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.
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.
vegan dog food exists, don’t listen to the carnists here. the technology is evolving and people are in denial