My son just adopted a young (~6 months) beagle from the local animal shelter which promptly ate the stuffing out of his new chew toy and got a tummy ache. When he (the dog) was taken outside for his walk he ate some grass which soon made him puke up the batting he had ingested, thereby relieving his indigestion.
My question is, how do dogs know to do this? Is it taught to them by other dogs? Is it instinctual? Did they read it in a book somewhere? Or do they just eat everything without discrimination and sometimes get lucky? How, exactly, is this important information passed from generation to generation?
We had a dog whose digestive system seemed to require that she eat grass and vomit, sometimes as often as every other day. Snow cover during the winter could make that difficult for her. We took her to the vet several times for this, and annually for shots, and he found nothing wrong with her. She finally died of a stroke at 14.
You better be ready to have your life run by a tri color overlord. I have 2 beagles and they get their way by cute. They can turn it up when needed. They must be spoiled. They will show you.
OK, so let’s try this again. Maybe I’m off base, but I’ve been told that when you see a dog eating grass, it means the dog has an upset stomach. So my question is, “How do dogs know that eating grass will make them feel better?” It doesn’t seem obvious that a carnivore would understand the benefits of bulk fiber. Do they learn this from other dogs, experimentation, or what?
Based on my experience with dog ownership (2 years with a Bichon Frise), a dog’s thought process goes something like this:
Hmm, what’s this? I think I’ll try to eat it.
I know that doesn’t answer your question exactly, but it seems to me like dogs just try to eat EVERYTHING. Does he ever eat grass when he doesn’t have an upset tummy?
My Lab (4 years old) has done the same thing eat-grass-and-vomit thing since we got her, she was 13 weeks old the day we picked her up. It happens about once a month, as long as six weeks in between. She’ll come running up to you and beg to go outside, but more relentlessly than she usually does. If you look at her mouth, she’s usually drooling as she’s jumping for the door. Once outside, she goes for certian types of grass, generally the taller, greener clumps over the rest of the usual grass. Graze for a minute or two, then the retching. Two vomit cycles, and she’s good to go.
Of course, I still have no idea how she knew grass makes her either feel better or vomit. I’ve been more curious as to why she goes for a certain kind of grass. I’ll just have to wait until she chews herself an opposable thumb and she’ll be able to write the answer down (should be within the next week or two, I think).
I have a Beagle mix bitch and a male Boxer pup (about 6-7 months old) and I have never seen Macy the Beagle do this. The Boxer Riley, however, brings all kinds of scattered grasses, tree branches and various detritus onto my front porch for my purview. He also eats grass, but I have never seen him vomit afterwards.
My guess is that it’s instinctual behavior and gets passed along genetically. Perhaps some dogs are more prone to bellyaches and this subsequent solution as well.
Yeah, it’s definitely not a “they’ll eat anything” thing. My dog doesn’t eat grass 99.9% of the time he’s outside, but when he’s feeling sick, he goes for the grass, and nothing will stand in his way until he throws up. He’ll sit at the door and cry much differently from when he just needs to go outside.
AFAIK none of the dogs I’ve ever owned or had any close association with ever ate grass if they weren’t feeling ill. So it doesn’t seem to be an “eat everything and see what happens” kind of thing. And, as KCB615 notes, they always seem to go for the long leafy blades when they do eat grass. So it sure looks to me like a directed, purposeful type of behavior. I just can’t figure out if it’s learned or instinctual. Surely someone somewhere has done a study about this!
When most humans have a hangover, they want greasy stodgy food to make it better.
When dogs feel sick they want long grassy food to make it better.
Barfing is pretty much de rigur for the latter, optional for the former.
We have two Black Labs, 8 and 9 years old, and I could’ve written the above post - word for word. Our dogs have always exhibited this behavior (one more so than the other), though not very frequently. I’ve had dogs most all my life, and have seen grass eating enough to believe it is some type of instinctual trait. It most certainly presents itself more often when the animal appears to be sick to its stomach. Our dogs drool just before they barf. I try to get them out if I can, or at least to the linoleum. It doesn’t happen very often.
When they do have access to grass, they most definitely have a preference: This Stuff - Timothy grass. Absolutely no idea why. The older dog, Mojo, heads right toward the first clump he can find. I can’t tell the OP why dogs do this, but it seems to be innate behavior. Perhaps one of the vets here will drop by soon with a more definitive response.
I’ve been searching around and it seems to boil down to:
We have no fucking clue
It’s not a “pets will eat anything” thing.
a)It seems to have to do with gastric distress, or possibly an instinctual response to deficiency of a certain type of viatmin or nutrient (or both/either depending on circumstance)
a1)On that last part, one Is aw compared them to their wild relatives who get their roughage via eating the undigested contents of their prey’s stomach (hey, noone said nature was’t gross). Domesticated dogs may not have this roughage so they resort to eating grass to clear it up.
