Page 132 - Zoo Animal Learning and Training

116 Tasks for the Veterinary Assistant

Learning Exercise

The patient is a 10‐week‐old Rottweiler puppy
recovering from parvovirus. He weighs 23lb. Deter-
mine his BER and then the additional amount he
needs to recover.

Sometimes we must move the calories in the opposite
direction to help a pet lose weight. The formula for that is:
Obesity: BER – 10–15%

Example: We have a cat that weighs 24lb. To maintain
that 24lb the cat’s BER would be:
.
.
2
24lb/ 2kg/l b 10 9 or 11kg 3011kg 70
400calories. FIGURE 7.1 Bag label – growth formula for kittens.
To lose weight the cat needs fewer calories, so we need to
subtract 10% or 15% of the calories the cat is consuming
now. The first step is to convert the 10% to a decimal by Learning Exercise
dividing: 10/100 = 0.10 or 15/100 = 0.15, then multi- • Why would there be two different amounts for a
ply the current calories by the decimal point. Formula is: kitten that is under 4 months of age versus one
400 calories × 0.10 = 40 calories. The 40 calories are sub- that is 6 months of age?
tracted from the current 400 calories to get our new BER: • What are the two feeding amounts listed on the
400 – 40 = 360 calories.
label for the following kittens: 3‐month‐old kitten
that weighs 4 lb gets ______ cup and a 6‐month‐
old kitten that weighs 4 lb gets ______ cup.
Learning Exercise • To split this into two meals it would be ____ cup
for the first kitten per serving and ____ cup for
If we want to reduce the diet by 15% how many the second kitten per serving.
calories would we end up with for this cat?

TIP BOX 7.1
These formulas are something to keep in a small To halve fractions, double the denominator and leave the
notebook until you have them memorized. This is numerator alone. For example, half of 1/2 cup is 1/4th.
good information to use on your own pets to keep
them from becoming obese or getting too thin which Now let’s look at the kitten food label again. See where
is almost as bad.
there is a huge jump from 5 lb to 10 lb and from 10 lb to
15 lb? What happens if the kitten you are weighing is 8 lb
How Much to Feed and 5 months of age? No need to panic or guess, we can use
math to help us figure it out. Let’s look at the label again,
we notice that a 2 lb cat at 4–6 months is to get 3/8th of a
The next thing we need to determine is how much to cup. We can divide the 3/8th cup in half which is 3/16th
feed. Pet foods must have a label on the package that and multiply it by 8. Here is the formula (Figure 7.2).
recommends an amount of food per pound of body
weight (Figure 7.1). As you can see, the label shown in
3
24
=
×
Figure 7.1 is for kitten food and has two amounts: one 8 1 16 16 =24/16=1.5 cups
for kittens under 4 months of age and one for 4–6
months of age. Note that this is a daily feeding and it is 1.5 cups/2=0.75 or ¾ cup per serving
recommended that you split this amount into 2–3
servings. FIGURE 7.2 Multiplying a whole number with a fraction.