Weight management is a crucial part of taking care of your dogs and cats. Ensuring your pet maintains a healthy weight minimises the risk of disease or injuries that can be associated with obesity or malnourishment. 

As a society, we are accustomed to seeing overweight pets as healthy pets, which means obesity is now becoming a major problem. Over 40% of dogs and over 30% of cats in NZ are at least 10% over their ideal weight.

We weigh your animals every time they come to see us, which creates a great record of their weight and can help us to see if it is creeping up. 

Weight gain isn’t always a bad thing - puppies and kittens are supposed to grow and some animals need to gain a bit. There also isn’t a ‘set weight’ for every breed, for instance, not all Labradors are overweight at 30kg. To give us a better idea of whether your pet is overweight, we look at body condition score (BCS). This is a 9-point scale based on the shape of your dog or cat, with 1 deemed underweight and 8 or above classed as obese.