The holidays are coming up and I'm happy to see articles like this
Surprising dangers for pets during the holidays
being posted on the front page of CNN. Because we're human, fallible, an inherently stupid/ignorant. Don't deny it, it's true, we do stupid shit that we have no explanation for other than the fact that it was a stupid thing to do.
So for that reason I will share with you my thoughts on the matter. Just because humans can eat it it does not mean you dog can! I am an adamant freak about dogs eating people food, it's a hell no in my house. Mostly because 1) I was a vet tech for 5 years and I have seen what it can do and it's not pretty. Like really not pretty, trust me on this one peeps, it's a very unfortunate thing with a damn big bill attached to it. And 2) I had a few dogs that had some issues with eating things. Bad issues. Here let me give you 2 examples, both of the 2 dogs I had prior to my dogs now, a lab named Marlin and a show english setter named Willy. I thought Willy was the dumbest dog ever until I got Corbin, goes to show that I just don't know stupid.
Marlin, he was a typical lab, hyper hyper hyper but oddly also reactive so see, I have experience with dogs like Jayne. That's why I knew we could handle him and that anyone else would euthanize the nutter butter. Me and my love of the rejects, I swear. Anyway Marlin was with me when I was going to school in Maryland. I had gone back to San Diego for Thanksgiving or Christmas, I forget when but it was winter. I know this because on the day I flew home it snowed that evening. Mind you it was a damn long flight so I had been up at like 7 am pacific time and by the time I got home and settled it was like 10pm. I went down stairs to do something and came back up to find Marlin had raided my suitcase (unzipped but closed when I left the room) and eaten a box of Abuelita mexican hot chocolate that I had brought back with me. Now for those of you that have not experienced this stuff it's like raw cacao with sugar, yeah only the good stuff for my damn dog right? I was PISSED. At me, at the dog, at the WORLD because I knew it was going to be a long night. In a snowstorm. Now you would think that this volume of chocolate would kill him. I was HOPING it would kill him. Yeah, no. Bastage was WIRED FOR SOUND after that stuff hit his system. I had called one of the vets I worked for to see if there was anything I could do because now he had an upset tummy, the squirts, needed to go out every 15 minutes. Did I mention the snowstorm? Ya? And was crawling the friking walls all damn night. I had to be at work at 7 am because that's what time vet techs go in even though office hours and vets don't get there until 9am. Next time you run into a cranky vet tech realize this ya? So the vet said there was nothing to do for him (of course). I got NO SLEEP and was not pleased by the next morning where I had to bring him with me since he couldn't hold it for any length of time. That dog was hell, he's the one who shoved me down a flight of concrete basement stairs when I wouldn't play with him. Oh and if you're wondering no, I didn't kill him. He bonded so strongly to my ex boyfriend I left in MD I gave Marlin to him. Separating them would have been cruel, those brats deserved each other anyway.
Dog #2, Willy, beautiful dog, dumb as rocks but so lovie you just don't care. Yeah he was a great dog for all his oddities. He loved everybody, polar opposite of Marlin. We kept them in the kitchen when we were gone. This was before we bought crates (before I was sold on crate training, all my dogs stay in crates when we're gone now) so they were baby gated into the kitchen. On a microwave cart in there I had a few cookbooks and one day, for reasons I just do not know, my bible was left in there. Yeah I had a bible (I probably still do somewhere too) I know that sounds so odd doesn't it? Me? Bible? It happens. Anyway I came home one day to bits of bible everywhere. Willy had eaten the bible. Not the cover mind you, no the thin thin pages of the interior. Shitting scripture for days. You could actually read some of it. Oddly Marlin didn't have a bite, it was just Willy. I never did understand what was going on in that dog's wee little brain but I was so waiting for the lightening to come shooting out of the sky, I swear. Lesson here, keep your religious icons away from the separation anxiety dogs or suffer some strange consequences. As for what happened to Willy, when I divorced my first husband (oh you didn't know I've been married before? Yeah I'll tell ya'll that story someday too, promise) we gave him to my aunt in law. She had fallen in love with him when we had moved across country and stayed in her house for a spell, Creve Coeur in St. Louis. I couldn't get rid of Marlin after the divorce. Like Jayne very few people can handle a dog with those kind of issues. Hell my ex couldn't really handle him but he did ok so there he stayed.
I'd show you guys a pic of them but it was in the days before digi cameras so I'll have to find where I put those old portraits I had taken of them and scan it in. It's around somewhere I'm sure.
But important note I want to make here, there are a multitude of different things that are toxic to dogs, please do not learn the hard way!
here's a mini list of what people may or may not know:
Grapes
raisins (no lie here people, we almost lost a foster to this one recently)
onions
garlic
tylenol/acetamenopin
macadamia nuts
chocolate toxicity slide rule
Xylitol
And there's a multitude of plants, the article above has a link to a website of all the plants that are toxic to pets, or maybe the book, I forget. I have a water softener in my house so I don't keep any house plants, too lazy to gather the water from outside.
If you need to make your pet vomit and can't take the dog in (because you're supposed to take the dog in and not make them vomit yourself) hydrogen peroxide works like a charm. It's takes a lot of it (10cc for a lab, yeah he ate 13 Costco muffins whole, I had to get him to give them back before they went through his system and caused another all nighter) but it works.
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