Water as an essential nutrient for your dog
For any living being, water is a very important element on its diet, doesn’t matter if we are talking about plants, humans or animals. It is mandatory that your dog drinks in a daily basis, fresh and clean water in large amounts.
Here is some data that can illustrate the importance of water on a diet. Water represents from 50 to 60 percent of the total weight of a healthy animal, if we are refereeing to puppies, this percentage can easily be upgrade to 75 percent of the body weight.
If our pet loses 10% of this amount due to a short supply of water and liquids loss, this can cause terrible alterations. The loss of 15% can even be responsible for death. There two ways that our pets are able to ingest the necessary water:
- Ingestion: This is the most basic. Drinking water our pet gets to cover the 90% of its needs, if our pet diet is based on canned food, the ingestion of water will be reduced. A fact that should be considered is that a dog can drink 90 ml of water for a kilogram of weight.
- Metabolism: In this process in which food is converted to provide energy and to produce and maintain cells and tissues, our pet is able to incorporate nutrients of different molecular compositions such as Oxygen, Hydrogen and Carbon. These molecules inside our pet’s body start to join between them, in such a way that joining two Hydrogen molecules with one of Oxygen, we get the water formula. Yet, this process can only provide the ten percent of the total amount of water needed by our pet on a daily basis.
The skin of our pet can tell us if it is well hydrated. If we nip a portion of skin, and it does not turns back to its original state, our pet is experiencing dehydration.
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