Pumpkin seems to be the magical add-in. It helps if your dog is constipated and it help if your dog has diarrhea. It’s a filler for fat dogs trying to lose weight and an appetite enhancer for dogs that are picky.
StG
drewtoo - I’d tell people she’s a lab/whippet (or IG) mix and this is her ideal weight.
StG
Trying to put extra weight on her probably won’t hurt her, but it certainly won’t help her, and it’s liable to be really frustrating for you.
I suspect there are some people who regard a skinny dog as a potential sign of abuse, and they can be irritating if you have a naturally skinny dog.
This is analogous to a problem people with pit bulls can have, when others assume any muscular, lean pit bull must be involved in dogfighting. I have a co-worker who describes with breathless horror how a relative used to play tug-of-war with his pit bull, “a sure sign the dog was vicious.” Never mind most dogs of anny breed will play tug-of-war. :rolleyes:
Are you? Well, then, there’s no need for this kind of nastiness. If you don’t understand something, just ask.
That’s it exactly. Kaia will skip meals, but if there’s pumpkin in her dish she licks it clean.
The view that people are accustomed to overweight dogs is generally true. An exception would be if the K9’s stool has an oily, mustard-colored color consistent with Endocrine Pancreatic Insufficiency (EPI). While no indication of that here, and I would hope vets would look for this in a withering animal… we found only one vet properly diagnosed it in one of our K9’s.
SO while probably not in play here, should there be symptoms of this, discuss EPI symptoms with your vet. Our two-year old GSD was dying, starving to death regardless of how much he ate… but once diagnosed, thrived because of pancreatic material added to his food. Additionally, we added a probiotic [we use fortiflora, others would also work probably] to his food… and it helped add additional weight (it allowed his diminished digestive system to extract still further nutrients from the food… and he’s thriving, going to be 9 years old next month).
And now that he’s thriving, we moved to mature food (which has fewer calories) to keep him at a healthy weight… so the warnings folks are making are real, if you “solve” this underweight situation, you may have to worry about the medical issues arising from an overweight dog later.
So… unless there are medical concerns… an underweight dog is probably one you will have longer… tell your concerned friends that it has been discussed with the vets and there is no problem.
We adopted a severely starved puppy a few years ago and this is what worked well for her.
First off you need to ensure that Pup is getting the necessary amount of fats and proteins to keep some weight on. If your kibble doesn’t cut it alone then you’ll need to add something else into the mix. We used This product and mixed a generous cut with each feeding. When we crated her at night we replaced her water with a bottle of foal milk replacement formula. She “nursed” on this for several months until her weight evened out and she then refused to drink it. Now she is a healthy weight and has kept her muscle tone well.
Thanks. I was afraid to google “satin balls” at work because I figured Rule 34 would come into play and I’d get all kinds of NSFW links. 
I wanted to throw in another $0.02 here. I’ve always tried to keep my dogs somewhere around a 3 on the scale – maybe just a teensy tiny bit overweight, but not officially overweight, if that makes any sense, especially as they get older. In a young dog, I try to keep 'em nice and lean because it’s healthier. But somewhere around 8 or 10, I’d rather they pack a little extra meat on their bones because certain diseases can cause rapid weight loss and I want them to be able to afford to lose some weight. When my Boston hit about 12, I pretty much let her have any treat she wanted (that wasn’t overly fatty or something that could hurt her, like chocolate or french fries). I was thinking, if she got sick and lost a bunch of weight, at least she wouldn’t be weakened (and therefore, harder to bring back to 100%) by being underweight. All I can say is I never had a dog die from obesity-related disease. And my Boston finally died at 15.5 – from Congestive Heart Failure and liver/kidney damage from all the meds she was on.
I’m glad to have read this thread though, because my recommendation would have been to add peanut butter to everything, but that’s probably too fatty and too much sugar for a dog. If I could find sugar-free fat-free peanut butter, I’d give my dog that, but for now I’m thinking of switching her to fat free cream cheese (stuffed in her Kong toy), so she’s dealing with less sugar. I would probably be cooking for an underweight dog, feeding it boneless chicken & brown rice with sweet potatoes, peas, and carrots. Sounds good, doesn’t it? 
I agree dogs, especially city dogs tend to be overweight. Many a times, I’ve petted a dog, expecting to sink my hand into fur only to find it is all fat.
Of course the dog still acts like the owner starves it. What is it about a dog that makes them able to convince everyone that they are only hours away from being starved to death.
It’s the look. Nose down, eyes up. It tugs at your heart even if you don’t have one. Sly little buggers.
I have had two dogs, one who is just skinny to the point where people sort of look at him in horror when we’re at the park. He’s about a 0 or -1 on that chart. He’s not lethargic, except when he’s being a couch potato (as most sighthounds - greyhounds, whippets, etc. are wont to be). We free feed him, 4 cups per day in his bowl, and 2 cups in his Kong toy. He prefers to eat piece by piece from the toy rather than the bowl (which for some reason he likes to spill all over the floor before eating it).
I say all this because my skinny dog maintains his weight. I had a GSD with EPI and she got crazy skinny. She lived several more years with the pancreas powder, but unfortunately she started losing weight again and we fed her more and more of the powder, not realizing that feeding too much of it causes the problem to get worse, not better. Long story short, stomach cancer. She was skeletal because we kept hoping the powder would kick in again, which it never did. She made it to age 10; we did the right thing.
If your dog maintains his/her weight, I don’t see a problem, and our vet doesn’t either. If the weight starts dropping off, definitely go see the vet.
EPI (and cancer and heartworm infestation and any number of things) can indeed cause weight loss - but as stated, you’d also see other signs, such as abnormal stool, lethargy, coughing, poor skin and coat, etc. And the weight won’t stay consistently low, it will drop. When one of my dogs developed bone cancer, he lost weight drastically because of cancer cachexia- but he’d maintained consitent weight for almost nine years prior to that. The weight loss happened within a couple of months, and he lost muscle as well as fat.
drewtoo, if you have any health concerns about Dotti’s condition, why not get a blood chemistry profile done, along with a fecal test to rule out parasites? It’s not a bad idea to have blood work done, even on a young dog, as a baseline. And it shouldn’t be expensive (about $40-45 around here). If you’re in an area where heartworms are an issue, get her tested for that even if she’s been on preventative - dogs ought to be tested annually wherever there’s risk. Even if she gets monthly pills or whatever, you can’t always be sure she didn’t throw one up before it got into the bloodstream.
Once tested and found clear of parasites, and with bloodwork showing everything within normal ranges, you can be pretty sure you have a healthy dog who doesn’t need to be forced to gain weight. And you can assure others that she’s perfectly healthy, and just has a model’s build. 
Probiotics are never a bad idea, and there’s things you can do to modify or tweak her diet - but (not to sound like a broken record) - as long as she is healthy and active, that’s not necessary and it’s optimal to be thin.
I am fortunate not to be familiar with EPI and many other things. Since excess fat inflames the pancreas, would adding fat to a dog’s diet that had EPI make it worse?