The Year the Dog Ate Chocolate

There was a lovely comment from Midnightcoiler on my last post that is the inspiration of this post - that's for curing my writers block!

Dogs and chocolate. Talktothevet.com has the following guidelines on dogs and the toxicity of chocolate:

"The good news is that it takes, on average, a fairly large amount of theobromine 100-150 mg/kg to cause a toxic reaction. Although there are variables to consider like the individual sensitivity, animal size and chocolate concentration.

On average,
Milk chocolate contains 44 mg of theobromine per oz.
Semisweet chocolate contains 150mg/oz.
Baker's chocolate 390mg/oz.

Using a dose of 100 mg/kg as the toxic dose it comes out roughly as:
1 ounce per 1 pound of body weight for Milk chocolate
1 ounce per 3 pounds of body weight for Semisweet chocolate
1 ounce per 9 pounds of body weight for Baker's chocolate.

So, for example, 2 oz. of Baker's chocolate can cause great risk to an 15 lb. dog. Yet, 2 oz. of Milk chocolate usually will only cause digestive problems."

Now my sweet little (yet chubby) Puggle has a tendency to get into things. He will do ANYTHING for food and I mean anything. He loves carbs. Will eat an entire bag of rolls in a flash.

The setting is Christmas, 3 years ago. It would be our first Christmas with Luke. I had just purchased a plethera of boxes of Frango Mints (love them - thank you Macys!!) to hand out as gifts. We went out to dinner one night and found that Luke had eaten yes, an entire box of these dark chocolate mint wonders. He appeared to be fine. Stomach of steel. Never better!

Fast forward 2 weeks. It's our first year we are spending Christmas together. My first Christmas at my future in-laws. We head to their house and have a lovely time. Christmas Eve. We go out and about somewhere and come home to find that as much as we had barricaded him in, our cute and innocent dog had broken into the basement and had found the one pound box of Jamaican rum chocolate and ate ... well all of it.

Christmas Eve goes on ... we open presents ... Luke gets sick. Luke proceeds to attempt to expel all chocolate and rum out of his system all night long. My poor husband slept with him on the kitchen floor all night to make sure he was OK.

Christmas Day comes and everything appears back to normal. We party all day long. 9pm rolls around and we finally start out 5.5 hour drive home because I had a meeting the next morning. We are 45 minutes into the trip and poor Luke starts to get sick again in the back seat of the car. Still the chocolate?? Hungover maybe?? Either way he ended up getting sick about every 45 minutes the entire car ride home.

Longest car ride ever.

We even went to far as to call a vet at 10 pm on Christmas Day night to see if he needed emergency care. He ended up at the vet the next day with an IV of fluids and shaped back up. Poor dog.

So yes, for your own sake - keep the dog away from the chocolate.

Other dog stories to come some day. Maybe about the time that he needed a epi shot?? Or maybe the time that he was in a cast for a week?? Ahhhh ... Luke. So cute ... yet somehow so accident prone!

Until the next time ...
The girl behind the lama (and her dog)
~LMM