On this episode of Fueled Dr. Spoo sits down with Russ Kelly, the Service and Working Dog Research Manager for Royal Canin (www.royalcanin.com) and Eukanuba (www.eukanuba.com). He is a member of the leadership team at the Pet Health and Nutrition Center based in Ohio as well as a member of the companies Discover Team based in France. Russ has been a part of the Eukanuba brand going back to 1997 when he joined the team. He was part of important advancements in nutrition related to maternal and puppy nutrition. He is also one of the authors of a ground-breaking veterinary research paper on performance nutrition. The paper is a study that has become known as the plantation study which looked at the performance of working pointers on a southern plantation and the impact diet had on their working abilities (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

Russ’s current work is focused around dogs with a job which can range from service dogs to military dogs and hunting dogs to agility dogs. While Russ’s knowledge is vast, in this episode they focus on puppies and performance. Not to spoil the episode, there are a couple of segments to really take note. For anyone with an active dog of any size be sure to listen when they talk about large breed puppy diets not necessarily being just for large breed puppies but for ALL athletic puppies. Too often owners get hung up on the adult weight of a puppy rather than the adult purpose of that puppy. Dr. Spoo discusses his belief that the large breed puppy formula is the most important tool we have in producing healthy canine athletes.

The second area to really focus on is the discussion on quantities. For veterinarians so much of the job is focused on people feeding too much that we almost never talk about the flip side of that coin and what happens if you are feeding an energy dense formula where you have to feed too little? These two examples are only two of the gems sprinkled through this engaging interview.

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