Should Dogs Eat Pumpkin Pie?
Pumpkin is a recommended and regular inclusion in home cooking for dogs, as well as often included in commercial dog food formulas. Plain, natural pumpkin is packed full of vitamins and is excellent as an addition to a complete dog food.
But what about pumpkin pie?
This festive favorite is one that countless dogs are exposed to every year. Whether that’s on purpose with well intentioned feeding of scraps, or by accident, many dogs consume pumpkin pie.
A pumpkin pie is quite different from plain old raw or cooked natural unprocessed pumpkin.
For starters, canned pumpkin is very often used and this usually contains more than just hearty pumpkin. Salt, sugar, preservatives and other additives will often be found on the ingredients list of canned pumpkin.
With our busy lives, many people make pumpkin pie with pre-made ingredients rather than starting from absolute scratch with nothing but raw ingredients. There’s nothing wrong with this of course, but when it comes to considering our dogs and their possible consuming of pumpkin pie, it pays to check out the ingredients in these processed products.
As an example: if we were to make a delicious pumpkin pie using Farmer’s Market Organic Canned Pumpkin Pie Mix (which is rather tasty if I do say so myself), there’s a list of ingredients that looks pretty good. Being organic there’s a big health focus on this pumpkin pie mix with no artificial additives. The sugars come from the organic cane sugar, and there’s no added salt.
The other potential danger with these mixes is the inclusion of any foods or spices that might be toxic to dogs – think onions and related ingredients.
The Farmer’s Market organic canned pumpkin pie contains cloves – a relative of onion in the same plant family. The compound eugenol is found in cloves (which is what gives it that spicy smell and taste) and this is toxic for dogs. Very tiny amounts are not thought to be harmful to most dogs, but whether you’re comfortable with your dog eating amount of clove ingredients is a decision for you.
