CanMyPetEat answers one question: can a dog or a cat eat a particular food? Type the food, pick the animal, and you get a verdict, the reason behind it, the signs to watch for, and what to do if your pet has already eaten it. It is free, it needs no account, and the answer is computed in your browser.
It covers 140 foods across 10 categories, with a separate verdict for dogs and for cats — 277 verdicts in total, each on its own page.
Every verdict is transcribed from a veterinary source and cited on the page it appears on. We do not infer verdicts, and we do not write them from general knowledge. The sources, in the order we defer to them:
Each record also carries the date it was last reviewed and a confidence rating. Of the 140 foods, 88 are rated high confidence and 52 medium. That rating is shown on the page — we would rather tell you the evidence is thinner than present everything with the same certainty.
This is the part most food-safety sites get wrong, so it is worth stating plainly: a finding established in one species is not evidence about the other. Macadamia nuts, hops and star fruit all have documented toxicity in dogs and no established finding in cats. We do not extrapolate. Those three foods have no cat page at all, and the tool answers "we don't have a sourced answer for cats — ask your vet" rather than guessing.
The same restraint applies within a verdict. Grape toxicity is documented in dogs; it is not established in cats, and our cat page says exactly that instead of borrowing the dog finding. Where the ASPCA says a risk is primarily a problem for other animals — avocado's persin, which it associates mainly with birds and ruminants — we say so rather than inflating it into a dog toxin.
Most human foods are not poison; they are simply not worth feeding. A verdict of caution usually means a food is too fatty, too salty, a choking risk, or of no nutritional use to an obligate carnivore. It is not a toxicity finding, and the page says which it is. Only 32 of our 277 verdicts are toxic. We would rather be precise than alarming.
These are not editorial intentions. They are automated checks in the build, and a failure blocks the deploy:
sponsored nofollow.It is a reference, not a diagnosis, and not a substitute for a vet. It will tell you when to get help. It will never tell you how to treat something at home. If your pet may have eaten something harmful, the right move is always to call your vet or the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center on (888) 426-4435 — not to read a web page.
Toxicity guidance changes as new findings are published, and individual animals vary in size, age and health. Where our data and your vet disagree, your vet is right.
If something here is wrong, we want to fix it. Email hello@canmypetseat.com with the page and the source that contradicts it, and we will correct the record and re-date it.