What happens when animals eat food that isn't in their "diet"?

Published by: webmaster 2010-03-12

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This means, when something happens, they know its eating time. Many species eat after a Even if a snake does eat food that is too large, it can cause them to
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What would happen if an animal (say a dog, or lion or whatever) were to eat something not of it's normal diet. Like... I don't know.. Mac N' Cheese, or Chocolate? Would it die? Or just get sick?

chocolate can kill dogs for everything else its probably ok

Chocolate could make a dog very sick, it could even be deadly. I'm not sure about lions though.

they will most likely get sick.........thats only if they are strong...if the are weak..they will get very ill and die......dogs cannot eat schocolate..they will get very ill

they would go to dogheaven/lionheaven

They become mutants and/or develop tooth decay.

It would depend on what the animal ate and how much of it they ingested. There's a lot of things that wouldn't consist of a normal wild canine diet in dog foods, for example (grains like oatmeal, barley, rice or sweet potatoes) that don't always cause any adverse affects in dogs.

Depends on the animal. I feed my dogs real, organic home-cooked food (chicken, turkey, veggies, eggs, etc). Chocolate is toxic to dogs... Along w/ grapes and a few other items like onions. Mac N Cheese- depends on the quantity, might do nothing to an upset stomach, possible diarrhea.

Well all my dogs are used to getting fed all different varieties of food so nothing would happen to my dogs if they were fed something out of the ordinary. They would just digest it and poop it out.

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Did you know that animals cant make their own food? Instead, they depend on plants thing happens to increase or decrease one of the links in the food chain, that
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This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, words are as often
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I give all my dogs just about anything i would eat.

I have given my dogs Chocolate. Like ice cream. I know It will only make them sick if they are fed high amounts of it.

It would probably just get sick, depending on how much it ate.

I have a teacup poodle, shes about 3 pounds and she eats people food constintaly. She eats at my table with us, but she only gets a little tiny bit of food.

Do not give your dog 'grapes, chocalte or onions'
they will die. it is posin to them

Shay,
Most things are ok. It depends on the animal and the food. As one answer said, chocolate can kill a dog. What most people don't know is that it takes a significant amount of dark chocolate or pure cocoa to be fatal and it takes a heck of alot of it to do any damage. A chocolate bar isn't going to do a chihuahua any good, but it won't be fatal. The odds of a dog finding enough chocolate in one spot is very, very unlikely. Stuff like brownies or cake isn't going to have enough in it to make any difference to them at all. I'm sure some people will thumbs down me on that, but it's the truth. You have to keep some perspective. IF you drink enough water at one time, it will kill you. Don't feed them chocolate on purpose, and don't run to the vet if they steal a brownie off the counter.

That being said - some things you'd never suspect are very bad for dogs. Steak bones are particularly bad. Small bones in general chip into small pieces. They can cut the intestines, get embedded in them, and so on. It can be fatal. Most of the time, the chips will pass through them, but not always. It's not worth the chance. It's much more likely to cause a problem than chocolate in fact. I asked a vet once - don't wolves and foxes eat bones? She said - "No. They instinctively do not, they fill up on the rest of their prey." She pointed out that domesticated dogs have lost this particular bit of genetic wisdom.

What happens when animals eat food that isnt in their diet?::
What would happen if an animal (say a dog, or lion or whatever) were to eat something not of its normal diet. Like I dont know.. Mac N Cheese, or Chocolate?
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One of the hugest risks to dogs is anti-freeze that has dripped onto the ground. It tastes and smells sweet, dogs will lick it up in a hurry, and radiator overflow is common. It doesn't take much to do grave damage or be fatal.

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When I considered the arguments honestly, I stopped eating animals. That was over 20 eat less animal foods, what do we make of the fact that were capable of eating animals?
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FOOD CHAINS::
one of the animals that students eat, along with what it eats and what eats Do the animals in this food chain eat any other things besides those that are
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While I'm rambling on about this, I'd point out that many people feed their dogs table scraps. They use whatever is leftover from a meal - regardless of what it is. My folks did this when I was growing up. I was a kid, and didn't know any better. Looking back, I'm apalled at how our dogs were treated, but given that most of them were strays, I guess it beat starving. They had plenty of milk and meat and my mother knew about 3 spices - salt, pepper, and anything "Italian style" got some oregano. So - the dogs weren't getting anything too strange.
Amazingly - our dogs seemed fairly healthy.

Bottom line - I think it depends what it is. Most of the time it will be fine. There's no question that animals can take a liking to some weird stuff that they'd never find in the wild. Horses like sugar cubes, and some owners will accommodate them. Does it affect their teeth? I have no idea. Surely chomping on grass will scrape off plaque and sugar residue. I have a friend whose dog will eat anything but mine acted weird the first time I let them try steamed fish. Cats ignore anything they don't want.

-Kevin

It depends what the food is, how versatile the dogs stomach would be, if the food was toxic to dogs, etc. Example a lot of vegetables just go right through a dog, so really hardly anything happens to them at all.

I dunno it really depends on too many things to say... each dog is different also. Some can break into and eat an entire pantry and be fine, others can find a crumb on the floor and be sick for days.

well it certainly wouldnt die.
but it may get sick depending on the amount that it ate.

dark and milk chocolate is the worst in the things you listed.
if it ate enough chocolate it could die but mac n cheese it should be ok

Too much chocolate will kill a dog. Most normal foods will give them the runs.

It wouldn't die, but it would probably be very bloated and farty.

It depends on the animal. Some animals, like Hyenas, have exceptionally strong stomachs. They can eat rotting meat with no ill effects, I doubt mac n cheese would phase them. Same with things like Raccoons, rats and possums.

Other animals, particularly if they've been kept on very narrow diets (like a dog that only ever gets one brand of food) may get sick, because their systems are not prepared to digest such food.

It should be noted that chocolate is toxic to some animals. Dogs and cats for instance should NOT have chocolate because it can kill them. Rats, on the other, and people, are free to eat chocolate.