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How Do Vegans Feed Their Dogs?
What is an animal lover to do when the animal they love most loves to eat meat?
Dogs can cause quite a dilemma for vegans. For vegans who decide to have a dog as a pet, the question of whether to feed them a diet free of animal products inevitably comes up. There are foods specifically formulated for vegan dogs, ready to serve in bags just like traditional sacks of chow. A dog, though, can’t choose the circumstances of its life any more than a cow used for milk production can, and the nutrition can be complicated to get right, which makes the answer to that unavoidable question a lot less clear than one might hope.
Lagusta Yearwood, the chocolatier behind beloved New Paltz, New York-based sweets company Lagusta’s Luscious, has been wrestling with it since adopting Xoli, a xoloitzcuintli, a Mexican hairless breed of dog. This is her first dog after a lifetime of living with cats, who can’t eat a meat-less diet; for those animals, she went to a local butcher “who sells me local meat that’s as not-awful as meat can be,” she tells me over email. She’s going to him now again for some of Xoli’s food. “I feel good, at least, about not supporting huge pet food companies and grateful I’m able to feed my pets unprocessed, whole foods that completely bypass the pet food industry,” she says.
While she’d prefer he ate a vegan diet, he refuses to eat only the food she prepares for him, so she supplements. “I make a homemade vegan mix for him with quinoa, pinto beans, green vegetables, orange vegetables, flax seed oil, and three kinds of supplements,” she says. The Vegan Dog Nutrition page on Facebook has been an important resource in figuring out what he needs.
“It’s a totally nutritionally complete vegan food that I concocted with lots of science, math, and research. It’s perfect except that Xoli won’t eat it,” she says. “So I feed him half that and half local meat. If I attempt to even shift the ratio 60/40 toward the vegan food he will literally walk away and not eat that entire day.”
He loves a horrible fresh bone from the butcher more than anything on earth. I don’t think he’ll ever be a vegan dog, and the fact that he could be and…
