Feed the percentage of the dog you want, not the one you have

Raw feeding guidance converges on one rule. Feed two to three percent of body weight a day, adjusted for activity.

The rule is sound. The trap is in which body weight, because applied to the dog standing in front of you, it calculates exactly the amount needed to keep that dog the size it already is.

Ideal weight, every time

If a dog should weigh 25 kg and currently weighs 30, feeding 2.5% of 30 kg delivers 750 g a day. That is the maintenance ration for a 30 kg dog, so the dog stays at 30 kg, and the owner concludes raw feeding does not help with weight.

Feeding 2.5% of the 25 kg target gives 625 g, which is maintenance for the dog you are trying to end up with. The difference is 125 g a day, which is around a sixth of the ration, and over months that is the whole gap between a dog at a healthy weight and one that is not.

The same logic runs the other way. A dog recovering condition after illness is fed toward the target, not held at the lower number it currently shows.

Activity shifts the percentage, not the weight

The three common bands are roughly 2% for a mostly resting dog, 2.5% for normal daily walks and play, and 3% for a working or sporting dog. Those move the multiplier. They do not change which weight it multiplies.

Where this gets interesting is a dog that is both overweight and inactive, which is common and usually related. The honest combination is the lower percentage against the target weight, and it will look like a startlingly small bowl compared with what the dog has been getting.

The raw dog food calculator takes the weight and the activity band and splits the daily total into the muscle, bone and organ shares, so you can see the portion in the units you will actually be weighing out.

Puppies work differently on purpose

A growing puppy runs on a much higher share, starting near ten percent of current weight at two to three months and falling through the year toward adult levels.

Because the basis is current weight and the puppy is growing weekly, the portion moves constantly. The alternative is to work from expected adult weight at a lower percentage, which gives a steadier number and avoids the rations lurching upward every time the scales come out. Either method works. Mixing them, which is easy to do by accident, gives a puppy either far too much or far too little.

Adjust by the dog, not by the arithmetic

A percentage is a starting point and a dog is not a spreadsheet. Two dogs of the same weight and nominally the same activity can need twenty percent different rations, and nothing in any chart predicts which is which.

Weigh the dog every two weeks and keep the number. Run hands along the ribs while you are at it, because the body condition tells you more than the scale does, especially on a muscular dog where weight alone reads as overweight.

Then move in small steps. Half a percentage point at a time, held for two weeks before judging. The common mistake is a large correction after one week, followed by a large correction back, which never settles anywhere.

Treats are part of the total

Everything that goes in counts. Training treats, chews, the end of a sandwich, the thing the toddler drops.

Ten percent of the daily ration is a reasonable ceiling for everything that is not the measured meal, and that ten percent comes out of the meal rather than being added on top. For a dog on a weight reduction plan, treats are usually where the plan actually fails, not in the bowl.

Transitions take longer than people expect

Moving a dog onto raw is a gut change, and the usual advice to swap overnight suits some dogs and causes a messy week for others.

A single protein for the first fortnight, then one new protein at a time with a week between additions, makes it possible to identify what caused a problem when a problem appears. Going straight to a five-protein rotation means a loose stool tells you nothing, because there are five candidates and no way to separate them.