Here are a couple of holiday safety tips for your dog.
1. Don't give your dog table scraps, especially from rich, fatty meals. These
kinds of foods can give your dog gastroenteritis or pancreatitis.
Gastroenteritis is the medical term for vomiting and diarrhea. Pancreatitis
is especially dangerous. It occurs when the dog is trying to digest a very
fatty meal. The pancreas produces enzymes to assist in the digestive process.
With pancreatitis, the pancreas produces far too much; it gets inflamed and
can even begin digesting itself. The symptoms are vomiting and diarrhea,
usually bloody. The dog will become dehydrated and can die. So please, don't
feed your dog your leftover holiday
meals. And if your dog gets ill, take him
or her to the vet right away.
2.
Don't feed your dog chocolate.
If someone sends you a hamper gift
with chocolate and holiday treats, make sure it is kept out of your dog's reach.
Actually dogs are allergic to the caffeine
in chocolate, not to the other ingredients. And it takes a certain amount of
chocolate before your dog gets sick. So if your Laborador Retriever grabs a
Hershey's Kiss, that is OK. Here are the amounts of caffeine
that will cause problems:
100 mg caffeine per
1 kilogram of dog's weight |
Symptoms will occur |
140 mg caffeine per
1 kilogram of dog's weight |
Toxic level |
| Milk chocolate has: |
45 mg of caffeine per ounce |
| Unsweetened chocolate has: |
400 mg of caffeine per ounce |
But to be on the safe side, don't give your dog
any chocolate. And if your dog eats chocolate (particularly if he or she is
a little dog), contact your vet for advice.
Thanks to Dr. Oltman of Countryside Veterinary Clinic in Ellicott City, MD,
(410-461-0517) for these holiday health tips.
Note: 1 (kg) kilogram is approximately 2.2 pounds. Therefore if your dog weighs
10 pounds, he or she is about 4.5 kilograms. The toxic amount of caffeine
for your dog is 630 mg (milligrams) (4.5 kg X 140 mg/kg = 630 mg). Therefore,
approximately 1.5 ounces of unsweetened chocolate will be a toxic amount
for your 10 pound dog. It will take 14 ounces of milk chocolate to be a toxic amount.
Page History: This article appeared on the Internet first
on the homepage of
this website in December, 1999, and returned for an encore in December 2000,
before being placed in its separate page in early 2001.
(Visit http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.crazyfordogs.com and see
the Feb 02, 2001 archive.)
Other online versions are copies or derivations (credited or otherwise)
of this article.
Original file date: 
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