Dog feeding test for assessing the nutritional adequacy of practical diets

The nutritive value of dog foods declared by the manufacturer as nutritiona lly complete and balanced can be best assessed by feeding trials with dogs. A protocol of a feeding trial has been developed and tested with working d ogs fed two different commercial complete and balanced diets for 8 weeks. T he parameters used for evaluating the effect of diets were general health s tatus, body and hair coat condition, change of body weight, haematological parameters (white blood cell (WBC) count, red blood cell (RBC) count, haemo globin, packed cell volume), and biochemical parameters in blood serum (ala nine aminotransferase, urea, albumin). The trial protocol proved to be appr opriate to monitor the dogs' nutritional status and to reveal differences b etween diets. This method of evaluation is recommended for use in supportin g the nutritional claims (labelling) of dog foods.