Expanded Description:
DWAA Best Care and Health Book Award Winner, 2006! Learn about the special needs of your performance dog and how to meet them with a sound nutrition program. An excellent resource for determining what food is best for your dog to enhance working ability. Explains how to read dog food labels and select appropriate food for your dog. Written by a veterinatian who is a long-time breeder and musher.
What reviewers are saying...
PAWS IN REVIEW
Active dogs competing in sports (or those engaging in the physical and mental demands of service work.) burn more calories and have different energy needs than companion dogs. Performance-dog owners who want to keep their canine athletes at peak health and fitness need to understand their dogs’ special nutritional needs.
Written by veterinarian, Performance Dog Nutrition covers the dog’s digestive system, various commercial diets (there’s little information on home-prepared diets) dog food labels and nutrient evaluation.
Through it includes valuable information for all dog owners—like a very clear explanation of a dog’s digestive process, reading a dog-food label, and determining ingredients’ digestibility—this book is really intended for the owner of performance dogs. Each chapter highlights how its contents apply to performance dogs, with whole chapters devoted to how food is converted to energy, the importance of fats, and carbohydrate needs specific to performance dogs. There is also information on the importance of water (“the most essential nutrient to the performance dog”), on conditioning, and a chapter recognizing physical problems (and solutions) in performance dogs.
The final two chapters’ help readers apply what they’ve learned in the book. “Practical Label Examples” describes three performance dogs and how to determine if a diet is right for them, and “Performance Dog Case Examples” offers a quartet of anecdotal problems, and how they were treated.
In addition, case studies from the author’s veterinary practice are sprinkled throughout the book, as are beautiful black-and-white photographs of performance dogs of many breeds.
Dr. Jacobs writes clearly and smoothly about a complicated topic that, in a different author’s hands, might be snooze-inducing. If you have a performance dog and a keen interest in keeping your dog in tip-top shape, this is an essential addition to your library. Janine Adams
MID-ATLANTIC BORDER COLLIE RESCUE
It’s hard enough to find an M.D. who appreciated the impact of nutrition on health; it’s downright exciting to find a DVM actually writing a book on how nutrition affects canine sport performance. Dr. Jocelynn Jacobs is a breeder of Alaskan Malamutes and has won many titles and trophies, both in the obedience ring and in skijoring (cross country skiing behind a dog in harness). In this book she brings her understanding of canine physiology to the subject of nutrition and how it affects the performance of, well, “performance dogs.”
The author also covers such valuable topics as how dog food is produced, the importance of particular vitamins, minerals, and omega-3 fatty acids, ratios and sources of protein, carbohydrates, and fats, and various illnesses common to dogs.
However, of less interest to the average dog owner but perhaps of greatest interest to those seeking to use nutrition to enhance athletic performance, are the more complicated section (some containing mathematical formulas!) on energy requirements, methods of energy production, nitrogen balance, and conditioning dogs for performance. The rarity of information that cannot easily be obtained elsewhere. Robin Eddington
CANINE REVIEW
I don’t want to buy my dogs junk, but I also don’t want to spend extra money paying for a company’s marketing budget. So, what is the real difference between the $30 and the $60 bags of dog food? “Performance Dog Nutrition” helps answer that question. The author of the book, who worked at a pet food company, uses her inside view of the industry to help us understand what our dogs’ nutritional needs are and foes beyond the “labeling games companies play.” In the book, Dr. Jocelynn Jacobs helps dog owners translate information provided on dog food bag labels into more useful information about the contents of the food. This information can then be used to help you decide whether your dog food is nutritionally appropriate for your dog’s activities. As the title implies, the author always goes back to what type of nutrition is needed for the performance dog. The author does have her biases and you can tell she is not a fan of the raw food diet. While the book will help you evaluate a raw diet, it will not give you warm fuzzies about going that route. It is also apparent that she is a fan of private label vs. more generic dog food brands. I was not disappointed after reading this book. It got me outside examining my dog’s poop and then inside with my calculator and the dog food label. After reading it, I feel more confident in my ability to look beyond the hype and know whether what I am buying is good for my dog. Marlene Parish
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