How to Feed a Puppy
📝 Summary
Puppies start solids around week three with soft, easy foods, and they overeat when new — they learn fast. Because dogs are omnivores with long, slow guts, scheduled meals beat free-feeding, and never contest a puppy for its bowl or you'll spark food guarding.
1 Feeding Your Puppy
From week three puppies wean and try non-milk foods. Their teeth aren’t full yet, so offer easy soft extras — meat paste, soaked kibble, puppy formula — which they love.
If an owner overfills the bowl or there are many pups, a puppy may eat until it vomits some back up.
Don’t worry much; after the first few over-stuffings the puppy learns to self-limit.
Free-feeding or scheduled meals — which suits dogs?
Dogs differ from cats because their guts differ. Cats are pure carnivores with a ‘straight-tube’ gut that fills and empties fast, so free-feeding suits them.
Dogs, like people, are omnivores with a long, coiled gut that takes four to five hours to digest — so scheduled meals beat free-feeding.
Many owners grab food from a puppy to fight resource guarding — wrong, and it can traumatize the puppy.
It teaches the dog food is scarce and ‘this person’ steals it, hardening a dominant pup until it growls and tenses the moment your hand nears the bowl, ready to attack.
Puppies are hard work, but the first open eyes, the first clumsy run into your arms, the first toy offered — none of the effort matters then. You’ll share many more firsts.
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