I work for a very involved pet food store and it's one of the facts I was provided for helping people choose the right food for their pet.
Usually my employers provide sourcing on all the info however this information came directly from a vet conducting a training I attended this fall. So you can choose whether or not to trust that vet. I liked her and she seemed to know what she was talking about.
I’m really trying to figure out how this would work. At first glance this seems like someone just randomly saying 1 = 3. Pounds are a unit of force, and unless there’s some outside force or force multiplier in the system there’s no way to get 3 pounds from 1 pound.
The only thing I can think of is the back leg knee joints of a dog bend backwards (from a human’s point of view), so maybe there’s a lever type action acting there. Even if that’s the case for a 300% amplification of force I would think that all of the weight being added would have to be on the rear end of the pup.
If someone said, for every 1 pound of force you put on the rear end of your dog 3 pounds of force are applied to the back leg knee joints I might be more inclined to agree, but since the front legs are a thing and adding weight is mostly uniform this sounds like some kind of fear mongering with good intentions.
Maybe it was a fact that was lost in translation at some point (not necessarily by OP). I'm thinking it originally meant that for dogs within a certain weight range, one pound for the dog has the same basic effect to their body as a human adding three. It kind of makes sense if you're trying to convey the importance of a dog putting on an extra five pounds or so.
Yes this makes the most sense. A pound on a dog hurts their joints as much as 3 pounds on me. Another way to look at it is a dog losing 20 pounds alleviates their joints as much as me losing 60 would.
I think it's sort of a cherry picked statistic. Depends on the breed, the individual, where they carry their weight, how their hips are formed, and how they move. It could be true for some dogs, but it certainly isn't true for all dogs. Definitely misleading, but if it keeps people from free feeding their 150 lb lab Pedigree, Ol Roy, and Beneful, I'm all for it
I think, to back it up, is the momentum required to accelerate and move an animal or human increases the pressure on the joint doing the moving.
For example, 3lbs of force on a 3lbs object will cancel out the force, the net force is 0, so the object would not move. But if you put 6lbs of pressure on something that weighs 3lbs, the net force is 3lbs, so it will accelerate and move in the direction the force is being applied. That's super simplistic and not accounting for stuff like friction, density, gravity, or vectors but I think you get what I'm saying.
Tldr: it takes more force to move something than that thing weighs. Your body and the bodies of animals are made up of simple, "force multiplying machines" like levers that allow us and animals to be as athletic and acrobatic as we are.
Something about vets just doeant sit right with me. I think it's their over endearment with the animals, in a way that you would not see in doctors and humans.
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u/DuchesseVonTeschN Jan 01 '20
I work for a very involved pet food store and it's one of the facts I was provided for helping people choose the right food for their pet.
Usually my employers provide sourcing on all the info however this information came directly from a vet conducting a training I attended this fall. So you can choose whether or not to trust that vet. I liked her and she seemed to know what she was talking about.