The house I used to live in had a garden - and one year, we had tomatoes like you wouldn’t believe! I mean bushels of tomatoes. More tomatoes than you’ve ever seen in your life. We used to play catch with our dog Eightball with the tomatoes. She’d eat maybe half of it, then want to catch another one. At one point, our yard was littered with 1/2 eaten tomatoes. She would never eat any other vegetable but corn - if we gave her part of a hamburger that had lettuce on it she would nose away the lettuce and eat only the meat. She’s dead now though. Totally unrelated to her eating habits.
The current doglet of love, the German Shepherd, eats salad. He loves salad. He doesn’t much care for vinaigrette dressings - he prefers thousand island. Actually, he pretty much eats EVERYTHING. Including books, puffy shower thingies (you know - those poofy things you put soap on in the shower?), shoes, boots, sweaters, table legs, casters on chairs…
Whenever we peel carrots at Casa de Lightnin’, we don’t bother peeling them into the trash- we just let 'em fall on the kitchen floor. Most of the peels don’t even make it that far.
However, my oldest dog’s favorite treat is bananas. Man, that dog goes crazy for 'em.
Ditto- Daisy loves bananas. She will linger by your feet with those eyes waiting for a piece. SHe also love edamame pods.
However, I once dropped a radish. She swooped in and picked it up and ran to her “I just stole food” spot. A minute later- she comes back and DROPS the radish at my feet, and walks away.
Nuts. No, really. We’ve had two dogs that adored them. The first was a terripoo; when he got older and started to lose his front teeth, my mother was getting rather worried about him, until she realized that the sharp things that he left on the carpet were hazelnut shells. He was stealing them out of the basket on the end table – left there because we thought no animal would bother them – and cracking them with his molars. End of worrying about teeth.
The second was a St. Bernard. She was moderately picky otherwise and wouldn’t otherwise eat green stuff, but if you had shelled almonds within fifty feet of her she would sit on your feet and drool puddles. Her two other favorite foods were liver and baked beans.
Currently, my folks have a Labrador retriever who will eat anything that does not run faster than he does. Ordinarily it’s difficult to get dogs to take medication in capsules, because it smells funny (the medication, although an argument can also be made for the dog), so my mother will get some brauschwaeger or bread and tuck the pill in the middle of a lump to get the dog to eat it. Well, after he had his dewclaws removed, the dog had some antibiotics to take; the lab snapped at the bread wad and managed to only get half of it, and the pill dropped on the tile.
“Oh, well,” said Mom, and went to retrieve the pill so that she could mash it into another wad of bread and try the process again. The dog saw her bend over to get it and executed a mad dive, licking the pill off the floor. We don’t worry about medicating that dog, either.
We’ve also had some very strange cats. We once had a pair that would team up to disassemble deli sandwiches. The “normal” one would steal the lunchmeat, and the other one would use one claw to delicately pick out and eat all the iceburg lettuce. Currently, Mom and Dad own a cat who must be repeatedly removed from any glass that contains alcohol, right down to the ginger ale and Angostura bitters Dad takes for stomach upset.
My late lamented springer spaniel loved watermelon. LOVED it. He would do anything for it. His favourite thing to do would be to pick up the rinds we threw in the yard after eating it.
My current pup, a pit bull, loves the stems from collard greens and broccoli. Makes him fart even worse than usual, but to see him begging for greens makes it all worthwhile.
Growing up, we had a miniature French poodle. My Dad made a habit of eating at least two pieces of fruit a night while he was watching TV (sounds healthy, no? the fruit came somewhere in between his first and second huge bowl of ice cream. . .) Anyway, the poodle would run to anywhere in the house that anyone was peeling a piece of fruit and beg for some. He loved it all!
Our dogs enjoy just about all fruits and vegetables, and are particularly fond of green beans, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, and pineapple. Unfortunately, the fiber seems to stimulate their digestive systems in unpleasant ways, and if I feed the doggies too much roughage, the gaseous exhaust gets a bit unpleasant later, when the dogs are sleeping on the bed right next to me. Phew. Pineapple farts are OK, but canine veggie farts will wake me out of a sound sleep.
