Food is key to keeping your dog healthy and active. Nevertheless, while food helps the dogs stay healthy, you shouldn’t be feeding your pet with all foods you get from the store or kitchen. Some foodstuffs contain ingredients that may be harmful, leading to life-threatening conditions or death. Thus, while you feed or provide the dog with treats, you must avoid giving your pet these foods. This article explores the top 8 foods you should never feed your dog.
Never Feed Your Dog These Foods
Raised Dough
Raised dough from baked foodstuffs is one of the foods you shouldn’t allow your pet to eat. The dog’s digestive system provides an environment for the dough to start growing, causing the stomach to enlarge. When the stomach gets large, it interrupts the blood supply to the stomach resulting in a ‘twisted stomach’ and even death.
Chocolate
Despite sounding like a good treat to your pet, chocolate contains methylxanthines. Methylxanthines are stimulants that may affect or stop metabolism in dogs. Thus, giving a small piece of chocolate may trigger vomiting and diarrhea. Experts reveal that chocolate triggers irregular heart function, seizures, or death.
Avocados
While avocados are nutritious fruits for humans, the fruit contains substances that are harmful to dogs. This fruit has persin, a fatty acid strain that becomes toxic when you feed it to dogs in large quantities. It’ll be good to keep the food from your dogs, especially the puppies, as persin may affect its chow.
Garlic and Onions
Garlic and onions are among the most common spices individuals include in foods. Nonetheless, it’ll be good to keep your pet from these spices. Your dog may develop anemia after eating them, as onions and garlic affect or kill the red blood cells. Remember, even little amounts can affect the pet’s health.
Raisins and Grapes
Experts warn against feeding your dog innocuous fruits in dried or fresh forms. These fruits have components that cause a wide range of debilitating health complications in dogs, including kidney failure. Thus, to save your pet from kidney failure, avoid giving it innocuous fruits like grapes and raisins.
Dairy Products, Including Milk
While puppies will feed on milk from their mother, you should never give them additional dairy products from other animals. Giving your dog milk from cows, goats, camels, etc., can make them sick. Dogs lack some enzymes to digest fatty acids and sugars from these dairy products.
Macadamia Nuts
Continuous research shows that feeding your dog macadamia nuts may result in adverse health complications. While you may consider it the best nut cookie, it’ll be appropriate to keep it from your pet. Besides causing digestion issues, eating macadamia nuts may affect the general health of your dog.
Sugary Drinks and Foods
While treating your dog, it’s always good to keep it off foods with high levels of processed sugars. Like humans, ingesting foods with high sugar levels may result in various health implications in dogs. These health implications include tooth decay, weight gain, and diabetes, which result in ill health.
What to Do If Your Dogs Eats These Foods Accidentally
While you may try to keep your dogs from these foods, they may eat some of the foods accidentally. In some circumstances, your dog might show signs of food poisoning, while other symptoms may develop later. Below are the vital things to do if your dog eats these foods accidentally:
- Stay composed and remove the dog from the restricted food or poisonous food substance
- Understand the dog’s condition and take note of the symptoms
- Reach out to your veterinarian. Ensure you have programmed your vet’s number on the phone. Alternatively, you can contact the nearest pet poison or emergency clinic hotline. You can ask if you can induce vomiting or take the pet immediately.
- You can collect the packaging or food your dog has eaten accidentally. It’ll also be important to collect samples of diarrhea or vomit to help the vet diagnose and treat your pet.
- Follow the veterinarian’s instructions on alleviating or treating the condition.
Summing Up
Like humans, you should never give or allow your dog to eat some food. Foods like chocolate, avocados, garlic, onions, dairy products, sugary foods, macadamia nuts, and raised nuts contain substances harmful to dogs. Despite your efforts to keep these foods away from the dog, they consume them accidentally. After eating these foods accidentally, take note of the foods and the current symptoms and call the nearest emergency clinic or vet for help.