"SKINNY" DOG? I thought I would write this for all the people on here who ask questions and are willing to learn but may not have their questions answered correctly or at all due to arguing or people without proper knowledge or a full understanding of what is asked answering the questions. I will try my best to answer and cover the common questions pertaining to this subject. This is addressing the "skinny" dog pictures.  We have all seen the pictures posted with what most people who have never seen a conditioned dog refer to as "skinny". Here is a picture of Tea, this shows a fit looking, well exercised and muscled dog. She is playing with a flirt pole..

Now, if you are reading this and never have seen this what do you think? What do you see? You, like many others, probably look straight at the lines on the side, the ribs and the spine bumps showing. When most people see ribs on a dog they think what? The dog is skinny! The dog is underfed, abused, neglected, starved! Well now thats not always the case, allow me to explain..First off, lets go over what it means to have a conditioned dog.. Conditioning a dog in essence means to exercise and feed your dog so that it is at peak physical condition, much like an athlete does in preperation for a season of a sport. People may condition a dog for many reasons, some being reasons being.. dog shows, weight pulling competitions, dock diving, lure coursing or just to better their dogs health and fitness.When a person conditions a dog the dog will, just like people, lose the excess fat from its body. When this happens muscles become more pronounced, and yes ribs (and sometimes spine) will show. You may wonder, why if a dog is being exercised will the ribs show?  Well... lets look at a picture of some dog muscle anatomy!

See the triangular shaped muscle that the arrow is pointing to. That is the Latissimus dorsi muscle, or Lat muscle. That covers the rib cage on a dog.

In this picture of Franzi's dog Chilly, you can see the Lat mucle as indicated by the arrow. You can see the clear lines forming that triangle shape. This muscle, like all muscles, require exercises (and in some cases, gentics) to become visible. Conditioning of a dog, as stated above, removes most if not all of the excess fat from the dog. Now what mostly covers the ribs of a dog is what? Fat. When all that excess fat is burned off it leaves the ribs only to be covered by the Lat muscle.

Here is Tea, this is what she looks like wearing her "winter weight". She is not conditioned in this picture.. See how no mucsle tone or ribs are visible at all, everything is covered by a layer of fat.

This is Tea after 3 weeks of conditioning. Notice how that layer of fat has been exercised off and you can see all the muscles and the Lat line covering the ribs. A few ribs are slightly visible.Now lets go over other exercises and how genetics come into play! The Lat muscle is a very hard to define muscle in some dogs. Some dogs will show a perfectly defined Lat muscle just from running alone, some require other exercises (like springpole or drag work) to even get the muscle to show a small amount, if at all. This is because genetics sometimes just dont permit it to be as pronounced on one dog as it is on the other. Some dogs, like Chilly and Tea, have a easily seen Lat muscle and some dogs dont. Does it mean one dog is being "starved" and the other isnt? No. It just means one dogs body is different than another, kind of like the how one persons body will differ from another persons when exercised. Another issue with pictures posted of dogs in a conditioned or well exercised state is what the dog is doing when the picture is taken. This is commonly a problem because the dogs have little fat on them, which means their ribs are only being covered by the Lat muscle which may or may not be extremely well defined, so if the picture is taken while exercising or inhaling deeply, the ribs may be more visible than what they normally are when the dog is in a resting state. This will lead to the dog looking extremely "ribby" when it is in fact not at all. Had the picture been taken when the dog was exhaling or at one second later the dog would have little to no rib showing, depending on the dogs body structure and how their Lat muscle is defined.

Here is a picture of Turbo exercising on a slat mill, as you can see in the picture he was caught while inhaling, notice how the ribs are clearly visible..

Now here is Turbo again, but the picture was taken a second later while he wasnt deeply inhaling..Notice how the ribs that were so clearly visible before are now covered by the Lat muscle and only a hint of the last few are visible. It makes all the difference in what second the picture was taken on whether or not the dog looks overly "ribby".
Some other comments made about dogs in a conditioned state are "This dog looks nice, but I like more meat on my dogs" or something similar, is this wrong? No! Each person has what they like a dog to look like, some people like to keep their dogs very fit and in peak physical condition. That isnt really what all people prefer to do and its perfectly fine! Some people like a dog to be kept at more of a pet weight, NOT OBESE, but not quite as conditioned as the dogs pictured above. Again, that is fine. So long as people understand that a dog in that body condition is not emactiated, neglected, skinny, etc. and that it takes a lot of work to get a dog to look like that and quite a lot of food for the dog to be able to get into that condition. So in essence the comments about a dog being "starved" into that condition are completely false and in fact IMPOSSIBLE.

That goes into the last part of this, the idea that you can somehow starve or cut feed to achive the results above. That is impossible for the simple fact that, when a dog (or human) is starved, after the fat is gone, the muscle is quick to follow. So instead of a dog looking like the dogs above it looks like...

That dog looks nothing like the dogs pictured above. That is because the dog was starved. You can see how all the bones in the dog are visible. Every rib is clearly visible when the dog is in a relaxed pose, the top of the rib care is clearly visible, there is zero hint of a Lat muscle covering the ribs. The hip points and entire spine is visible, there is zero muscle covering those areas at all. That and the dog has little to no muscle mass in its legs, as well as the gut area being sunken in. The dogs starving body cannibalised the muscle tissue to keep itself alive after it used what fat it had. This is not the same, nor is it close to the dogs posted on this page.

I hope this answered some of the questions people have pertaining to the "skinny" dogs posted on this page and helped the people who truly want to know about the conditioned dogs this page posts.

*All photos used (except the last one of the emaciated dog) are of American Pit Bull Terriers. Slight variations are expected when other breeds such as the American Staffordshire Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, or American Bully are conditioned. Each breed conditioned will look somewhat different due to breed standard and body structure.