Nutrition and Your Dog's Behavior
By: Jeanne Perciaccanto

Proper nutrition is the fundamental basis for every aspect of your dog’s life. It affects their health and longevity by offering an essential balance of proteins, fats, complex carbohydrates and the trace nutrients and minerals their bodies need for growth, repair and maintains of sound immune system.

Nutrition is a complex and integral part of your dog’s ability to think clearly, lower stress levels and a produce a calmer behavior. Thinking takes a lot of energy. Dogs involved in a training program, expend tremendous mental energy focusing on the tasks presented to them. If your dog starts with minimal nutrition, they become lethargic, edgy or hyper active when asked to perform the simplest of tasks. They cannot focus and loss concentration after a short period of time or become confused. If the dog is continually asked to do something they cannot comprehend, confusion can lead to an aggressive form of acting out.

In training dogs, the first thing I look at is the dog’s diet. I work from the inside out. Training becomes ineffective if the underlying causes for the behaviors are not changed. Hyper, unfocused and out of control dogs often are eating foods with high levels of cereal foods such as wheat, corn, and corn meal. Aggressive dogs eat food containing higher levels of incomplete protein which do not digest well. Shy and stressed dogs do not digest their foods well at all and often suffer from intestinal complications such as diarrhea. Their coats are often very dry and shed heavily.

One way to test the foods you are feeding is to soak the food in water for about 15 minutes. If it swells in size and becomes mushy, it is primarily cereal. Are you dog’s stools often soft and loose or is the dog gassy? They are not digesting the food properly.

By looking at their food, you will do more to help balance their behavior, as well as, contribute to their health and longevity.

Life Abundance offers the best combination of food for all dogs concerned. The proteins are complete and digest easily. The carbohydrates are complex and do not turn into simple sugars producing energy swings of highs and low behaviors. The Probotics in the food balance and digest more easily, which is not only perfect for the nervous or shy dogs, but ensures all dogs are receiving the nutrition they need from food.

To search sites for food information go to http://www.healthydogfood.net.

Jeanne Perciaccanto, a certified trainer and Health educator. Information can be found at http://www.healthydogfood.net and http://www.ultimatedogtraining.com.

About The Author Jeanne Perciaccanto has been a professional dog trainer for twenty years, at http://www.ultimatedogtraining.com, with an education degree in Health. She has combined both disciplines and researches diet and nutrition as it pertains to canine behavior. Jeannep777@aol.com

This article was posted on August 25, 2004

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