A UK woman has been savagely mocked on the international shaming platform that is Twitter after she appeared on the breakfast TV program This Morning claiming that her Siberian husky was happy on a vegetarian diet.

In clips from the broadcast, owner Lucy Carrington can be seen explaining that her regal-looking companion, named Storm, appeared to lose interest in her normal dog chow earlier this summer. Hoping to tempt her with some new options, Carrington offered Storm a mix of vegetables. The woman recounted that Storm “really took to it”, so she switched the husky to an entirely plant-based diet.

And, before anyone starts railing against a possible vegetarian or vegan agenda, the Independent notes that Carrington and her family are big time meat eaters. They just haven't been giving any to their wolf-descendant pet.  

“I'm certainly not one of those, I'm not vegetarian. I'm not a vegan, far from it, though I've reduced my meat consumption,” she shared.

“I wouldn't want to impose it on anybody because my mother-in-law and father-in-law are vegetarians and we often had many debates. I've got a large family, they're all boys. We're doing burgers and sausages every night.”

Then the program’s hosts, who had invited a veterinarian named Scott Miller along for the segment, revealed that they had a test to see whether Storm really preferred veggies to meat. They placed two bowls – one of each food type – in front of the pup.

Of course, the dog went straight for the bowl of meat. She did pause her enthusiastic snout-stuffing for a moment in order to sniff the vegetable blend on offer, but that was about it.

 

 

 

 

After Carrington was ribbed by the hosts, Dr Miller commented that more and more people are choosing to put their pets on eyebrow-raising diets.

“People make this decision for all sorts of reasons; people are making it for cultural reasons, for religious ones, for reasons of animal welfare, but the point is it's a choice and our pets can't make that choice, so it's something we have to be exceptionally careful about,” he said.

“They can't make the choice, so we need to do look at the natural history which dictates that dogs are omnivores, they eat a mixture of meat and plant in order to get all the essential minerals and vitamins they need.”

Earlier this year, the FDA issued an alert on the potential danger of low-meat dog food varieties that use lentils, legumes, and potatoes as main ingredients after vets across the country linked these trendy, grain-free foods to cases of a devastating and often fatal canine heart disease called dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). Normally a rare condition that only a handful of breeds are predisposed to, DCM is thought to arise from a deficiency of the amino acid taurine. Though the canine body can synthesize its own taurine, it appears that supplementation from the diet is critical. Taurine is abundant in animal tissue, but only found in trace amounts in plants. So please, give your dogs healthy, vet-approved, meat-based foods.

Carrington appeared to listen to Dr Miller, stating at the end of the show: "If this is what she wants, then obviously I’m going to adapt accordingly."