Can Dogs Eat Pears? Yes, a Slither and Nothing Else

Home > Blog > Can Dogs Eat Pears? Yes, a Slither and Nothing Else

Quick Facts

This is our own research, not veterinary advice. For nearly every food there are many sources, and they do not always agree with each other. We check each claim against the veterinary and poison control sources, and we say plainly where they disagree. Even so, if you are in any doubt, contact a vet and do your own research before you feed anything to an animal in your care.

Fresh pear flesh is safe for dogs and I have given it plenty of times, but never more than a slither. That is the whole page. The core, seeds and leaves come out, and the portion stays small. And the portion stays small, because pear is high in fibre and high in sugar, which is exactly the combination that gives an animal loose stool if you overdo it.

I have always thought of a pear as basically an apple, and I treat it the same way. Small pieces, and never much more than a slither. It is a taste rather than a snack, and the dog is perfectly happy with that.

What makes pear worth its own page is not the fruit, it is the fibre. A pear has more of it than most fruit, and fibre is the thing that turns a nice gesture into a bad night. Getting the portion wrong is the only realistic way to cause a problem here.

The rest of what is safe is on the safe food list, and the apple page covers the fruit it most resembles.

If you are interested in getting into house sitting, our book Travel More for Less puts the whole process in one place: clear, step by step guidance from your first questions to your first confirmed sit, and the reviews that open the door to the next one.

Can Dogs Eat Pears? Yes, the Flesh Only

Fresh pear flesh is safe for dogs. It brings fibre, antioxidants and vitamin C, and at 57 calories per 100g it is a relatively light fruit. The varieties you find in a shop, Bartlett, Bosc, Anjou and Comice, are all fine, and so are Asian pears.

The preparation matters more than it does for most fruit. Wash the fruit, remove the stem and the leaves, take the core and seeds out, and cut what is left into pieces a dog can manage.

The skin can stay if it has been washed. It is safe for most dogs, though it carries extra fibre and some dogs with a sensitive stomach do better without it. If you peel it you lose some of the antioxidants with it, so there is a trade either way rather than one right answer.

The Core, the Seeds and the Leaves

The core, seeds and leaves of a pear should never go in a bowl. They carry trace amounts of cyanide compounds, the same family as apple seeds, and a core is also a solid object a small dog can choke on or swallow whole.

In practice the cyanide is the less likely of the two problems, because a dog would have to eat a great many seeds to be affected. The choking and blockage risk is the immediate one, and it is why the core comes out rather than being handed over to be chewed around.

I would not eat the seeds myself, so I do not give them to a dog either. Cutting the core out takes a second and there is no version of the fruit where leaving it in makes anything better.

How to Cut It, and Why a Slither

I cut a pear lengthways and take the core out, then hand over slices. For a small dog the slices get chopped smaller, but in most cases a pear is soft enough that a dog has no trouble with a slice at all.

The published size for a piece is about 2.5cm wide and 6mm thick, which is roughly what a lengthways slice gives you. The reason for the size is choking, and the reason I stop at a slither is different: it is the fibre and the sugar.

A pear has about 3.1g of fibre per 100g, which is more than an apple, and about 9.8g of sugar. Too much of that at once is what causes vomiting, diarrhoea or a general stomach upset, particularly in a dog that is not used to high-fibre food. A slither is inside that limit. Half a pear is not.

Canned Pears, Juice and Anything Else

The difference between a fresh pear and a tinned one is stark. Fresh pear is 57 calories per 100g. Canned in water is 29. Canned in extra heavy syrup is 97, which is nearly double the fresh fruit, and the syrup is sugar rather than pear.

The advice is to stick to plain fresh pear and avoid anything with added sugar, syrup or artificial ingredients, because all of it can upset a stomach or contribute to weight gain.

My own view is simpler: I would not give a dog anything but the fresh raw pear. There is no need to experiment, and no need to test the animal's stomach tolerance for no reason. A dog is exactly as happy with a piece of fresh pear as it is with a syrupy one, so why hand over the version that might upset it. That is how I think about every food, not just this one.

Loose Stools, and Where They Actually Come From

This is worth a section of its own, because the assumption people make is that a bad stomach comes from a bad food, and my experience is that it usually comes from too much of a good one.

