113 Owner Dietary and Exercise Regimens Influence Perception of Ideal Body Weight in Dogs

Abstract The increasing prevalence of canine obesity across the globe has become the number one health concern for dogs. Part of the problem may be the way owner’s perceive their dog’s body weight. The goal of the current survey was to assess what variables, related to both owner and dog’s feeding and exercising practices, were predictive of the owner’s perception of their dog’s body weight across North America (Canada and the United States) and Europe (France, the United Kingdom and Germany). The online survey was distributed by Qualtrics (Qualtrics XM, Utah, USA) in June 2020. A total of 3,298 responses were collected and were equally distributed across country and sex of respondent. Multinomial logistic regression was performed in SPSS Statistics (Version 26, IBM Corp, North Castle, New York, USA). More than 85% of respondents reported that they believe their dog is an ideal body weight. Results from logistic regression suggest that owners of younger dogs (0–2 years) are 5 times more likely to believe their dog is an ideal body weight compared to older dogs (over 11 years; P < 0.0001). Respondents who selected that they perform vigorous exercise, themselves, less often than 4 days per week were less likely to believe that their dog is an ideal body weight compared to those who reported vigorously exercising for more than 5 days per week (P < 0.05). Finally those who reported feeding their dog a fixed amount of food were more likely to believe their dog is an ideal body weight (P = 0.044) while those who reported restricting their dogs food intake to control weight were less likely to believe their dog is an ideal body weight (P < 0.0001). Overall, both human and dog dietary and exercise routines were predictive of a dog owner’s perception of their dogs body weight.