Our dog, Sienna, has a large food vocabulary because of all the things she likes to eat. One veggie in particular that she really loves are peas, strangely enough. She used to eat carrots when we had guinea pigs, and, although she likes them, it was mostly a jealousy thing. One strange thing is that, while she loves the taste of banana, the texture squicks her out, so we have to give her tiny pieces of banana so she can’t get sick of the texture before she finishes the piece.
Two of my parents’ dogs are crazy about green beans. I mean obsessed. They really prefer them uncooked. When I’m breaking the beans for supper, those two hover around me like I’m handing out steak.
-Lil
Seconded. My puppy (she’s almost four, she’s still my puppy :D) LOVES playing with grapes.
The study showing grapes were dangerous involved dogs eating at least nine ounces of grapes. According to this site(warning, pdf), that constitutes a “large” bunch. I wouldn’t ever give my puppy that much of any human food (well, except meat, but only if it’s not seasoned).
She’s still going to get a few grapes tossed to her while I’m eating them. But while we’re at it, from here: Foods that Fido Should Avoid:
Chocolate
Cocoa Mulch
Fatty foods
Nuts
Mulch
Onions
Potatoes
Artificial Sweeteners
Turkey
Alcoholic beverages
Avocado (the only “fatty” member of the vegetable family)
Coffee (all forms of coffee)
Moldy or spoiled foods
Salt
Yeast dough
Garlic
(I deleted the descriptions of why, you can view them on the site.)
My malemute is a veggie fiend! I’ve had to reinforce the garden fence more than once to keep her from trashing the whole thing. Her favorite is probably tomatoes–I give her the split ones when it rains and she can catch one thrown from thirty feet away. She is also passionately fond of raw snow peas, cucumbers, green beans, eggplant, apples, pears, corn, spinach, watermelon, canteloupe, honeydew, and will sometimes eat citrus as well. One year she very carefully dug under the fence and carried off and consumed every damned pumpkin I had! I throw stuff out on the compost pile and I’ve had to stop throwing grape stems and onion peels because she’ll mack them down and they’re not good for her. She also likes nuts, especially hazelnuts, cashews and almonds, and digs peanuts and peanut butter as well. I ought to try her on the canned green bean thing, because we’re trying to get her weight down so her arthritic back leg will heal a bit and she’s always hungry.
The junior dog is still somewhat picky in his tastes, but he’s starting to catch up. We recently discovered his unholy fondness for banana chips, and he also likes nuts.
Our cat will take your arm off for cinnamon roll frosting…
i’ll be sure and let the dive master know about too many grapes, altho the ‘wolf pack’ only gets grapes on a strictly-limited basis.
the macaw (aka the hook-billed red-headed velociraptor from hell) gets pretty much whatever she wants except for avacados, liquor and chocolate. there’s another something she can’t have, but i can’t think of what it is at the moment.
My golden retriever, Snoopy, was fond of most fruits and vegetables. She loved oranges and tangerines, and enjoyed chewing on apples. She was strangely fond of lettuce, and she loved broccoli – she would sit in the middle of the kitchen floor and wait while Mom cooked it.
I was somewhat surprised to see turkey on the “no” list; we always gave her a bit at Thanksgiving and Christmas (only meat though, no skin).
I’m surprised people feed their dogs spoiled or moldy food.
Gah… if you won’t eat it because of its state, what makes you think the animal (mammal) would eat it and not have any side effects??? Common sense, if you won’t eat it, don’t give it to Fido (or Jack the cat or Henry the horse).
I don’t know how I forgot to mention this…Snoopy was also good at detecting spoiled produce. Mom kept the onions and potatoes in a little basket under a side table in the kitchen (Snoopy never bothered food items like these, though she would carefully inspect the floor under the table after every meal). Every once in awhile, she would pace back and forth between this basket and wherever my mom happened to be sitting, occasionally stopping to sniff at a particular onion or potato that turned out to be in the first stages of rotting.
Our dog loves spinach and carrots and mandarin oranges. I will see if she likes other fruits and veggies. I don’t generally buy canned vegetables, but now I’m curious to expose her to Green Beans, the Greatest Food of All.
