Minecraft: Here’s How To Heal Dogs & Wolves

Pets in Minecraft are likely the most useful and loyal entities. It’s no wonder they are since they are pets, and you do feed them. In return, they battle alongside you and scare off the creepiest mob of them all – creepers. But what happens when your pets lose health, specifically dogs? How do you heal your dogs in Minecraft when they’re low on health?

Difference between dogs and wolves in Minecraft

There is no difference between dogs and wolves in Minecraft because dogs don’t exist in the game. There are only wolves you can then tame, but they’re still wolves even though they act as dogs. If you want some slack in this department, we could say that before taming the wolf, it is considered a wolf, and when you do tame it, it becomes a dog.

If you’re curious about why I made this distinction, I’ll refer to untamed wolves as simply wolves and tamed wolves as dogs in other writing.

Dogs and wolves base stats

There’s a difference in base stats between a wolf and a dog. A wolf has 8 points in health, whereas a tame wolf has 20 points in health. This is a drastic difference, but their attack damage remains the same whether it’s a wolf or a dog. In easy mode, the attack damage is 2.5; on normal difficulty, it’s 4; on hard, it’s 6.

It would be foolish to assume that dogs don’t lose health when assisting you with battles. They lose health the same way you, the player, do, but of course, in the end, they lose less health because mobs don’t attack them as often as they attack you. After the battle, if your dog hasn’t already died, it’s important to assess your dog’s remaining health.

How to determine a dog’s remaining health

You can determine a dog’s remaining health by looking at them and its tail. To do this, you’d have to measure the exact angle between the dog’s hind legs and tail. Another indicator of low health is if a dog whines. When they whine, they’re below 10 health, so it would be smart to watch out for the dog’s behavior and sounds to determine whether or not you need to help them regain health by feeding them.

But what can you feed the dog? As it turns out, you can feed the dog any meat to regain health, and it’ll regain the same amount of health you’d regain by eating it. The only meat you can’t feed the dog is fish since that’s exclusive to Bedrock Edition Minecraft. In Bedrock, you can also feed the dog rabbit stew, which is one of Minecraft’s most nutritious foods but takes a lot to make so the next best option would be something else.

Best food to feed your dog to

In Java Edition Minecraft, there’s no point in thinking about which food you’ll give the dog since all types of meat give back the same amount of health. The dog will get two health for each type of meat. Bedrock is more complicated than that, so let me proceed by listing all types of food and how much health the dog will regain with them.

All types of fish are the least valuable when it comes to health regeneration since 1 or 2 health by feeding to them. The exception is cooked salmon, which makes them regain six health. You can feed them rotten flesh without worrying about the hunger status effect, and they’ll regain four health. Raw chicken and mutton give two, whereas cooked chicken and mutton give 6. All other variants of raw meat give three, whereas cooked rabbit gives five, and cooked pork chops and steak give 8.

Rabbit stew gives ten which is the most out of all,l but most of the time, it’s not worth making it. Seeing all these values, it’s easy to conclude that the best type of food to feed your dog is rotten flesh since it’s easily accessible, and you don’t have to cook it in a furnace for it to give you the full health back value.

Since the most likely reason a dog would ever lose health is that they fight with skeletons, zombies, and other common hostile mobs, it’ll be easy to use the ton of rotten flesh you already have in your inventory. On another note, if you still haven’t gotten rid of that rotten flesh sitting in your chests and inventory, there’s no limit to how many wolves you can tame, so the supply will run out quickly.

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