Thanks everyone, especially for the laughs, WhyNot & Hamster King!
Our former dog (now deceased from old age) once was so mad we left her home on Christmas Day she got into the Christmas stocking stuff. Turns out she did not like Mentos, which were spread out all over the floor. But she ate the entire bag of little foil-wrapped Santas, including the mesh bag. Found the foil and the mesh out in the back yard when I was cleaning up in the spring.
Lily (JRT) doesn’t get into too much anymore (age 10) but does like to chew on plastic. She ends up ingesting quite a bit of it.
I didn’t know that raw chicken bones were safe. Very interesting.
Their recipe for trail mix is not very discerning. In the not-so-wild, they’ll also eat cat poop right out of the litter box, litter and all. Also, human poop is fair game.
And a shit ton of vets are on record as recommending Science Diet, IAMS, or other filth marketed as “Dog food.”
I don’t mind at all, so long as you don’t mind feeding your pets garbage. Of course, most humans don’t mind eating garbage so why would we treat our pets any different?
Sort of. Chocolate contains theobromine, which is toxic to dogs at elevated levels. Of course this varies from dog to dog. Also toxic to dogs are grapes, onions, and raisins.
This reminds me of the time when my wife, who had not been around dogs for a while (probably since she left home after college), was reacquainted with the nature of a dog.
She had joined a cheese club that sent various cheeses directly from France via Fed Ex every month. Damned expensive, but the cheese was really good. And some of it stunk, the way a good cheese will. I don’t know what she was thinking at the time, but she had about a one pound half wheel of a particularly smelly cheese and she reached down and placed it about three inches in front of my Dalmatian’s nose (to “let the dog smell it”, she later said). She was genuinely surprised when the dog took about a nanosecond to chomp down on the cheese, almost taking her fingers with it.
She yelled at me “Did you see what your dog did?”
I was laughing pretty hard, but managed to reply “You put cheese in front of a dog. What the hell did you expect was going to happen?”
I stopped laughing when I realized that was $40 worth of cheese I wasn’t going to enjoy.
A piece of chocolate won’t kill a dog, but if a dog has a lot of chocolate it can be bad for the dog. Incidentally dogs aren’t special in this regard. Theobromine is toxic to humans as well but humans are a lot bigger than dogs and you have to eat a LOT of chocolate to get adverse effects from the theobromine.
I think if I ate 2 pounds of chocolate in one sitting I would be pretty sick too. Up until recently I have only really had two dogs in my life because they both lived between 16-17 years. They both ate what we ate for the most part with no problems. My 4 year 0old Shi’Tzu and my 5 month old chocolate lab are the same so we will see what happens. Just for the record dark chocolate has 8-10 times the amount of theobromine as milk chocolate. A dog would have to consume about a pound of milk chocolate to show symptoms of theobromine poisoning.
Does anyone know when canned dog food was introduced to the market?
Actually the problem is that dogs and some other domesticated animals don’t metabolize the theobromine as efficiently as humans. Cats are even more susceptible.
Yes true it’s more the metabolism than the size that makes the difference. The point was just that theobromine is bad in general if you have enough of it, not just for dogs.
I can’t speak for dog food, but can tell you that the common varieties of dry cat food contain a lot of grain fillers which are not good for cats. We had to switch to a rather expensive dry food. Also (cats again), salmon and whitefish are both problems for older cats, as they aggravate the thyroid.
I now return you to your regular canine-oriented discussion.
Raw horsemeat plus dry chow was the only thing my family ever fed our dogs. Plus whatever table scraps they could beg or steal. I doubt if dog-grade horsemeat is processed with any more sanitary procedures than people food.
One problem with dogs who eat table scraps is that it might not be just “high in fat” it might be almost ALL fat. What is the bit of a steak that is least likely to get eaten by a human? The fat. What bits of any meat are most likely to be left on the plate for the dog? The stringy, gluggy, fatty bits. There’s a big difference between a dog who might get a strip of fat once in a while and one whose night time meal consists of fat offcuts from what ever meat every human in the house had for dinner.
