Calling all pizza fans out there.
When you have your favourite takeaway pizza, do you suddenly find your dog sidling up to you at the table looking for a piece of pizza or some delicious garlic sauce?
Or do you eat whilst on the sofa, making it even easier for your dog to “get involved”?
Don’t worry, I think that this type of behaviour is fairly common with dog owners.
Our dogs used to not bother but they have learned from being with my young grandson.
If they wait patiently enough then sooner or later food will come their way.
But what happens, if the dog eats something that they shouldn’t have?
In the case of a pizza, if a dog ate the garlic sauce, is that the end of the world?
Should you be on the phone to your vets or just try to be more careful next time?
Let’s find out…
My dog ate garlic sauce, what should I do?
If you are worried after your dog ate garlic sauce, then there is no need to worry.
And there is really no need to do anything because it is unlikely that anything bad will happen to your dog.
If your dog ate garlic sauce straight from a small plastic tub that came with your takeaway pizza or if he had a few licks of that delicious sauce left over from your garlic chicken then nothing will happen.
Your dog shouldn’t suffer any ill effects.
I mean, if your dog isn’t a keen fan of garlic then he might vomit the sauce straight back up.
Or tomorrow, his stool might be softer than usual.
Garlic can be poisonous to dogs if they consume it in very large quantities- and this is what I will look at in the next section.
Is garlic poisonous to dogs?
Garlic is poisonous to dogs but only at a certain level.
What I mean by this is that your dog won’t die if he licks a little bit of garlic sauce or eats a small amount of crushed garlic.
But scientists believe that there is a safe level that your dog shouldn’t go above.
And that level is anywhere between 15- 30g of garlic per kg of dog.
And so my two Golden Retrievers each weigh around 30 kg.
Looking at these figures, a safe amount of garlic for my dogs to eat is between 450 g (15 X 30) and 900 g (30 X 30.)
And the dog needs to have consumed this quantity of garlic in a few days.
Now I don’t know about you, but to me this seems an impossibly large amount of garlic for a dog to consume.
I have just weighed a single clove of garlic and it weighs 5g.
A bulb of garlic weighs around 40g.
Are any of us seriously going to be feeding our dogs ten or twenty bulbs of garlic?
Why is garlic poisonous?
Garlic is poisonous to dogs because it contains a substance called thiosulphate, which is toxic to dogs in large quantities.
Thiosulphate is not just present in garlic but in any vegetable within the onion family, such as onions, leeks, shallots and cloves.
Dogs cannot absorb the thiosulphate and so it damages the red blood cells, which are unable to carry enough oxygen.
If these blood cells are damaged severely enough then a dog could die..’
What are symptoms of garlic or thiosulphate poisoning?
As a result of a lack of oxygen one of the key symptoms to look out for is breathlessness. Other symptoms include vomiting and diarrhea.
But it is important to note that these symptoms might not appear for a few days.
In my next section, I want to put these quantities of garlic into some sort of context.
How much garlic is in garlic sauce?
I am going to list some of the most popular foods that contain garlic sauces and check out how much garlic is in them.
Now, it will be impossible to find out the exact amount of garlic that famous brands (such as Papa John or Dominos) use in their garlic sauces because their recipes are top secret.
But what I can do is look at some of the most popular recipes online that use garlic sauce and use those as a guide.
As the focus of this article is about garlic, I will stick to talking about how much garlic is within each recipe.
But you should also bear in mind that these recipes probably contain ingredients that might upset your dog’s stomach!
[1] Garlic dipping sauce (for pizza)
This recipe and this one use two teaspoons of garlic powder whereas this vegan recipe uses two cloves of garlic.
And even though there is some difference between the forms of garlic that these recipes use and the amounts of garlic contained in them, none of the recipes contain enough garlic to be toxic to your dog.
[2] Garlic chicken
This is a very popular garlic chicken recipe.
The creamy garlic sauce that goes with the chicken, contains a whole bulb of garlic.
Now this is a lot.
Judging by my calculations, a fairly standard garlic bulb will contain about 12 bulbs, with a combined weight of around sixty grams.
But the amount of garlic used is still nowhere near the toxic levels.
Another popular recipe only uses 2 bulbs of garlic in its sauce.
[3] Garlic bread
For our third and final popular “garlic” food I have selected garlic bread.
In this highly rated recipe, only two cloves of garlic are used, whereas this one uses three cloves of garlic.
Both of which are well within the safe amounts of garlic that a dog can process.
And now that I have looked at how much garlic is used in popular recipes, I want to switch focus and talk about how garlic can be used to boost the health of your dog…
The health benefits of using garlic with dogs
It may seem a bit strange that I have spent the first part of this article warning about the dangers of garlic and now I am talking about its health benefits.
But the health benefits of garlic have been known for hundreds of years.
All of these studies have only been carried out on people, not dogs.
But, garlic has been shown to reduce blood pressure and improve cholesterol.
And a few years ago, I was giving my dogs one clove of garlic each everyday as a natural alternative to using a flea ointment.
Now, I don’t know how effective it was when it came to stopping fleas (because our dogs rarely seem to be affected by them) but I know that they didn’t suffer from any garlic poisoning either.
And of course, any real research on using garlic to prevent fleas is very hard to find.
Although this study used raw garlic to see if it might prevent fleas on dogs.
The dogs weren’t fed the garlic, the garlic was scattered around crates that they were housed in.
But the results showed that garlic helps to prevent the number of fleas on dogs.
Another study looked at whether eating raw garlic prevented tick infestations in soldiers in the Swedish army.
And the results showed that it did.
