What You Must Know about Feeding Great Pyrenees Dogs
on Apr 25, 2016, Updated Oct 28, 2023
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This post is sponsored by Wellness Natural Pet Food and the BlogPaws® Pet Influencer Network™. I am being compensated to help share the reinvented Complete Health Line and other Wellness Products, but we only share information we feel is relevant to our readers. Wellness Natural Pet Food is not responsible for the content of this article. #GrainFreeForMe #ad
If you have a Great Pyrenees or are thinking about getting one, it’s important to understand how this breed reacts to and around food. Here are five things you must know about feeding your Great Pyr.
The Great Pyrenees breed is one of the most beautiful working dogs there is and oh so helpful to homesteaders and other farmers. As livestock guardian dogs, they have a useful role and help keep other farm animals safe from predators. To help them perform to the best of their ability, it’s important to feed them a high quality, healthy food. It also doesn’t break the bank to feed them so you can afford to buy them a higher quality dog food.
What You Must Know about Feeding Great Pyrenees Dogs
We recently started feeding our Great Pry, Nora, from the newly reinvented and now grain-free Wellness® Complete Health™ Line, specifically the Grain Free Lamb and Lamb Meal formula. The first ten ingredients are real food items that I can identify: lamb, lamb meal, potatoes, peas, dried ground potatoes, chickpeas, menhaden fish meal, tomato pomace, chicken fat (preserved with mixed tocopherols), and ground flaxseed. Wellness Complete Health is free from artificial ingredients, colors, flavors, and inexpensive poultry by-product meals. Our dog, who isn’t honestly all that interested in food, LOVES her new dog food. I’m happy to feed her something that’s good for her and will provide her with live active probiotics, a good Omega 3 & 6 mix, essential vitamins and minerals for cellular health, immunity and disease resistance, and fruit and veggie antioxidants.
Great Pyrenees dogs have a slow metabolism.
You might think that a giant breed like the Great Pyrenees would eat as much as Clifford the Big Red Dog. (Can you tell I have kids and read a lot of stories?) Well, it’s not really true. Luckily for Pyr owners, the breed has a slow metabolism and doesn’t eat as much as other giant dogs. That’s nice, because they also don’t poop as big either. 😉
They have a gentle mouth.
Nora has the gentlest mouth of any dog I have ever met. Unlike the labs and goldens we used to have, she won’t snatch food out of anyone’s hands. It’s so funny to watch her ever so gently take the food we offer from our hands, if she even will. Sometimes, we have to simply put her treats in her bowl if we want her to eat them because just will not take them from our hands at all.
They like to bury their food.
Another quirk about feeding Great Pyrenees is that they often like to bury their food. We’ve watched Nora run off with a huge bone thinking she’s excited to gobble it down, only to instead watch her bury it. Amazingly, she always remembers where she put it too, because in the next few days we’ll see her eating that bone around our little homestead! Other friends who have Pyrs chuckle as they tell us about their dogs who buried their entire food bowl!
You might want to feed your puppies adult food instead of puppy food.
Now I’m not a vet, so you’ll want to follow up with this and make your own choice, but our breeder told us that Pyr puppies should be fed adult food instead of puppy food. I’ve heard this same advice from many other Great Pyrenees owners as well. I researched the issue and found the concern is out-of-proportion growth spurts which can be very painful to the breed. But again, I am not a vet, so please do your research and make your own decision.
They need healthy food for optimum performance.
Clearly, Pyrs are hard workers and don’t like to lounge about. 😉 Just like it’s important for YOU to eat a healthy diet, it’s also important to feed your dog a healthy diet. Pet food is notoriously full of bad ingredients like artificial colors, corn, wheat, and soy (common allergens to dogs), and all sorts of fillers and by-products. I’m happy that I don’t have to worry about these bad ingredients in Wellness Complete Health. I’m happy to provide our dog with a high quality food from a reputable company like Wellness, a pioneer in holistic nutrition.
If you’re looking for a great dog food you can trust, I highly recommend taking a look at Wellness Complete Health , available at PetSmart using PetSmart points! You can learn more about Wellness on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google +.
Do you worry about what you feed your dog? How do you keep her healthy and happy? Please leave a comment!
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Wellness. The opinions and text are all mine.
OMG! My Pyr also buries her bones! I can’t say I’ve ever seen her dig them up and chew them though! She also buries her toys. I have a row of roses along a fence. One day as I was fertilizing, I noticed a big pile of dirt under my rose bush. I thought – gopher! But when I dug into it, I found a stuffed toy! As I went along the roses, each bush had already been “fertilized” with one of Gracie’s toys!
Great now I have two bone burying boys . A 19 month lab/retriever and a 8 week Pyrenees who loves to dig like his big bro maybe no garden this year lol
My male buries his entire dish of food and my female carries her dish of food around!
I worry a lot about my Pyr as she rarely seems interested in food! I’ve had to come to accept she’s an “eat to live” dog, not a “live to eat” dog ?
I think they’ll take care of themselves! As look as she looks and acts healthy!! <3 That said, my male pyr is much more interested in food than the female.
Are GP a breed that is prone to BLOAT? I’ve heard it affects large breeds.
Yes, technically large breeds are more prone to bloat. What I’ve read about Great Pyrs is that they may not be as affected as other large breeds.
My puppy has swallowed cookies and chews while. It’s the craziest thing. I thought that the other dogs might have snatched his. Now I know for sure he’s just gulping it down. So, obviously no more treats or cookies for a long while. Is this anything you’ve heard of?! He’s about 14 weeks old. He’s also crazy about mealtime. Loves to eat and we have to watch him so he’s not getting into the other dogs bowls.
Can you break up the cookies into pieces and still give him some? If you want to slow down his eating, you could try feeding him a bundt pan so he has to work a little bit harder for it. 🙂 Good luck!
^ That should say swallowing cookies and chews WHOLE.
We’ve had Pyrs for 17 years, and I studied them and thought about having them for year before finding any to bring home in the rural area we still live. We have all furred animal predators here, and needed them for my milk cow and calves.
As for their metabolisms, yes they are slow compared to other large breeds, even to the extent that if they ever need surgery Pyrents need to be sure their vets are aware that these wonderful dogs may not wake up if given too much anesthetic for their surgeries.
I’ve also heard of them bloating from gulping down their food.and over eating…and I know about cows and bloating and what has to be done for them to relieve the bloat…NOT PRETTY!!! I had to walk my milk cow in circles a couple of times so she could become more comfortable, rather than call in the vet to put a needle in her belly.
I’ve never had to worry about them being a little slow to eat the food just put into their bowls because they usually know when they NEED to eat. Just give them time, especially if it’s food they were happily eating a few days ago.
Our two dogs eat one of the foods our vet recommended because we couldn’t afford Hill’s Science Diet…and they really like it and it has helped with the reaction our newest one four years ago was getting to what we had been feeding him.