All About Ooby the Vegan Bulldog| Birthday Q&A

Today’s video post is a very special vegan nugget for a very special birthday girl.  This nugget is all about Ooby, my vegan English bulldog companion and the real star of bite size vegan.  I’ve gotten a lot of questions about Ooby over the time that I’ve done bite size vegan.  So today, I thought I would go over some of the questions and tell you a little bit about the bulldog behind the Bite Size Vegan. [tweet this]

To get the full “Ooby effect”, check out the video above.  But here are the basics of our Q&A:

Q: how old is Ooby?

A: Actually, today is her birthday!  She’s 8 years old.

Q: where does Ooby’s name come from? what does it mean?

A: I call her Ooby, but her full name is “Oobedoob Benubi” which is kind of ridiculous but it was a spoof on star wars called “Thumb Wars” where they did the whole video on thumbs and Obi Wan Kanobi became Oobedoob Benubi–so that’s her full name.  She goes by “Ooby”,  “Oobertons”,”The Boo”, or “Oobs.”

Q: What do I feed Ooby?

A: I actually did an entire video on this. Ooby eats V-Dog food and I mix in Halo vegan wet food sometimes, but you can see the other video to see exactly what I feed her.

Q: Is it healthy to feed a dog a vegan diet?

A: It absolutely is.  I would argue it is the healthiest thing to feed a dog, especially given what we put in pet food.  Check out my video “Can pets be vegan? And what’s really in pet food?” and get all of the gory details on that.  And as far as Ooby’s health is concerned, she has a long history of chronic health issues and multiple surgeries.  Check out my video post on pet breeding, in which I talk a little bit about her history and the number of surgeries she’s been through.  But, suffice it to say, Ooby’s the healthiest she’s ever been.  She hasn’t always been vegan, but since she’s been vegan–in the last handful of years–her health has improved so much.  We just went to a new vet here because we just moved here and the vet said that she had never seen an English bulldog this healthy. [tweet this]

Now in our videos, you usually see Ooby sitting around and not doing very much.  She’s very good at that and at sleeping.  On Instagram, you’ll see Ooby sleeping a lot.  She’s actually in good shape.  The bed I sleep on is about three-and-a-half feet or so tall and Ooby jumps on that no problem.  She also loves to go trailblazing or for longer walks and while she moves very slowly most of the time, if you drop a kernel of food, she’s like a ninja!

So being vegan has done nothing except vastly improve her health and there’s the peace of mind it give me knowing that her life does not depend on others’ suffering. [tweet this]

Q: Where did she come from?

A: I talk a little bit about her origins in the video on breeding, but Ooby is basically a breeder reject. most breeders will give a one year warranty so to speak on their dogs, so if you have a lot of medical issues with your puppy in the first year you can basically trade them in for another model, which is kind of horrific and really speaks to how we treat these animals as objects to a great extent.  So Ooby is one of those dogs who had so many health issues.  She’s basically defective or a ‘lemon dog’.

I got Ooby when she was nine weeks old and she’s already had so many health problems.  One of them which was funny was that she was too fat to support her body weight, so she dragged herself around on her front paws, and they weren’t sure if she was ever going to stand right, like if something was wrong with her legs, but she stands fine and Ooby had 5 surgeries before she was one year old.

As I say in my dog breeding video, bulldogs are really the poster children for the perils of pure breeding.  Every purebred has so many issues because the genetic pool that we use to breed dogs is so small.  But we breed these animals to look the way we want them to look and to have that aesthetic.  It has nothing to do with functionality, or their own health.  The bulldog is the most extreme example of that.  Nature would never make an English bulldog. [tweet this]

I hope you enjoyed this special nugget all about Ooby, the true star of Bite Size Vegan!

— Emily Moran Barwick