How to feed your dog vegan
How to feed your dog vegan
Do you guys have good resources on how to feed your dog vegan?
There are a lot of pages online that simply say "consult an advisor" who will calculate what your dog needs. I'm not bad in maths, I could calculate it myself if I'd knew what the dog needs. I can look into commercial dog food ingrediants but there are declarations like "minerals" without any further specificiations. Moreover, I eat a huge variety in differrent vegetables and food in general, yet my dog shall always eat the same according to vegan complete feed. Moreover, I can not properly judge whether a feed is good because the information is missing.
Where does the nutritionist get his information from? There must be someone who has studied the needs of a dog based on size and breed and created a formula such that you can calculate the servings.
I've looked into books on amazon and the comments are horrible. There's nothing on libgen and google scholar doesn't yield appropriate results.
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Overall, it seems the jury is still out on whether feeding our carnivorous four-legged friends vegan diets is actually safe. What we can be certain about is that both strong pro- or anti vegan pet feeding arguments are potentially misguided, and not backed by evidence. For now, owners committed to feeding their pets a vegan diet should take a cautious approach. Use a complete and balanced commercial vegan diet formulation, and schedule regular health checks with a veterinarian.
There is an urgent need for large-scale population-based studies to further investigate this question, with a particular focus on assessing the dietary aspects cited to be of particular concern, e.g., taurine and folate. For guardians wishing to feed their pets vegan diets at the current time, based on the available evidence it is recommended that commercially produced vegan diets are used since these are less likely to lead to nutrient imbalances.
"In the few studies that measured health directly through examining the animals or running laboratory tests, there was little evidence of adverse health impacts from vegan pet diets. Nutrient levels were generally within normal range, no heart or eye abnormalities were detected, and body and coat condition were normal."
"However, it’s important to note these studies often involved low numbers of animals, with vegan diets only being fed to animals for a few weeks – so deficiency may not have had time to develop. Furthermore, the study designs were often ones considered less reliable in evidence-based practice, for example with no control groups used as a comparison."
"For now, owners committed to feeding their pets a vegan diet should take a cautious approach. Use a complete and balanced commercial vegan diet formulation, and schedule regular health checks with a veterinarian."
For me personally I wouldn't try to keep a dog and especially a cat on a vegan diet until there's more robust evidence to say that it would be safe to do so.
Thanks for your input. There's enough evidence for the akc https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/nutrition/dogs-can-adapt-to-a-vegan-diet/
Dogs prefer meat, but a vegan or vegetarian diet is possible with the right supplements.
Which means there's also enough evidence for me. Peta may be biased but if you believe their work is good, you may also quote them https://www.peta.org/living/animal-companions/vegetarian-cats-dogs/
Can Dogs and Cats Be Vegan?
Yes! With the right planning and care, your dog or cat can be vegan. Of course, it’s important to ensure that their nutritional requirements are met.
Like with a human vegan diet, if you do it wrong, it's bad. But if you feed yourself or your dog wrongly with meat it's also bad.
Both those links don't inspire confidence, neither are written by scientists or universities as far as I can tell.
The article that's being quoted through this thread comes with a lot of caveats to it and the other article I found mentions the poor quality of the studies mentioned in said article.
The risks and lack of robust data should be emphasised and the extra effort and monitoring a pet owner would need to be engaged in to make sure their pet stays healthy be first and foremost when talking about vegan pet diets.
I would personally be happy if pets can have vegan diets, but their safety should come first.
Edit: Accidentally said op was quoting an article throughout this thread when a mod has been doing so. I edited that to be more specific sorry for the mistake.
The problem with scientific papers is that I could provide you one, or even more but I am not (yet) in the psoition to judge which paper is reliable. There are too many parties involed and it depends upon the financee of the paper. Therefore I provided the link to akc which depends on scientific and general believes. They have no direct incentive in one or the other stance. One of their goals is to take care of dogs. If it was questionable, they should reflect it in their stance. They do not reflect it, hence there is not enough evidence against it, as long as you take proper care of the dog.
One paper supporting a vegan diet
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0265662
But:
This research and its publication open access was funded by food awareness organisation ProVeg International
That's why I'd take the position of being cautious and waiting for better quality studies.
There really needs to be more studies done and then a meta study to really nail this down. Or at least some high quality well reviewed studies.
That's alright. Right now, I'm curious enough about the nutritional needs of the dog and how a vegan diet for dogs work