The two causes I have actually seen are overfeeding and scavenging. Give an animal more than it should have and you will see loose stool. Let it find something on a walk, somebody's discarded lunch or worse, and you will see the same thing faster.

The scavenging one is genuinely hard to prevent. A dog can swallow an entire lunch in about two seconds, and by the time you get there it is gone. I have put my fingers into a dog's mouth to pull something out and found that it had already been swallowed. There is no technique for that. You simply cannot always get there in time.

Which is the argument for keeping the fruit portions small in the first place, and it connects to feeding the wrong amount on a sit.

The Choking Question

I have never seen a dog choke on a piece of fruit, and I think the reason is worth saying, because it changes what you should do about it.

Choking seems to happen when a dog tries to eat something too quickly and gulps it instead of chewing. That is not a fruit problem, it is a scavenging problem. It happens when a dog finds something it really wants on a walk, and the worst thing you can do in that moment is run at it shouting, because the dog reads that as competition and swallows as much as it can as fast as it can.

So the useful prevention is not cutting a pear into smaller pieces. It is keeping food away from a dog in the first place, staying calm when it has something it should not, and not creating a race for it.

That said, I would not argue with cutting fruit small. It costs nothing and a smaller piece is a smaller risk. Where I would push back is on the idea that a dog choking over food is a common event, because in my experience it is usually over in a second and the dog carries on as if nothing happened.

How Much Pear

Treats of every kind should stay under about 10% of a dog's daily calorie intake, which is the standard most vets and the literature give. With pear, the fibre is the limit before the calories are.

Those calorie figures are our arithmetic on the published energy value of 57 kcal per 100g.

The point of the table is the fibre rather than the calories. A whole pear is about 5.6g of fibre in one sitting, which is a great deal for a dog that has never had fruit before.

On a Sit: The Fruit Bowl

A pear turns up on a sit in the fruit bowl, and the risk is the same as an apple: a dog that counter-surfs will take one, chew it, and leave the core somewhere you find it later.

What I would do is what I do with anything in somebody else's kitchen. Keep fruit where the dog cannot reach it, watch what goes in the bin, and do not hand over more than a piece at a time.

The habit that covers this is asking before you improvise, and the pre-sit question list is where that starts.

Where This Research Comes From

The sources behind this page:

Conclusion

A pear is a safe fruit and one of the easier things to share, on two conditions. The core comes out, and the portion is a slither rather than a fruit.

Get both of those right and you have a treat that costs about nine calories and makes a dog happy. Get the portion wrong and you have a night of loose stool, which is the realistic risk here rather than anything dramatic.

Caro and I have completed 20 house sits across 12 countries, driven 19,000km across Europe in our 1998 VW T4, and saved over $26,500 in accommodation costs over three years of house sitting.

DM us @housesittersguide, we answer everyone.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Can dogs eat pears?

  Yes, the flesh of a fresh pear, in small pieces. Wash it, remove the stem, leaves, core and seeds, and cut what is left into pieces your dog can manage.

• Can dogs eat pear cores or seeds?

  No. Pear seeds, stems and leaves contain trace amounts of cyanide compounds, and a core is a choking and blockage risk on its own. The core comes out before the pear goes anywhere near a dog.

• Can dogs eat pear skin?

  Yes, as long as it is washed. It carries extra fibre, so a dog with a sensitive stomach may do better without it. Peeling also removes some of the antioxidants.

• How much pear can a dog have?

  A slither. Pear is 57 calories and 3.1g of fibre per 100g, so a small piece is a treat and a whole pear is too much fibre at once, which causes loose stool.

• Can dogs eat canned pears?

  Fresh is better by a distance. Canned in heavy syrup is 97 calories per 100g against 57 for fresh, and the syrup is added sugar. I would not give a dog tinned fruit at all.

• Why do pears give dogs diarrhoea?

  Because of the fibre and the sugar. A dog that is not used to high-fibre food will react to a large amount, and pear has more fibre than most fruit. Keep the portion small and it is not an issue.

• Can dogs eat Asian pears?

  Yes, Asian pears are safe on the same terms, prepared the same way with the core and seeds removed and the fruit cut into pieces.

Related Guides