I often read about people wanting to know why dogs eat grass. Or even asking “How can I stop my dog eating grass?” because it disturbs them when they see their loved pet being sick from it. Well, in answer to the second question is “You can’t” or even better “Don’t” because there could be a decent medicinal or dietary need for the dog to eat the grass in the first place.

On PetEducation.com, this appears to get narrowed down to one of three theories…

1. To start with (and this seems to be the most common suggestion), is that the dog’s natural instincts tell it that eating grass will cause it to throw up or vomit. The grass acting as an irritant to the dog’s internal systems causing it to vomit up the contents of it’s stomach - which could contain whatever is making your dog feel so poorly.
2. Secondly, wild dogs hunt and devour animals that eat grass, meaning that the contents of a herbivore’s stomach form a part of your Dog’s diet. A modern dog stuck on a non varied diet of dry kibble and canned meat will probably find the it’s intake is lacking.
3. How many times have you had to pull your mutt’s nose out of something rotting or worse when out on a walk? Well this theory covers situations where a dog chews upon but doesn’t actually eat the grass. The idea being it is uses it’s taste for things to analyse the flavour of the grass. In doing so it would be looking for the territorial creatures that have been leaving their mark.

The one that rings most true with me is the vomiting answer. I haven’t often seen a dog just “testing” the grass and a lot of the websites out there talking about grass in dog’s nutrition are also on web pages set up to specifically sell a barley grass supplement. I’m not questioning the supplement itself, after all humans too can benefit greating from supplementing barley and wheat grass into their diet.

One note of caution, be wary of letting your dog eat grass where it may have been sprayed with chemicals such as fertalizers and/or weed killers.

Further reading:

• Grass Eating
• Why do dogs eat grass?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 18th, 2005 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Pet Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.