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My Pet World: Adding pumpkin to a dog's diet may help with weight-loss

By Marc Morrone, Tribune Content Agency on

Q: We were watching some of your hilarious YouTube videos and caught one where you were talking about adding pumpkin to a dog's food so that it would lose weight. Could you please explain in more detail why a dog would like pumpkin? My Boxer is very overweight and we have tried everything else and nothing has worked so we are willing to try anything. -- Mike Larsen, Las Vegas, NV

A: Many carnivorous animals like pumpkin -- not just dogs. Many zoos give pumpkin to their big cats and wolves. There is just something about the smell and texture of it that they enjoy.

Canned pumpkin has lots of fiber and hardly any calories, so if your dog is overweight and you add the pumpkin to its dinner, then the dog feels full, yet it is getting fewer calories.

When my dogs grew older and were not as active as they used to be, they all had weight problems. So what I did was to remove 1/2 the normal ration of food and replace it with the pumpkin -- in other words I would give them one cup of dog food and one cup of the canned pumpkin. They loved it and did not feel at all like they were missing out on anything. I am proud of how good their conformation was in spite of their inactivity.

The only time you may not want to do this is if your dog is on one of those special prescription diets -- in that case you must always consult with your vet before changing your dog's diet.

Q: My green cheek conure is a great pet, but every time I put his dish of parrot pellets in the cage he eats a few and then spends the rest of the day flinging the rest all over the floor. Is there any way I can put some kind of cover over the dish so he cannot do this anymore? It cannot be because he is bored; his cage is so full of toys. -- Terry Richards, Allentown, PA

A: Pet stores do sell certain covered dishes and splash guards that force a bird to stick his head into an opening of the cup in order to eat, preventing him from scattering the pellets about.

However, if he enjoys playing with his food after he is done eating, then most likely he will still figure a way to do even with the covered dish. It seems as if throwing his pellets around is more entertaining to him than playing with all the toys that you gave to him.

I would advise you to put the dish of food in the cage for an hour in the morning before you go to work and then an hour at night when you get home. He will have plenty of time to eat as much as he needs of the pellets, but after he is full he will not have access to them.

 

If you feel guilty about leaving him during the day without any food in his cage then you can put a dish of vegetables cut into large chunks that take a long time to chew up, such as sweet potatoes, carrots or celery. He can chew up and eat these during the day and they are not quite so easy to fling about as parrot pellets.

Q: My son has a 5-month-old guinea pig that has lost quite a bit of fur on his back and the bridge of his nose. His skin is raw and red and he is scratching at it all the time. He has never been sick or had any other problems since we bought him three months ago. Our dog has a similar problem and the vet said it was a food allergy and put her on a special diet. As long as we keep her on that diet her skin is fine -- can a guinea pig have an allergy as well? -- Sally Duffy, Ft. Lauderdale, FL

A: I am not a vet nor any kind of educated professional, so I am not qualified to give out medical advice. However, I did graduate with honors from the school of hard knocks and have kept a lot of guinea pigs.

From my experience I would say that most likely your guinea pig has an infestation of skin mites -- they are microscopic arthropods that live under the animals skin and their presence is what causes the skin irritation. They are very uncomfortable for the guinea pig and must be treated as soon as possible.

Since they are living under the skin there is nothing you can put topically on the skin of the guinea pig to kill them. They must be treated with a medication called ivermectin that must be administered by a vet that has experience with small animals. Without the care from the vet they will never go away, but with the prescribed medication it is quite a correctable condition.

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(Marc Morrone has kept almost every kind of animal as a pet for the last half-century and he is happy to share his knowledge with others. Although he cannot answer every question, he will publish many of those that have a general interest. You can contact him at petxperts2@aol.com; please include your name, city and state.)


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