What to Feed a Puppy at Every Age

Puppies grow faster in their first year than at any other point in their lives, and the diet supporting that has to do two jobs at once: fuel the growth, and keep it at the right speed.

Feeding a puppy like a small adult dog gets both of those wrong, and it is comfortably the most common feeding mistake made with a new dog.

Weaning, from three to eight weeks

Puppies start on mother's milk alone. From around three to four weeks they begin taking solid food, and by seven to eight weeks they are usually fully weaned.

Soften puppy food with warm water into a porridge at first, thickening it over a fortnight. Expect mess, and expect them to walk through it.

A puppy leaving its mother before eight weeks is at a disadvantage, both in nutrition and in the social learning that happens with littermates in those weeks.

How often to feed

• 8 to 12 weeks: four meals a day
• 3 to 6 months: three meals a day
• 6 to 12 months: two meals a day
• Adult: two meals a day for most dogs

Small breeds especially need frequent meals early on, because their blood sugar drops quickly. A tiny puppy that has not eaten for many hours and becomes wobbly or unresponsive is a veterinary emergency, not a sleepy puppy.

What to feed

A complete food formulated for puppies, not adult food. Puppy formulations differ in protein, fat, calcium and phosphorus, and the calcium balance in particular matters during growth.

Large and giant breeds should have a large-breed puppy formulation. These are deliberately lower in energy and carefully balanced for calcium, because growing a big-breed puppy too quickly is directly associated with developmental joint disease. A fat, fast-growing large-breed puppy is not a thriving one.

How much

Start from the guidance on the packet for the puppy's expected adult weight and current age, then adjust to the animal rather than the chart. Do the rib and waist check weekly: you should feel ribs easily under a thin covering, and see a waist from above.

Weigh the puppy regularly. Steady, unspectacular growth is what you want. Our free feeding and portion guide and first-year care calendar make this easier to track than doing it from memory.

Switching to adult food

Roughly when growth finishes, which varies:

• Small breeds: around 9 to 12 months
• Medium breeds: around 12 months
• Large and giant breeds: 18 to 24 months

Change over a week, mixing increasing amounts of the new food into the old. Abrupt switches cause diarrhoea, which then gets blamed on the new food rather than the speed of the change.

The mistakes worth avoiding

• Adult food during growth, which under-supplies what a growing skeleton needs
• Calcium supplements added to a complete food. Excess calcium during growth causes skeletal problems; it does not prevent them. Do not supplement without veterinary instruction
• Free feeding, leaving food down all day, which makes it impossible to notice appetite loss, the earliest sign of most illness
• Overfeeding a large-breed puppy in the belief that a bigger puppy is a healthier one
• Table food and stew, which unbalances a carefully formulated diet and often contains onion
• Cooked bones, which splinter
• Cow's milk, which most puppies digest poorly after weaning

Treats and training

Treats should be a small share of daily intake. Use part of the daily food ration for training rather than adding treats on top, particularly with a puppy being trained several times a day.

When feeding is not the problem

See a vet rather than adjusting the diet again if a puppy is not gaining weight despite eating well, has persistent diarrhoea, a pot belly with a dull coat, or is vomiting repeatedly. Worms are extremely common and mimic feeding problems closely, and no diet outcompetes a heavy worm burden.

Diet is where owners are most willing to spend and least sure what they are buying, which is why the puppy year attracts so much confident, contradictory advice. The one thing that reliably separates good advice from the rest is a vet who has weighed the puppy, scored its condition and knows its breed.

Those consultations are covered on Skeepy Pet HMO plans, alongside the vaccinations and deworming the same year demands, so getting an actual answer costs you a phone call rather than another opinion.