Every fall the apple tree out back starts a delivery service nobody ordered. Fruit lands in the grass, the grass hides it, and the dogs find it. That is the main event of the afternoon around here.
In this video, the huskies at Snow Dogs Vlogs get their first tree apples of the season. No plan and no training involved. One dog discovers that food falls out of the sky, and about nine strong opinions arrive at once. The nose goes first. Then a careful poke with one paw, the kind of paw test that answers no useful questions, and then the taste test, followed by the drop. Then the whole sequence again on a different apple, because the first one clearly could not be trusted.
Any dog owner knows the rest of it. The suspicion, the circling, the commitment of a creature who is taking this very seriously, and then the total loss of interest the moment you stop watching.
What makes the clip work is that nobody in it is performing. They are running quality control on produce they found on the ground and they intend to finish the job.
Can dogs eat apples?
Apples are fine for most dogs in small amounts. The flesh is the part that matters, so a few slices is plenty for a medium dog, and fruit should stay a treat instead of a meal. Skip the core, the seeds, and the stem. Seeds contain a compound that releases small amounts of cyanide when chewed, and a dog would need to eat a serious pile of them to get sick, but there is no reason to hand over the risky part when the good part is right there.
Fallen fruit has its own wrinkles. Fruit sitting on the ground ferments, and a dog who eats enough of it can end up with an upset stomach. Wasps like the same apples. So does mold, and moldy food is a real problem for dogs rather than a stomach ache you wait out.
Two habits cover almost everything else. Pick up what you can, and pay attention to what your dog finds. A backyard is not as safe as it looks. The dedicated scavenger will eventually turn up something worse than an apple, and the result is not always a stomach ache. In one case we wrote about, a single naproxen tablet caused kidney failure in a dog. If your dog treats the lawn like a buffet, it is worth understanding why dogs chew and mouth everything in reach.
One more note for fruit season. A few slices of apple make a great low calorie treat, but they are not dinner. If you want something meant to go on top of the bowl rather than beside it, a dog specific topper is the easier habit, and the same reasoning applies to using bone broth as a warm topper when the weather turns.
Credit
This video is by Snow Dogs Vlogs, the same husky household behind the pillow caper and a long list of pool and sandpit incidents. They film their own dogs, the dogs are clearly loved, and the channel is a good follow if you like watching huskies narrate their own lives. The channel is here.