Weight issue, help - Page 1

I have a 6 month old male which weighs 46 pounds. He is on high quality diet. Both dam and sire were average to small in size and both were KKL1 dogs. All the growth charts say he will be significantly small when full grown and likely under breed standard. Does anyone have experience with these charts in terms of how accurate they are.

Chances are he will add at least 15 more pounds when mature probably 20 when he is 3 years

Try adding what is popularly called 'silk balls' to his diet and feed once a day. I use oatmeal instead of the cereal and 85% lean beef. I also add what germ. You can find the recipe online.

Stoelzle while silk/satin balls are good to add weight to a dog that is thin in this case they have a young dog who they want to know if it will grow to a certain size and the satin balls will have no real effect on this.

They will  put fat on the puppy/ dog not the adult size they are looking for.

Thanks for input so far. It's not simply an issue of simply putting on weight, I could easily make him fat but that is not goal. Really trying to find out personal experience as to how accurate those charts are. To all thanks again.

General rule of thumb is that at 6 months, a dog is 2/3 of his adult weight. So, according to this, your male will end up around 77 pounds. That is well within the standard.

SV standard:

Male dogs:
Height at the withers: 60 cm to 65 cm
Weight: 30 kg to 40 kg

30 kg is about 66 pounds.

Christine

In my opinion the dog is slightly oversized for his age. Much bigger then 40 lb atr 6 mo will increase probability of environmentally induced hip dysplasia. I would not worry about it. Feed him raw meat diet and let the nature do what it will do. i would estimate final size of the dog to be 80lb+/- . Do not feed granulated crap of any kind no matter how shiny the bag is. The dogs often grows too fast on these diets which IMO is #1 cause of environmentally induced HD because fast growing bones are soft since it takes time for nature to deposit proper amount of minerals and the big dog then weights on not fully formed bones. The sheer amount of nutrition in granulated food does not help but hurts. this is about density of the bone. For example slowly growing tree in nature has proper density of the wood and does not need to be supported w stake, where the same tree growing in nursery is inundated which excess of nutrition is growing too fast and tree trunk is then soft and needs to be supported by stake or it will bend or brake.
When I go in desert and see bones of coyote they dense like a steel ( so to speak) that is in my opinion caused by genetics and slow growth.
Prager

My pup is 57 lbs at 5 months and not over weight. Hmmm, we'll see how big he turns out to be. Both mom and dad were about 25 inches at the shoulder,

Western Rider-thanks for the input on the Satin Balls. A person owning a King Shepherd and very into the size and weight of the dog at the time, brought over some original style 'satin balls'.
I saw them so widely described with recipes on the internet that I thought they must be the great thing to do for your dog. Needless to say, I have been feeding them to my GSDs. Ooops!
What you are saying totally makes sense.
Neither of my dogs are underweight-one is a large girl (on overweight) and weighs 80lb. 2 years. The other female is one year and weighs about 65 lbs.

Another long time breeder told me to order (I think this is the right name) 'Fortical' from Revival to put weight on my 7 week old pups. None are skinny but 2 are just small. She says at 8 weeks she sends out pups that weigh up to 25 lbs using feeding supplements from Revival by adding up to 200 calories per pup per day.
As I have said before, things have certainly changed since I was a breeder way back then, when we depended on the dogs natural size unless something was wrong with it. I think I have been trying too hard or being a worry wart mother. They look and act just fine and full of energy.

I have a feeling that I already know what you are going to say about supplementing healthy big pups as well as supplementing those that are just smaller in structure just to WOW a potential buyer. Go ahead and slap my hands. Sometimes asking lots of questions is how we learn.
Thanks for all the good help. Happy New Year to all who use this site and write, read and respond to these posts. Thank you.

Oh, I meant to say the 80lb female is NOT overweight, just a large female.