Can dogs eat sweet potato?

The detail

Sweet potato turns up in a lot of commercial dog food and in most homemade toppers, which is why owners assume it must be fine in any form. Cooked and plain it is, and the fibre and beta-carotene are real.

Portion is the whole discussion. Boiled sweet potato runs to about 76 kcal per 100g against roughly 41 kcal for carrot, so a couple of cubes is a treat and half a potato is a second dinner your dog did not need.

Preparation matters nearly as much as amount. Boiled or baked with nothing on it is the version PDSA and Vets Now describe, and it stops being that food the moment butter, oil or salt goes near it.

Diabetic and overweight dogs are the ones to hold back. The starch load is the reason, and green beans or cucumber give the same handful of something to chew without it.

Cooked sweet potato: boiled or baked, nothing added

Boiling and baking both work. Boiled cubes are softer and easier for older dogs, baked flesh is denser and sweeter, and neither needs a thing doing to it beyond cooling before it goes in the bowl.

No butter, no oil, no salt, no honey, no cinnamon. The moment anything joins the pan you are back to sharing a human side dish, which is where most upset stomachs start.

Cut cooked sweet potato into cubes rather than handing over a wedge. The Kennel Club makes the point that any fruit or veg should go in very small pieces for dogs that swallow instead of chewing.

Can dogs eat raw sweet potato?

Skip it. Raw sweet potato is hard, dense and difficult for a dog to digest, and Vets Now says it should never be served that way.

The bigger worry is the shape. A raw chunk bitten off a whole potato is exactly the sort of hard lump that lodges in a throat or sits undigested in the gut, and small dogs and gulpers are the ones at risk.

If a dog has run off with a raw sweet potato from the veg rack, watch for retching, drooling, a hunched posture or refusing the next meal, and ring your vet if any of those show up.

Can dogs eat sweet potato skin?

Washed, scrubbed and cooked, the skin is safe. It carries most of the fibre, and plenty of dogs eat baked skin with no trouble at all.

PDSA still advises peeling, because some dogs find the skin difficult to digest. Take that advice for puppies, seniors and any dog with a history of loose stools, and leave the skin on for the cast-iron stomachs.

Whatever you decide, wash the potato first. Soil on unwashed skin is the part nobody thinks about.

Roast sweet potato and sweet potato fries

These are the versions to say no to. Roasting means oil, chip-shop and oven fries mean salt, and both usually mean paprika, garlic granules or a seasoning mix.

Garlic is the one that turns a poor share into a real problem, because Battersea lists onions, garlic and chives as foods that damage dogs' red blood cells. A seasoned wedge is not the same food as a boiled cube.

A single stolen fry is not an emergency for a healthy dog. A shared portion is a good way to trigger a fatty upset, and dogs with a pancreatitis history should get none.

Dried sweet potato chews

Dehydrated sweet potato slices sell well in UK pet shops as a rawhide alternative, and plain ones are a reasonable treat. The ingredients list should say sweet potato and nothing else.

Read past the front of the bag. Some brands add glycerine, sugar or a coating, and drying concentrates the calories, so one strip carries far more than one cube of the boiled version.

Give them as a chew rather than a snack, one at a time, and take the last stub off a dog who is trying to swallow it whole.