Ad–Lib Feeding is where food is available at all times with the quantity and frequency of consumption being the free choice of the animal, it would be your job to simply ensure that your pets feeding stations are always topped up with fresh food.
Advantages:
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- Require less knowledge and work: The dogs choose when and how much they eat.
- Each animal can eat: When several dogs live together, ad libitum feeding allows each dog to eat peacefully. With set meal feeding, dominant dogs sometimes prevent other dogs from eating.
- Calming effect within kennels: As there is less competition for food, ad libitum feeding usually has a calming effect within kennels.
- Less coprophagy: Coprophagy (the consumption of faeces) is less frequently seen in kennels where dogs are fed ad libitum.
Disadvantages:
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- Loss of appetite and health problems are less obvious: As the dogs are fed less frequently and food consumption is as a consequence monitored less accurately, loss of appetite and health problems are often harder to detect with ad libitum feeding.
- Some pets eat too much: Some animals are not able to regulate their food intake by themselves and have a tendency to eat too much. With greedy pets, ad libitum feeding is not a good feeding method. For Example, Growing dogs younger than 1 year should never be fed ad libitum as pups eat too much when fed this way.
Thank you!!1
Our dogs informally eat like this. Although we put their food down at set times, they often ignore it and eat when they want to. As it is dry food it does not go off like wet food would. We have rarely ever known them to be hungry outside of their own decision on when to eat, and they never get more, in a day, than the recommended portion sizes.