Putting Your Dog With Vegetarian Diet?

There are a number of reasons why owners consider putting their dogs on a vegetarian diet. It could be because of health problems, environmental and/or ethical concerns.

For one, meat is one of, if not the most polluted food source right now. It contains various toxic substances that come from antibiotics, hormones, and harmful chemicals such as lead and mercury.

Also, a high-fat high-protein diet composed mainly of meat and bones may not be entirely appropriate for the modern pet dog since they exercise less and thus less energy is needed. A vegetarian diet can reduce the strain on the liver and prevent obesity.

Lastly, from an environmental and ethical perspective, producing and consuming meat is expensive (cows and chickens have to be killed) and environmentally-unfriendly.

To determine if putting your dog on a vegetarian diet is ideal, first know what kind of eater a dog is.

According to experts, scientific evidence shows that dogs clearly have a carnivorous bias. From DNA studies, we know that dogs evolved directly from the timber wolf around 15,000 years ago. And as thus, theyre bodies are optimized for meat eating from their sharp pointy teeth, lack of salivary amylase (an enzyme that breaks down starch before it enters the stomach) , down to their large stomachs, short intestinal system and higher stomach acid concentration (that allows for faster digestion of meat and kills disease-causing bacteria in decaying meat).

Dogs however, have significant omnivore ability and thus have an unusually flexible diet. This is because they have evolved over the thousands of years they have spent beside man and surviving on food scraps and human leftovers.

It is safe to say then, that dogs can eat variety of foods including vegetables. But, they are naturally designed to eat meat. Armed with this knowledge, you can make sound decisions about what to feed your dog.

Properly designed vegetarian dog foods work but it is important to give preference to meat-based products.

For instance, bones provide key nutrients that hard to obtain from vegetarian diets. Nutrients from bones are especially important for growing puppies.

It is also hard to prepare a balanced vegetarian diet that has all the vitamins and nutrients that a dog needs for optimal health. Supplements are thus crucial. Without supplements, it is highly unlikely that your dog will receive enough vitamins, minerals and other nutrients from a vegetarian diet to keep his/her bones strong.

Lastly, some vets voiced out their concerns that a vegetarian diet even with supplements may not be enough to keep your dog healthy. Heres why: Dogs can adapt very well to a poor diet. This means that it may take years before you can see any negative effects of the diet on your dogs health, by which time there might already be serious repercussions on your dogs health.