Episode 40 - Why and When to Give Egg Yolks to Pregnant Dogs

2/3/2026

This episode is a follow up question about one of our most popular episodes, “An Egg Yolk A Day Keeps Mastitis Away”:

“At what point in the pregnancy should I begin giving my dam egg yolk to help prevent mastitis?”

In this episode I discuss:

Why egg yolks are a benefit for pregnant and lactating dogs
Best practices for when to begin feeding egg yolks to your brood bitches
Cooked vs Raw egg yolks and egg whites

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

Transcript - Episode 40

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist. And this is a Puppy Culture potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

This episode's podcast is a follow up question that came in on a previous podcast. Magda Chiarella and I did a podcast a while back on dietary choline and specifically egg yolks. The choline and egg yolks for pregnant and lactating bitches to help prevent obstructive mastitis. If you haven't listened to that podcast yet, you can find it on the Madcap Radio home page.

It's not under the potluck podcast. It was a separate podcast. You'll see it at the end of the home page. It's a great listen, but I'm going to give you the Reader's Digest that egg yolks are a supreme source of phosphodiester choline which can help prevent obstructive mastitis in lactating bitches. And the question that came in is, “At what point in the pregnancy should she start adding egg yolk to her bitches diet? ”

And my answer is that egg yolk is always a great addition to your dog's diet. So by all means, whatever point you're in, start adding that egg yolk. If you're specifically thinking of the avoiding mastitis piece of the project, I really don't have a specific answer as to how long it takes to load that choline.

I'm going to talk in a minute about some bovine studies that were done, but when it comes to dogs and choline and at what point it needs to be added in order to help prevent obstructive mastitis, my short answer is the earlier the better, because we really don't know how long it takes to load that choline. It hasn't been studied in dogs. My recommendation is that you give an egg yolk a day to your dam, at least from the time that you're planning the pregnancy.

We're giving our dogs eggs and egg yolks throughout their lives, periodically rotating it in their foods. But I would start being more purposeful about getting it into her food every day from the time she's in season and you're planning to breed her. My only caveat here with giving these egg yolks is that in the beginning part of the pregnancy, your dam does not need any extra calories.

So back out whatever the calories would be approximately. You don't have to go crazy. Just give her a little bit less of her regular food as you're adding in that egg yolk daily, because it is fairly caloric.

Just as an aside, dogs have an evolutionary strategy where the fetuses don't grow much physically for at least the first two trimesters and even most of the third trimester. It's only at the end of the third trimester, and even the last days of the pregnancy, that there's explosive growth and her caloric needs really increase. So definitely for the first two trimesters, you don't want to be increasing her calories, even though she may be asking for more food because a fat bitch is going to have more trouble whelping, and is going to have a higher cytokine level and all kinds of other complications can inflammatory complications can stem from that.

So we want to keep our bitches lean, not skinny. We don't want them gaining a lot of weight during pregnancy. In the early part. So you just want to cut back her calories in her regular food a little bit to compensate for that extra calories in the egg yolk.

Now, someone else asked, is the egg yolk raw or cooked? My bitch got terrible mastitis in her first litter. I was feeding her scrambled eggs. Then we had a shortage here in Australia. Once I stopped the eggs, the mastitis got worse.

Yeah, so interesting that she saw that correlation between not giving eggs and mastitis right away. In answer to her question, for the purposes of this discussion, the choline content is there, whether the eggs are raw or cooked. Raw egg yolks are always going to have a better nutritional profile because there is some degradation of nutrients when you cook them. But by all means, scrambled eggs are fine for choline. Your, your bitch, even in mother's pudding, it packs a huge choline punch. So by all means, you can cook your egg yolks.

Now that does bring up the question, though, of the egg whites and why we recommend raw egg yolks and not raw whole eggs.

