Last week we stopped the app being wrong: it was giving your pregnant bitches the smallest ration in the kennel, because it worked from the work a dog had done, and a bitch carrying a litter pulls nothing. Since then it has said "Pregnant — set the ration by hand".
That was honest, but it left you alone in front of the bowl. Here is what comes next.
What you see now
From the sixth week of pregnancy, and right through lactation, the feeding sheet shows a range:
1,050 – 1,950 g/day Provisional guide — confirm with your vet
The Activity column tells you what it rests on: "Pregnant · W7", or "Nursing · W3 · 6 puppies". So you know which week the app counted, and how many puppies it counted on.
Three things to know before using it
Before the sixth week, nothing changes. A bitch's requirement does not rise through the first third of her pregnancy — so the app has nothing to add, and keeps saying "set by hand". The week itself shows from the mating on: when the figure arrives, you will have seen it coming.
Lactation follows your live puppies. A litter of nine does not ask what a litter of two asks — the gap is close to double. If you lose a puppy and record it, the range drops, and the screen tells you what it is counting on. That is deliberate: better that you see the figure move and know why.
If you had set a ration by hand, it stays put. Your figure is still served, with the range beside it. You compare, you decide. The app never corrects over you.
Why a range, not a number
Because a precise number invites a confidence it has not earned here.
These calculations come from the veterinary literature on canine nutrition. We implemented them carefully, they are tested on both sides — phone and computer give the same result — but they have not yet been reviewed by a vet, and they are measured against none of your litters. We wrote all of that down in our technical documentation, together with the four coefficients that need confirming.
A range says what a number hides: we know roughly where the answer lies, not exactly. Your vet is who closes that gap.
The thing that surprised us
Working through the arithmetic, we found this: a 25 kg bitch nursing six puppies at peak lactation needs more than a dog running a long-distance race. Appreciably more.
We checked three times, because it looks enormous. It is what the literature says: producing milk for six puppies is the most metabolically expensive thing a sled dog does — more than an Iditarod.
We are telling you rather than smoothing it over, for two reasons. First, because if those figures look too high to you, that is exactly the feedback we need. Second, because it may well be true, and a nursing bitch running herself down is a quiet problem.
What this does not do
The app changes no ration on its own. The range is a guide on screen. What gets served is what you pour.
It does not replace your vet, and it says so under every figure.
It no longer reads body condition on a bitch who is carrying. We discovered, while working on this, that the app was advising you to reduce the ration of a pregnant bitch whose body-condition score had risen — which is normal in a bitch carrying puppies. That was the opposite of what is needed. The advice is gone, replaced by "BCS not interpretable during pregnancy or nursing". The score is still shown; it is the interpretation that has gone quiet.
On the phone you get the range but not yet the week or the puppy count. A technical limit on our side, not a choice; it will follow with the next update to the app's wording.
The decision taken against the obvious
The obvious move was to show a single figure, like every other dog. It reads more simply, pours more simply, and looks more like the rest of the app.
We didn't, because last week we fixed exactly that fault: a wrong number, shown with the same confidence as the right ones, that nothing invited you to question. Doing it again with an unvalidated number — in the other direction — would have been learning the wrong lesson from our own mistake.