Hey All, I currently give my 7 month old boy some pieces of apple and raw carrots every now and then. Any adivice of the best fruits and veggies? and also the quantities Thanks
Hi there, it's not something I feed my dog, fruits and veggies, although he'll nick any soft fruit from the garden. Do you mean as feeding a homemade diet or something?
You probably already know that onions and grapes are toxic, but there are many fruits and veg that dogs can enjoy. Holly loves apples and melon, and picks her own blackberries in the autumn. She also loves raw carrot and brocolli, the crunchier the better.
Sam enjoyed banana as a pup and still does , plus blackberries , apple . I give both dogs carrot as a treat but if adding veg to their food as part of their daily diet , I lightly cook it first as dogs cannot break down the cell walls of raw veg , so whilst it might be good for their teeth, they don't get the value of it unless lightly steamed or boiled . My two love potato ( never ever raw ), broccoli , carrot , cauliflower , cabbage , runner beans , anything really except onions which shouldn't ever be given , raw or cooked .
Maisie will eat any raw veg or fruit except for lettuce and celery! She especially loves the heart of broccoli or cauliflower.
Lucan's a little fussy when it comes to fruit and veg. He'll eat cabbage & broccoli both cooked and raw, cooked carrots but not raw, he won't eat any salad ingredients, no apples, but will pick pears off the tree to eat and loves strawberries.
Carrots, melon, apple, banana, pear........pretty much any fruit and veg that falls on the floor. Onions and grapes definitely out. Lilly won't eat parsnips or green beans. Haven't any other veg she wont eat. Mostly she gets it raw, but if she has a home cooked meal, I will lightly cook them.
As treats? Or as part of a raw diet? Not much difference I guess, other than quantity. One of my favourites to give occasionally is red beets. They are very hard so give a good chew, and they are sweet so dogs like them. They turn pee and poop a scary red that looks like blood. When feeding raw sometimes a meal will have more bone than other times and then poop might be a lighter colour. Feed beets at the same time, pink poop. The things that amuse me. On a more serious note, when Oban got sick his Vet said he had a cold gut and should have only neutral or warm foods. In TCM foods are believed to have cooling or warming affects. She said no more red pepper for a while as it is a cool food. Too bad, they were a favourite as well.
In TCM, yes. It was confusing to me because as the link describes, Oban is a hot dog. But the Vet said the gut was cold so no cooling foods. REally, by the time he was deathly sick he probably was not feeling so hot, literally. Of course red peppers aren't even on this list, and lists don't agree. http://www.acreaturecomfort.com/yinyanbalance.htm
Sigh....I read the article. I do declare I have a bias against things like this - as in I think they are pretty much nonsense. Why do you believe things like this? Is there some kind of sound theory behind it?
I didn't believe. I respected people who did but thought it worked for them becasue they believed. Western medicine failed Oban. He'd lost over 20% of his body weight from month and a half long diarrhoea and with the amount of Prednisone he was on he should have, in the words of his previous Vet, "been shitting bricks." My neighbour, also a Vet, had two dogs in her own practice with the same symptoms, nothing she tried worked, they went to this new Holistic, Integrative Vet and they lived. So we went, he not only recovered, he is now off his allergy meds too. It worked for us and I didn't believe.
I had a a particularly horrible verruca on my foot. I went to see a foot doctor, who gave me a homeopathic remedy - I paid £50 for it (the foot doctor was in a very expensive part of London). I took this pill (which was sugar and water) for a month, and my verruca went away. For a good while I puzzled over this, it was a very powerful thing - I had taken a useless remedy, and yet 'been cured' how could that be? Well, it was just a coincidence. My brain is wired to respond to this, it's a human thing to spot patterns, but it's a mistake to think one thing follows another....I still have this nagging doubt about homeopathy that is hard to suppress - because I once took a sugar and water pill and a verruca on my foot went away. But it's just nonsense, it's just my strange human brain playing tricks.
To answer the OP's question -- the best advice is not to feed your dog fruits and vegetables. Will they eat fruits and vegetables? Yes. The common ones you'll hear about are bananas, strawberries, spinach, green beans. They are not inherently harmful but if your dog cannot properly assimilate the nutrients from them why bother feeding them?
Dogs can digest fruit and vegetables though. Especially if cooked (which is why we mostly cook veg we give to our dog but sometimes we give raw stuff like whole carrots as a low kilojoule crunchy chew).
Mine have apples melon banana bits of pear broccli and sprouts They love it ! Some Mixed in with brown rice and tripe and chicken meat I swear they eat better than me lol
I don't go out of my way to feed my two fruit and veg, but I'll chuck them the end of a courgette or what-not if I'm preparing them. Willow tends to enjoy everything. Shadow tends to look at me as if I'm trying to poison him.