The problem with raw egg whites is that they contain avidan, which theoretically, if consumed in extremely large doses, could cause a biotin deficiency. The avidan in the egg whites binds up with biotin and makes it unavailable. However, if you cook that avidan, the protein is denatured and can no longer bind up with a biotin. So now it becomes harmless.

So cooked egg whites at any stage in a dog's life are fine. It's the raw egg whites that you want to watch out for. Now, having said that, the animal studies where they showed that Avidan could cause a biotin deficiency, I mean, they were giving inordinate amounts of egg whites, not one egg white a day like you might give to your pregnant bitch.

So this is why I say, theoretically, this could happen because really, you know, I don't think one egg white is going to cause one egg white a day is going to cause biotin deficiency. But then on the other side, what we have is that pregnancy in general is a, a state where the organism is at risk of biotin deficiency.

In fact, in human studies, they found that 50% of pregnant women are marginally deficient in biotin. And this is because the metabolic demands of pregnancy. It's just it's very biotin intensive. You need a lot of biotin. And so you are at risk or your dog is at risk for biotin deficiency anyway. So, you know, even though I really think probably raw one raw egg white a day is not going to cause a biotin deficiency, I err on the side of caution and I leave the raw egg whites out.

The good news is that the egg yolk is an amazing source of biotin. So in addition to potentially preventing obstructive mastitis, you're giving her a nice hit of biotin, right when she needs it. And, not diverge too far off track, but by the way, a biotin deficiency early in the very early part of the pregnancy can be a teratogenic meaning to say can potentially cause birth defects.

So adding that egg yolk into her diet from the time she's in season and you're planning to breed her, you know, it's just a good practice.

Now, I want to circle back to the original question, which was for the purposes of potentially preventing mastitis in lactating bitches. When should you be introducing an egg yolk a day into your bitches diet?

If you go to the show page at Madcap Radio, you will see that I put a study up there, under the original, podcast that we did, which is an egg yolk a day keeps mastitis away. That was with me and Magda Chiarella. And I put a study up there, a bovine study, which, to summarize, found that there was a benefit to giving rumen protected choline from three weeks before calving to three weeks after that.

That was the best outcome for preventing metabolic diseases like, milk fever and mastitis. And they call this in cows the transitional period. So what's happening? And it's it's the same process in dogs. Okay. I mean, it's how can I say it's not an exact parallel because cows, for instance, are pregnant for nine months, whereas dogs are pregnant for nine weeks.

And cows have a different digestive system, but the process of switching from a dry to a lactating state is the same in cows and and dogs, in that in a dry state, most of the calcium that an animal uses or needs comes from diet. And it's a it's a specific set of hormones that allow the animal to extract what they need from their diet.

But then when they start lactating, their entire endocrine system has to do this sort of flip over to a different set of hormones that are going to allow the animal to extract calcium from its bones. And, that's because there comes a point with lactation, because it's so calcium intense that the animal just could not get enough calcium from its diet alone.

It actually has to liberate calcium from its bones in order to keep from going hypercalcemia, which is what we call milk fever or eclampsia. And that is life threatening. Okay. In cows, that would be the three weeks before up to the three weeks after.

Interestingly, even though dogs have a much shorter gestation period, I don't think that you can extrapolate it down and say, well, it's nine months. So for cows. So if it's nine weeks for dogs, it's that much shorter and just do proportionately shorter and say that's a transitional period. I don't think it works that way. I actually think three weeks before to three weeks after is probably a pretty good practice as far as that's like your safe margin for that transitional period in dogs.

But, you know, that's just my hypothesis. If it were me, I would just be giving her the egg yolk at least once or twice a week. Her whole life. And for sure starting to give her one of those raw egg yolks every day from the time she's in season and I'm planning to breed her.

If you liked this podcast, you'll love our breeder course. From Newborn to New Home at puppyculture.com. Breeders do you want to get your puppy owners started off on the right foot? Check out our bulk discounts for puppy owner courses at puppyculture.com. Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.