Pet Care Reference Tables

General information, not veterinary advice. These are educational estimates for a healthy animal; real requirements vary with metabolism, health and environment. Agree any feeding or weight-management plan with your vet, who will rule out medical causes first. Cats must never be crash-dieted— a sharp drop in intake can cause hepatic lipidosis, a serious fatty-liver condition, and overweight cats are at the highest risk. A cat that stops eating for a day or two needs a vet, not patience.

Daily calories — dogs

Resting energy scales with body weight to the power of three-quarters, not linearly — which is why a 40 kg dog needs 1113 resting calories against 234 for a 5 kg one. Every other column is that figure multiplied by a life-stage factor, and the spread from weight loss to growth is threefold on the same animal. Picking the wrong column is a bigger error than any imprecision in the weight.

Note the gap between neutered and intact — factors of 1.6 against 1.8. Neutering genuinely lowers requirements, and continuing the previous ration is one of the commonest routes to a pet slowly becoming overweight.

Daily calories — cats

The numbers are small enough that a single treat can be a meaningful fraction of the day’s budget, which is how cats gain weight on what looks like generosity. Measuring matters more here than it does for a dog, simply because the margin for error is narrower.

Daily water, in millilitres

This is totalwater, not water from the bowl — wet food is roughly three-quarters water, so a cat on wet food may drink very little and be perfectly hydrated. The value of the figure is as a baseline: a sustained, unexplained change in drinking is an early sign of several conditions, and you can only spot a change if you know the normal.

What each body condition score means for a 30 kg dog

Five out of nine is ideal, and each point either side is roughly ten per cent. Scored at 8, this dog’s estimated ideal is 23.08 kg — 6.92 kg to lose, close to a quarter of its body weight.

Why weight loss needs a real plan

The feeding target for weight loss is set from the idealweight, not the current one — a ration calculated for the current weight maintains the current weight, which is the problem. For the dog above, the target is 737 kcal a day against a current maintenance of 1436: a reduction of 699 kcal, or 49%.

That is why trimming the bowl by eye rarely works — the required change is about half. It is also why the pace matters: on the order of one to two per cent of body weight a week, over months rather than weeks, with a vet monitoring it. And for cats, under supervision without exception.