Can I feed my dog vegetarian dog food?

More and more people than ever are adopting vegetarian lifestyles today – and with that trend comes the increasing popularity of the idea of giving pet dogs a vegetarian diet. The main problem with this is that dogs obviously have different dietary requirements than humans, so that while a vegetarian diet is actually very healthy for a person (probably more similar to the diets that people had hundreds of years ago), it isn't so much for dogs. Dogs are omnivorous, which means that they eat a part meat, part plant diet – but they are also opportunistic eaters. Dogs in the wild would pretty much eat whatever they could find, from rodents to birds.

Of course, this means that feeding a dog any kind of commercially produced dog food can't exactly be called “natural”. But that's OK – in fact, theories that it's more “natural” to feed a dog raw meat are not entirely accurate, since our pet dogs aren't in the wild. Because they're domestic animals, they don't have the same tolerance of and immunity to certain bacteria found in raw meat. Mimicking the diet they'd have in the wild isn't necessarily the ideal way to decide on a diet for dogs in health terms. That's why, when choosing a commercial pet food, the question isn't so much whether it's meat-based or vegetarian, but more about the quality of the food in terms of whether or not it provides the correct nutritional balance required to keep the dog happy and healthy.

 

The main standard for this (in the USA) is the AAFCO – the Association of American Feed Control Officials. If the food is of a good enough quality to provide dogs with their basic nutritional needsm it should be AAFCO certified. Best not to trust a commercial food without this stamp of approval. There are vegetarian dog foods which do come with good references and recommendations, so talk to your veterinarian or trained pet store staff to find out what the best available food for your dog is.

Be careful when you're trying to making the switch. Switching your dog from one type of food to another should never be done suddenly, even if the two foods are similar, as this will more than likely upset the dog's digestive system and cause discomfort or ill health. It's best to gradually start mixing the old food with the new food, increasing the new one and decreasing the old one more and more every day until eventually your dog has been successfully switched over to the new one. This is particularly important when the foods are considerably different – in this case, switching from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian one.

You will also need to make up for the nutrients missing from the dog's new diet by using mineral and vitamin supplements – again, talk to an expert about this. It's important to make sure that your dog is getting all that he or she needs from food and supplements. Tests have shown that dogs on vegetarian diets can be lacking in calcium and other essential nutrients, so take care that this doesn't happen to your dog. And some dogs, just like people, can have bad reactions to protein replacement sources such as soy. If your dog doesn't thrive on a vegetarian diet, you might have to consider feeding a meat-based diet after all.

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