ok so i bought a 19kg bag of eukanuba medium breed puppy food to feed my pregnant staffordshire bull terrier bitch, can anyone
i phoned them up to see if they could advise how much i should give her , they then come out with we dont advise that you should not be feeding her that
you need to feed her eukanuba working dog and endurance food!
can anyone advise wether this is correct or is it a case of them just covering themselves ?
any advise will be appreciated cheers

To be honest if she is in good weight and condition she should be fed her usual food.  many of us have found feeding puppy food just causes looseness if the diet is already high enough in nutrients.

You should not start to increase her intake at all until the 6th week, and even then only slightly so that she is on half as much again at whelping.  So say she normally ahs 150g by term she should only be having an extra 75g.

After whelping I feed my bitches to appetite at least 4 meals a day.  With my own breed they will be getting 4 to 5 times their maintenance rations.

Her normal diet is raw,  she gets nature's menu but have read allover to put her on puppy food at 6 weeks, so do you think if I give her her normal food and add a Tin of sardines in Aswell that would suffice,  thanks for the help and advice,  it is making me look hopeless but looking on the internet just gives conflicting information.

Just slightly more of a well balanced diet with good proteins

If the normal diet is raw, just add chicken wings for extra meals -that's what I do. Normal feeding regime with chicken wings given as extra meals from week 6. Definitely do not go down the route of complete puppy food as you will most likely cause bad stomach upsets and will instead end up with weight loss and possibly quite serious problems as a result, been there, done that. Natures Menu is FAR better quality than Eukanuba!

Excellent thank you for the advice you guys are legends

I have never really understood where all this puppy food for pregnant bitches came from.   Mine were on a good quality maintenance food, and stayed on that throughout a pregnancy.   Yes, I might have to feed smaller meals and more often as the puppies took up more and more room but I preferred not to let my bitches put on scads of extra weight and didn't up how much and what, until the puppies were born and I saw how many I was catering for - or she was.   There's no point provided the bitch was on good food from the start.   The pups would take all they need before and after birth and once I knew the numbers, then and only then would I increase her food, add more protein and so on - but still no 'puppy food'.   Puppy food is for ............ PUPPIES.

> Puppy food is for ............ PUPPIES.

Actually more an more people are wondering whether feeding puppy food to puppies is wise, and ending up with over nutrition.

Portion controlled feeding in a laboratory may be very different to ad lib to appetite feeding in the real world with a litter, as many of us do.

> Actually more an more people are wondering whether feeding puppy food to puppies is wise, and ending up with over nutrition.

Good point - Burns recommend switching from puppy to adult at 6 months.  Much as I think they changed hands, and this isn't the product it once was!   I would still use puppy food up to around 8 months, at which time many of my puppies would 'go off' their puppy food in any case.  And I'd switch to either a Junior version or the same, or to Adult.   My problem is with the protein level in some puppy food.

All this feeding information can just confuse the novice and for me, experience will tell me what works, and what doesn't!

It's no different with human food information really - one moment it's eat this, and the next it's don't ........

It is interesting how feeding of dogs have changed over the years, I suspect the thought of more money going to the processor keeps these changes going. It makes me wonder how our dogs manage to survive. For instance, I'm sure there were no special food for puppies when I last had one.

I remember when I got my first GR nearly forty years ago. The breeders were fairly well known and good at their job, but the recommendations for feeding my new pup would raise eyebrows today. The instructions, neatly typed out, were for two of her four meals a day, to be cows milk (eek) and Complan or a Farleys rusk. The other two meals were minced beef and to get her onto tinned meat and biscuits as was the norm in those days. A few years later, it became the thing to feed dogs on something that looked like rabbit food that was soaked in hot water for a while. Then the big new thing came about, a complete food that was shaped like a ring, can't remember the name now, does anyone remember those?

Omega... the stuff that looked like giant polo's only brown..
I feed raw and keep to the same diet throughout pregnancy with  (like Marianne & Mamabas ) some more of the same as pregnancy progresses but not too much until pups are here and then its a free for all really and I feed as much as the bitch wants if she has a normal sized litter  (I once had a singleton pup and had to make sure Mum got only what she needed not what she thought she wanted ;-)
My pups too are weaned onto a raw diet but I do give some good quality (Orijen or Arcana) kibble once the pups are eating well, as well as not every puppy owner wants to feed raw. I often from about 5 - 6 weeks leave a bowl of dry kibble down overnight. Many times it is not eaten but they have the options.
I feed all sorts of odd bits and pieces in puppy feeds,  tinned fish, eggs, grated cheese, table scraps,  veggies, along with chicken, chicken necks and pieces of carcass, hearts, liver, beef, lamb, tripe etc.. I get beef ribs for them to chew on and I find we have very few upset tummies and even when pups move to new homes they can cope with most things as by 8 weeks they have tried so many different things their tummies are like cast iron !!
No puppy food for Mums at all.
Aileen