Different than prebiotics and probiotics, dog digestive enzymes can add to your pup’s level of health. Foods like green tripe, and pancreas, etc. (affectionately named “glands and guts”) can provide helpful enzymes for dogs’ digestion.
Tripe is the lining of beef, hog or sheep stomach although most sold is from beef. This part of the animal is tough and requires long cooking for tenderness. Beef tripe is most often obtained from the first three of the four stomachs of beef cattle (rumen, reticulum, and omasum). Source: USDA article
Dog owners search for the “green” variety of tripe because it has not been bleached and sanitized until it is useless. If you buy human grade tripe is white and sterile and dead.
Green tripe is not enticing to many humans because it, in a word, stinks. There is no getting around it. But in addition to good bacteria, it contains along with the glands of animals, necessary enzymes for dogs. (And they love it, don’t ‘cha know).
Green tripe can usually be bought from raw dog food companies and I do know of canned tripe but imagine it to have been heated to a point where the enzymes have been destroyed, so I pass on that version. Interestingly, while heat destroys the enzymes, freezing does not.
If you are interested in adding these ingredients to your dog’s diet, two places I know of that you can purchase beef pancreas and tripe are Hare Today or tripe at Carnos.
Why Add Enzymes?
Enzymes help with a variety of symptoms including:
- Belching
- Flatus (passing gas)
- Vomiting undigested food
- Diarrhea
- Bad breath
- Coprophagia (eating poop)
They complement probiotics’ ability to improve digestion of nutrients and removal of toxins in addition to reducing symptoms of allergies and arthritis.
Another Way To Get Dog Digestive Enzymes In The Diet
You can purchase enzymes to add to your dog’s commercial meals to help with digestive difficulties.
This will give the dog the three basic enzymes:
- protease to break down proteins
- amylase to digest carbohydrates
- lipase for the fat digestion.
I had not been adding supplemental dog digestive enzymes to my shelties’ diet as they didn’t have any issues with digestion. However, the cotons were a different matter. I found out to my dismay that they are voracious poop eaters. I thought shelties were prone to that but nothing like these cotons. While their poop looked perfectly normal, I figured it was worth a try.
I started with commercial plant based enzymes, then moved to animal based and eventually found success. You can read more about my process HERE.
I have read that some believe the animal based enzyme will not survive the dog’s gastric acid but plant based does. I did a little experiment using both and I think the animal based is better. Although, since I am now dealing with cotons purchased from breeders, they were all weaned onto kibble, and only when they arrived here were they transitioned to raw fed, so their digestive acids may differ.
I switched over to the raw pancreas and tripe for a while since I support the philosophy of:
“Let food be thy medicine”
~ Hippocrates
if at all possible, but found that getting a consistent source wasn’t working out, so I went back to the powder.
If your dog has a need for animal based enzymes, a great website that delves into EPI as well as sells the enzymes is EnzymeDiane.com