Doggy Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘canine hip dysplasia’

Before choosing a large orthopedic dog bed for your large dog, you need to measure your dog and consider a few other things.

Measure your dog from tip of nose to base of tail and from floor to head. This gives you an idea of how large the diameter of the dog bed should be.

Notice your dog’s sleeping profile. Does your dog curl up when sleeping, or does your dog stretch out? This is important, as most dog beds are designed to only accommodate one of the two sleeping profiles. A sofa style bed will accommodate a dog that tends to sleep in both stretch and curl sleeping style. A sofa styled large dog bed is both long and wide to accommodate a stretch sleeping style, sofa style beds also have bolstered sides to support the curling sleeper.

Instead of using the dog’s physical dimensions, use its diameter while sleeping if he or she prefers to sleep in a curl style. Use this measurement when purchasing a curl style bed.

For stretch sleeping style dogs, size the bed dimensions required using the measurements from earlier. To ensure the bed is large enough to comfortably accommodate your dog, make sure it exceeds your dogs size by 12 inches in both dimensions. Ensure that there is an extra 8 inches on the diameter of a curl style bed.

You should know your material. Different fillers are used in orthopedic dog beds. Which offers the highest quality? Well we only need to look to the material used in beds for humans suffering from back pain or some other muscular skeletal condition. For maximum comfort and support, memory foam is the material of choice for their mattress. Egg crate foam is only used in human mattress toppers. In other words if it is not good enough for humans, why give your dog second best. Maximum support for a large and heavy dog is needed.

With the above simple criteria you should now be able to better identify a great orthopedic dog bed for your dog.