Vet Help

[Dantrag]

My dog ate chocolate once. Was nothing close to the MG he needed for him to be sick. It was milk chocolate. Dark chocolate in almost any MG is dangerous for dogs of any size.

[Byrthnoth]

My dog ate an entire chocolate cake once and gave a shit but lived longer than average for her breed. The ingredient in cacao that ultimately damage dogs is theobromine, which isn't an ingredient we intentionally include in chocolate and thus probably doesn't have an incredibly consistent concentration across different sources of chocolate.

(Malaysian journal of nutrition)
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc...=rep1&type=pdf

I'll note that the reference finds about 20 mg/ounce of chocolate (~.75 mg/g), which is substantially lower than what most secondary/tertiary source websites report but consistent with the other research paper I found.

[Wulfgang]

Now that the pooch is likely ok, can we turn this into the "Crazy shit that your dog/cat/child ate?" thread? When I was a kid, we had a massive male dog named Remington. Remmy was not a particularly intelligent dog, but was resilient as hell. His eating exploits included:

1) Most of a can of paint thinner (we were actually pretty worried about this one; dog never showed a sign of an issue)
2) A 60W light bulb
3) An entire 18oz bag of Hershey Kisses, foil included (less worried at this point after he survived the paint thinner np)

Remington was eventually done in by a 60 mph collision with a pick-up truck on the road in front of our house. If that event had not happened, I swear the thing would still be alive much to my mother's chagrin; guy was a total beast.

[Brill Weave]

Did Remington at least kill the driver?

[Obsidian]

My dog (yellow lab) ate two cobs of corn, husk and all. I was four hours away when it happened on a Friday, my mom didn't tell me until Monday night because he hadn't eaten or gone to the bathroom since he ate the cobs. I made the four hour drive in two and a half, had him at the vet by the time they opened, and the vet said if we'd waited a few hours longer he would have died. Had a massive blockage in his large intestine and the corn completely fucked the bacteria in his stomach.

He had surgery that day where they had to cut open his stomach along his rib cage. He stayed overnight and we brought him home the next day. He had never bothered with incisions in the past and he had issues with the cone so we never put it on him. I left for work and told my mom to keep him with her to make sure he didn't chew out his stitches. Got home around 10PM after work, mom's asleep on the couch and I don't see my dog. Walk upstairs because he liked to sleep in my mom's room and saw some droplets of blood on the carpet. Said hi to him and told him to roll over. When he did his incision split wide open. Grabbed a bunch of extra gauze pads and wrapped his chest tight with a tenser bandage and took him to the emergency vet. He pulled out both layers of stitching. They sewed him back up and we put the cone on him and started him on meds for the ear infection we knew it would give him.

He was the smartest and dumbest dog I've ever met.

[BaneTheBrawler]

sounds like it's a miracle you made it past your toddler years

[Obsidian]

It is honestly a miracle I'm here today, though not entirely because of my mom (who I love but is definitely inattentive sometimes). I'm not a religious person but someone somewhere either really likes me, or absolutely loathes me.

To summarize most of my major injuries: both wrists broken at least twice, five separated shoulders, two dislocated knee-caps, half a dozen broken ankles, eight broken ribs, one shattered shin, a dozen minor concussions and one grade III concussion (accompanied by a 24 hour coma), tore my ACL, MCL and PCL at the same time, and permanent hearing damage from a firework. I broke my nose twice and have broken or mangled more fingers and toes than I can count but I don't count those as major injuries. Short of locking me in my room for most of my adolescent life I doubt there's anything my mom could have done to prevent most of those.

[Brill Weave]

It is honestly a miracle I'm here today, though not entirely because of my mom (who I love but is definitely inattentive sometimes). I'm not a religious person but someone somewhere either really likes me, or absolutely loathes me.

To summarize most of my major injuries: both wrists broken at least twice, five separated shoulders, two dislocated knee-caps, half a dozen broken ankles, eight broken ribs, one shattered shin, a dozen minor concussions and one grade III concussion (accompanied by a 24 hour coma), tore my ACL, MCL and PCL at the same time, and permanent hearing damage from a firework. I broke my nose twice and have broken or mangled more fingers and toes than I can count but I don't count those as major injuries. Short of locking me in my room for most of my adolescent life I doubt there's anything my mom could have done to prevent most of those.

What he's not telling you is that all of these were self inflicted because he's a Leafs fan.

[Obsidian]

That's what the concussions were supposed to fix.

[Salodin]

It should be said, often if a dog eats something they shouldn't in large enough doses that they vomit it up. They still get a little of its effects but not the lethal dosage people worry about.

My pup ate an entire double chocolate brownie I was saving once. Before we could properly freak out he started vomiting like something out of the excorcist. Seriously, it was disgusting, and I like to think I'm desensitized to gross things. He was a little shakey after that, but some water and a nap and he's fine.

[zoobernut]

It should be said, often if a dog eats something they shouldn't in large enough doses that they vomit it up. They still get a little of its effects but not the lethal dosage people worry about.

My pup ate an entire double chocolate brownie I was saving once. Before we could properly freak out he started vomiting like something out of the excorcist. Seriously, it was disgusting, and I like to think I'm desensitized to gross things. He was a little shakey after that, but some water and a nap and he's fine.

You are lucky that your dog vomited it all up but it is not true that they will automatically start vomiting it up. A disturbingly high percentage of the emergency appointments my wife sees are for situations like that and they have to induce vomiting.

My dog ate a dark chocolate bar out of my backpack one morning so my wife induced vomiting on him and he barfed up a bunch of brown sludge all over our yard. He looked really unhappy that we wouldn't let him re-eat the barf.

[Sho]

When it comes to dogs and eating chocolate, there can be a few factors, with the main one being the size of the dog itself. Obviously a larger dog with a bigger gut will take a Hershey's Milk Chocolate bar better than a smaller toy dog. In most cases the dog will regurgitate the chocolate, but if it's a small amount, I wouldn't worry about it -- if the dog gets an upset stomach you can hold off on feeding him/her the rest of the day, and then give them a little bit of plain white rice and water on the first feeding so it's stomach "resets". It shouldn't be said that if they've eaten a large amount of chocolate (regardless of size of dog) you should see a vet immediately. Another factor is the type of chocolate -- bitter, dark and baker's chocolate are the worst and more prone to poison your pup than milk & white chocolate.

One of my best friends is a vet, if it matters (and my girlfriend is his vet tech). Worst cast that I've seen him work on was a medium sized beagle that got into a 2 or 3 potent weed brownies. He induced vomiting and then gave him some activated charcoal (to slow any further absorption of THC). Caught it in time and the dog was fine after 3 days.

If you guys have any pet questions I could always pass it along to either of them for ya.