ARE YOU KILLING YOUR DOG WITH KINDNESS?

• Position: Unhealthy feeding habits lead to obesity - Brief Article

It can be tempting to hand over a dinner scrap to a begging pet, but rewarding such behavior causes more harm than good, maintains C.B. Chastain, professor of veterinary medicine and associate dean at the University of Missouri-Columbia College of Veterinary Medicine. It can lead to obesity, the most common nutritional disorder of dogs in the U.S.

"When a pet is obese, the real problem is the owners' inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the problem and its seriousness in the first place. These owners continue to feed the pet excessively in a misguided effort to show their love to the pet. Some will kill their pet with this type of kindness."

The easiest way to detect obesity is through a simple physical examination. If a dog's weight is in a normal range, its ribs are...