When it comes to the weight of your dog, you may not know what is underweight or overweight in your dog because the right weight for your pooch is hard to know unless you have your dog’s vet assess the weight. Weight will vary based on the breed and size of the dog. The generic weight chart for your dog breed is not always going to be accurate because your dog may be more muscular than other dogs of the same breed. That is why when you calculate the dog’s weight, you will want to first calculate the body condition score or the BCS.
What Is The Body Condition Score?
The BCS is a common tool that can estimate how much fat is on the dog’s body as it is evaluated through a 9-point scale. Dogs that score in the middle between 4 to 5 are at a healthy weight. Dogs that score from 1 to 3 are underweight, if they score between 6 and 7, they are overweight, and if they score between 8 and 9, then the dog is obese. You can also evaluate the BCS in your dog by looking at the waistline and whether or not you can feel the ribs. If your dog appears on the larger side but you can feel its ribs well, then the dog may be very muscular, especially if it gets plenty of exercise daily. There should not be much fat on the ribs and should always be easy to touch. There should also be a slight upward curve behind the rib’s belly.
Dogs that are overweight will have fat on the ribs and there will not be an upward curve either which means you will not feel the ribs that easily on a dog that is overweight or obese. At the same time, dogs that are underweight will be extremely thin and the ribs will stick out. Now that you know the dog’s BCS, now you will want to calculate your dog’s ideal weight:
How To Calculate Your Dog’s Ideal Weight
What you want to do first is to take the dog’s BCS and take away 5. For example, if you have an obese dog that has a BCS of 8, then you take 8 and subtract 5 from it which leaves 3. Then what you will do is multiply the number you get by 10. Therefore, in this example, you take 3 and multiply it by 10 which is 30. Then you add the result you get from that and add 100. Therefore, in this case, you add 30 to 100 which is 130. Then you divide 100 by the result you get. Therefore, you divide 100/130 which you round to three digits, and in this example, the answer is 0.769.
The last step is to take that number and multiply it by the dog’s current weight. Therefore, if this obese dog is 50 lbs, you take 0.769 and multiply it by 50. The result is 38.5 lbs. That is how much your dog should weigh for its particular breed. You want to know your dog’s ideal weight because you can make sure that your dog stays healthy, and if they need to lose weight, then you will know.
Obesity in dogs can become quite serious the same way it does in humans. They can develop diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis, and certain cancers. Dogs will not like it when they need to lose weight because they will be hungry all of the time but you have to be strict with their food intake and that way they can be in the best health possible.
