i have 2 dogs that like celery and carrots. is it okay to let them eat it. thank you.

Absolutely. If you look at the list of ingredients in most petfood (even petfood for carnivores like dogs and cats) you will see that they contain vegetable matter. Remember, too, that carnivores eat the stomach contents of their prey. And their prey are often vegetarians. Cats eat mice. Mice eat grain and greens and carrots and all sorts. And my cat eats up every bit of that mouse.

Yes but, curiously, a dog's digestive system cannot digest raw green plant material. The vegetables in commercial dogfood are already cooked. When a wild dog eats the contents of the prey's stomach it is eating plants that have been mostly or partly digested by the prey: the dog's own system can cope with that.

Your dog probably eats grass too. Most dogs seem to. (Today, with a canine sense of the absurd, four of mine stopped alongside the horses in the field outside and all of them started grazing, as though making fun of the horses who doing the same thing )Nobody really knows for sure why dogs do this, given that they can't digest it, but the likelihood is that they take in the fibre as an aid to their digestion,perhaps because they want it as some laxative or aid to vomiting.The old story is that they feel some stomach upset and take it as a remedy. They commonly vomit the grass straight back up.

Your dog may enjoy the chewing of the raw carrot or celery as much as anything else about the material.Neither will hurt the dog.Dogs know which of the materials that they might encounter in the wild are harmful. Unfortunately they aren't so good with man -made materials that hurt them e.g. they like chocolate bars and some find anti-freeze tasty.

Hmmm. I've seen those nature shows on the wild dogs of Africa. They leave the pups at home in the den all day while they hunt and gorge. Then they come home and regurgitate for the pups. (The narrator said the pups licking the adults' faces cause the adults to regurgitate. I fully sympathize.)

But I wonder. Do the adults also sometimes eat a bit of grass to stimulate regurgitation? Of no nutritional benefit to themselves, maybe, but still giving their genes a survival advantage?

So let's see. Carnivores such as dogs and cats can be stimulated to regurgitate for the young so that the parent doesn't need to stay at home and nurse. That means that the parent(s) can return to hunting a lot sooner. (The cat tribe, the mother does all the nurturing. The dog tribe, both parents feed the kids.) I've seen cats eat grass and go urk! urk! urk! SICKUP!

So how about this: carnivores who find grass attractive to eat, even though it does not nourish them, have a tiny species-survival advantage; eating grass causes them to urk-up, and the young benefit.

Hmmmm. Hmmmm-hmmmmm-hmmm. Pablum looks the same, but has definite advantages.

Yes babs: It's best not to think too deeply about why that sweet little puppy reaches up to lick your face . " Look, he's giving me a kiss...aaaah !" And grown dogs do the same because they have learned that this puppy behaviour is rewarded by humans petting them, making approving noises and showing affection.Odd thing about it is that the domesticated pup is usually no more likely to get regurgitated food from its dam than from its human owner when it does this . Only a few bitches respond to this stimulation.

That's the funny thing about a lot of heritable traits. Because mutations are random, an odd behavior can just appear. It's not designed to do anything. But if it 'happens' to give an advantage, then it allows its carrier to raise more offspring.

But if a behavior is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage, it can persist. So probably in the dog tribe, the licking was just a 'tasting' behavior - 'Is this really my mom? (lick) Yup.' Then it became useful to African hunting dogs whose pup-survival rate wasn't too great because the adults had to travel miles to run down their prey. But when they got back, exhausted from running but gorged with food, the excitedly licking pups triggered ....

So the barfing and the licking were both reinforced behaviorally and genetically!

Hey, it's fun to speculate!

All 4 of my dogs love carrots! I don't feed them celery tho, for fear they may choke on the "strings". My Akita LOVES onions, but I don't give them to her anymore, since I read it causes a type of anemia in dogs.