When your Dog Needs to Gain Weight

We’ve just encountered a problem new to us…certainly not one I, myself, have ever dealt with. Ike is a dog who is too skinny. He’s a smaller-size golden retriever to begin with– when we adopted Ike he was 57lbs.

But recently, we’d been thinking Ike looked like he’d lost weight…he looked too skinny. We could feel his ribs and spine easily. So we took him to the vet’s today.  And that’s when we discovered that he’s lost 4 lbs since we got him a month and a half ago.

So we need to work to help him gain weight. He presently gets 4 cups of good quality food–up from the 2 cups/day we started out giving him. We are going to look into different food that may have more calories.

After blood tests, fecal tests, etc there were no parasites found or other factors known that might contribute to the weight loss, except for mild anemia.
One other thing, he has a slow heart rate, but we don’t know enough about that yet and he’ll be getting more testing.
Lots of hugs for Ike!

Have you had to help a dog gain weight? What worked for you?
Has your dog every been diagnosed with a slow heart rate?
How do you handle the stress/worry when your dog has health issues?