Heart (beef or chicken)

Heart is muscle, not a metabolic organ, and that distinction matters. Liver concentrates vitamin A and causes toxicity when fed heavily; heart does not. It is lean, high in protein and iron, and works well as a food topper or a training reward when it is cooked plain. One claim deserves a correction. Heart is genuinely rich in taurine, but the species the Merck Veterinary Manual lists as having a dietary requirement for taurine is the cat, not the dog. Dogs generally synthesize their own. If you are feeding heart because of something you read about diet-associated dilated cardiomyopathy, that is a conversation for your veterinarian or a board-certified veterinary nutritionist, not a reason to increase the portion on your own. Most of the risk lives in how it reaches the dog. In American kitchens, hearts usually arrive in the giblet bag tucked inside a whole chicken or the Thanksgiving turkey, along with the neck, gizzard and liver — and that bag most often ends up simmered into giblet gravy with onion, celery and salt. Onion is toxic to dogs, so gravy is not a way to serve heart. Grilled heart skewers (yakitori, anticuchos) are salted or basted with garlic sauce. Feed heart boiled or steamed, unseasoned, with the yellow fat cap and the large vessels cut away. Skip raw. FDA testing of 196 commercial raw pet food samples found Salmonella in 15 and Listeria monocytogenes in 32, and dogs can shed those organisms while looking perfectly healthy, which puts the household at risk too. After cooking, cut heart into bite-sized pieces; chicken hearts are small and slick, and plenty of dogs inhale them whole. Keep all treats under 10% of daily calories, the ceiling Merck uses, and let a complete and balanced diet do the rest. An all-meat menu runs short on calcium and long on phosphorus, which produces nutritional secondary hyperparathyroidism and demineralized bone. If your dog eats seasoned heart and then vomits repeatedly, goes flat, or guards the belly, call your veterinarian or the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center at (888) 426-4435. Do not induce vomiting at home.