David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Your dog wants to eat your fruit. Should you let him? Consult this handy chart to see if it's poison.
by Johnny McNulty
June 11, 2015
Your dog is a miracle of nature; not only is every pooch on the planet descended from wolves—apex predators with a social intelligence rarely seen outside primates or cetaceans—they've co-evolved with modern humans (sometimes because we bred them, sometimes by accidental selection) to understand us in ways chimpanzees can't even fathom.* Your best friend, however, is also an idiot who will poison him/herself at the first opportunity by eating human food that it cannot eat. A lot of these surprise poisons are fruit, because its ancestors were not tree-dwelling sugar junkies like ours. They still want to eat it, though, because (a) it's food, and (b) they want to do whatever you are doing. So consult this handy chart from Ohio State veterinarian Dr. Edward Cooper to see if you should let your dog eat that blueberry you just dropped on the floor. (Note: Not included are tomatoes. I guess vets ascribe to the official dogma that those are vegetables. Nevertheless, don't let your dog eat tomatoes.)
View larger image here
*(Most dogs understand what you mean if you point at something. Think about that. The dog knows that you are thinking about an object that you are not touching and it cannot yet see, but it knows the object will be located along a straight line from the end of your outstretched finger, even if your eyes aren't looking at said object. This requires not only a Theory of Mind, but basic symbolic language, the symbol being your finger. The chimpanzee just thinks you're stretching.)
by Johnny McNulty
June 11, 2015
Your dog is a miracle of nature; not only is every pooch on the planet descended from wolves—apex predators with a social intelligence rarely seen outside primates or cetaceans—they've co-evolved with modern humans (sometimes because we bred them, sometimes by accidental selection) to understand us in ways chimpanzees can't even fathom.* Your best friend, however, is also an idiot who will poison him/herself at the first opportunity by eating human food that it cannot eat. A lot of these surprise poisons are fruit, because its ancestors were not tree-dwelling sugar junkies like ours. They still want to eat it, though, because (a) it's food, and (b) they want to do whatever you are doing. So consult this handy chart from Ohio State veterinarian Dr. Edward Cooper to see if you should let your dog eat that blueberry you just dropped on the floor. (Note: Not included are tomatoes. I guess vets ascribe to the official dogma that those are vegetables. Nevertheless, don't let your dog eat tomatoes.)
View larger image here
*(Most dogs understand what you mean if you point at something. Think about that. The dog knows that you are thinking about an object that you are not touching and it cannot yet see, but it knows the object will be located along a straight line from the end of your outstretched finger, even if your eyes aren't looking at said object. This requires not only a Theory of Mind, but basic symbolic language, the symbol being your finger. The chimpanzee just thinks you're stretching.)
