime, I gave her the other half of the carton (one carton a day is the recommended quantity for a 10kg dog) and she wolfed that down too.

When introducing new foods to dogs, you’re supposed to do it very gradually – a quarter of a portion for a couple of days, then half a portion for another couple of days etc. I’d always done this. But we’d reached a point where she just had to eat. So we just kept giving her new varieties of food every day.

The next day, she ate a different variety of Pooch & Mutt. The day after that, she ate a full tin of Lily’s Kitchen.

After a few days, came the true test – the original wet food from the 18 pack. And she even ate that!

We’ve now managed about four weeks of Hetty eating all her food. I make sure I let her sniff it before I put it out, so she knows it’s coming and is excited about the smell of it. We use four different brands and several varieties from each of those brands, so she doesn’t have time to get bored. It is such a relief to have her eating properly after all this time.

But does she weigh 10kg? No. Her weight dropped below 9kg for three weeks and now she weighs exactly 9kg again. Hetty clearly isn’t meant to be a 10kg dog.