Science Fair Projects on Dog Food

Science fair projects on dog food can be gross, scientific, fun or technical. There are a lot of angles that your food experiments can take. However, to get the best reaction possible from the judges at your local science fair, you need to develop a great project that not only is informative, but that is also innovative and practical.

Does processed dog food replicate the natural diet wild dogs would eat? This hypothesis is great for science fair projects on dog food. To test it you will need to research what members of the dog family eat in the wild. The closest relatives to the dog are foxes, wolves and coyotes. After conducting this research you will want to compare the wild diet to the ingredients found in dog food.

How do dogs digest their food? The purpose of this project is to see how dogs process food. You will want to set up safe observation sessions to examine how dogs pick up food and chew it. You will then need to conduct background research to determine what happens next. To advance this project you can examine dog poop to see how well they digest their food, and what extra items they are eating, like toys, cotton and fabric.

Can a dog be a vegetarian? This hypothesis is very interesting. Currently there are no natural dog vegetarians. Dogs are mainly carnivorous, and generally only eat vegetation for medicinal purposes. In this experiment you will want to examine if a vegetarian diet would be able to (1) be digested by a dog's digestive system and (2) provide the dog with the nutrients that it needs to stay healthy.

What dog foods produce the most gas? This is a fun and gross experiment that is definitely unique. To complete this experiment you will want to set up several experiments. You will feed your dog a different dog food brand each week and chart how gassy they seem to be after eating each dog food brand. In your journal you will want to note how many times they break wind, how loud it is and what it smells like. I told you this was a gross one.

The final dog food experiment that you can conduct will be to determine if dogs prefer sweet or savory flavors. This is a great hypothesis for candy science fair projects. To test this hypothesis you will need to set up two feeding stations that are fairly close together. One station will have a piece of candy an done station will have a meaty treat. See which station your dog goes to first. Repeat this experiment several times over a week. You can advance this project by using the data from this experiment to predict a trend for dogs in general. Then run a lot of dogs through this experiment to see if your predictions were correct.