Vegan Dog Food / An Unconventional Perspective

FINAL DATE TO REACH GOAL: OCTOBER 31-2019!!

Hello to all visiting my GoFundMe page,

I am a German Veterinary student currently in my last semester at the -Lithuanian University of Health Sciences- in Lithuania. 

To be able to graduate as a vet we need to write a final thesis on a subject of our choice. I did choose "Vegan-Dog-Food", for which I want to take blood samples from different dogs fed a vegan-diet. 

My university can´t provide financial support for the needed blood tests and therefore I turned to gofundme.com in hope to be able to finance the blood tests which will be carried out at the IDEXX laboratories in Germany.


I am planning on taking and analysing blood from 17 dogs. As I do need many parameters to create useful data, each blood test will be above 200€. That would add up to a total of above 3400€ for all 17 dogs. Me as a student would never be able to afford the tests, so I contacted IDEXX laboratories in Germany which put me in their study section which made the special price of 120€ possible, meaning that it would be a total of 2040€ for the blood tests. 

The dogs to be tested are all meeting following criteria:
1. Being on a 100% plant based (vegan) diet for at least 6 months.
2. Being healthy and active without any chronic or current diseases.

My research is for the greater good, meaning if my thesis would proof that vegan dog food is healthy and ethically acceptable, we would have a diet option for our beloved dogs that could drastically reduce a big part of the environmental impact. To put things into perspective it is worth mentioning Gregory S. Okin´s study on the Environmental impact of food consumption by dogs and cats in the US, which showed that dogs and cats alone consume about 20% of the amount of dietary energy that humans do and around 33% of the animal derived energy. The possibility of feeding a plant-based diet to dogs would have an unbelievable impact on mother nature: Decreased CO2 emissions, decreased overall pollution, tremendous decrease in animal deaths per dog (due to avoidance animals as food-source), decreased water-usage, the list goes on and on....

I hope you can help me make this thesis become reality to hopefully find a dietary alternative for our dogs of which our whole planet could benefit from.

You can also help me by filling out my survey on vegan-dog-food: https://survey.questionstar.com/d77c3a61


I really hope we can reach the desired limit of 1999€ until November in order to start the blood analytics, enabling me to create a study about vegan dog food that potentially could change our future to the better.

Thank you in advance to everyone interested in the project, if you decide to donate something to the project I would be more than thankful and if you agree I´d like to mention your name in my thesis as donor making the research possible (if you want to stay anonymous it will be respected).

Best regards
Lukas Kiemer