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.
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.
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.
