Life stage nutrition categorizes nutrition into the best foods for a puppy, an adult, and a senior dog. Depending on the size of the dog, the puppy stage is considered anywhere between a year to about 18 months of age for a large breed, and then adult stages from there to about seven or eight. After that comes the senior stage, which for large breed dogs, starts more around six years of age.

Specific diets are particularly important for large breed dogs. Their food, whether it's a puppy or adult formula, has slightly different ratios of minerals and vitamins that help them grow properly as they are going to get so large. Apart from that, ensuring a good quality and complete diet is important. If your dog eats really fast, there are different sizes and shapes of food that can be helpful in slowing them down.

I would suggest feeding your dog at least twice a day. Feeding them more than once a day helps to keep their metabolism up and helps prevent weight gain. Puppies, being in their younger life stages, should be fed at least three times a day.

Most definitely, and we have a few of them here at the hospital.

You can, it's going to make them drool a lot, so we usually use a different antihistamine to help treat those allergens.

Well that depends on what's causing it. We may do a food trial if it's food related, we may do some steroids if we need to, or some antihistamines, and if it's just a nasty infection that's causing some of that, we're going to do some shampoos and mousses and some antibiotics.

We're going to look at the skin, do a full physical exam, and just give them a good one once over. We're going to do some skin scraping, some skin cytology, and just look and see if there's anything that we see abnormal besides allergens.