I had never thought about this before… DO any animals eat onions?
Love 'em.
Just in case that response is deemed to violate a GQ premature snark rule, here’s a link with a video of a chimpanzee eating an onion.
They’re on the list of foods you get from the vet that dogs shouldn’t eat.
How do I turn off autocorrect?
The onion fly is, shockingly, an eater of onions. At least in the larval stage.
They don’t like shoes that pinch their toes or people who squirt them with the garden hose but mmm, they love onions!
I don’t think they’ve met Crazy Ted. Probably wouldn’t like how he dances.
One of the two dogs my wife had growing up used to dig up onions from the garden and eat them with no apparent ill effects. But then a dog we had after getting married devoured at different times a bag of Tootsie Rolls and a bag of chocolate chip cookies and chocolate is supposed to be very bad for them, too.
Well, I knew about chocolate. A friend of mine who has been a dog lover for years says she won’t let her pooches have chocolate. I didn’t know about this until then because we rarely had dogs. The matter of onions was moot.
Chocolate isn’t nearly as bad for pets as it’s made out to be. On a per-weight basis, theobromine is only about twice as deadly to dogs as it is to humans. The real differences are that, first, most dogs are lighter than humans, and second, that dogs have no sense of restraint when it comes to food, and so will eat a lot more of something given the chance.
As for onions, my understanding was that they’re not so much dangerous to the dogs themselves, as dangerous to anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of the dog, especially behind them.
Your understanding is faulty. Ingesting alliums like onion and garlic can cause hemolytic anemia in dogs.
It’s a big deal if your dog eats onions. In our case, our 20lb dog ate three whole onions caramelized in butter. It took a ton of resources, but she survived.
Onions and garlic are said to be more deadly to cats than dogs, but why even take a chance? If your dog ate some onions, treat it as an emergency like any other poison.
Our 100+ pound puppy sometimes gets a few bits of onion that is cooked with meat in some food my wife makes. We buy vanilla ice cream so he is okay with us getting all the good stuff. (He never seems to get an ice cream headache. No fair IMO. )
We watch him and are pretty careful, just not going to crazy lengths.
And I expect that it would cause a lot of problems if an 180-lb human ate 27 whole onions, too.
:eek: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
You hear that? We got a bet! My boy says he can eat 27 onions, he can eat 27 onions.
Dogs are not supposed to be given ice cream either.
However we’ve never had any problems with them getting occasional ice cream treats.
Never give house cats an inch, they’ll always take a mile …
I had 80lb a dog who ate a large bag of milk chocolate. She tore around the house like she’d done a line of coke. We called the vet, but it was over an hour after she ate it that we realized what had happened. Vet said she would probably be fine, but give her plenty of water, and take her for a walk. She crashed afterwards, but she was snoring and moving, so we weren’t worried.
Later the vet confided that because of her size, we didn’t really have to worry if she got chocolate, as long as she did not eat baking chocolate, but don’t take that as a license to give her chocolate, and don’t tell anyone he said that, because chocolate was still dangerous for small dogs.
One (non-authoritative) reference gives the problematic onion dose as 15-30 g/kg for a dog, 5 g/kg for cats. So not quite cyanide, but there you go. Theobromine is 20-40 mg/kg, again even less for cats; a chocolate bar could contain 1% theobromine if it has a lot of cocoa.
Actually, would it? Other than others not wanting to be in my vicinity after I ingested 27 whole caramelized onions. Do humans have similar toxicity problems in large doses with onions?
I’ve got some patches of walking onions in a few places in my yard. It is an interesting plant all around including that it seems to stay green longer in the winter than most other plants. I’ve noticed that the rabbits nibble on them. It is probably more out of food scarcity than preference but they do eat them.