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A Good Friday Dog Warning // Fixing a Chocolate Fix

Friday, April 14, 2006  Terry

Chocolate Chip Cookies and a Wired Dog : (The Story of My Wonderful Life)
Matthew Ballou, Peter Prosser

Reminder to dog companions... keep chocolate away from them. They will eat it. They will get sick. They could die. Also, even pastry chef's make mistakes (or, rather, even dachshund's can sometimes figure out a way to get up onto the counter to retrieve the baking chocolate). Don't be cavalier about the dog eating the chocolate once it's happened. Here's a story from Pet Peeves (a vet blog):
Pet Peeves: Chocolate fix: On a reasonably steady night, a woman called the clinic.  “I have 3 Dachshunds, and I think they got into chocolate,” she said. 
 
Our standard response to this is to ask how much the dogs weigh (well, usually it’s only one dog), how much and what type of chocolate.
 
Her reply:  “I am a gourmet pastry chef.  This was a big block of specially made unsweetened baking chocolate special-ordered from France, and it weighed several pounds and quite a bit of it is missing.  My dogs weigh around 12-20 pounds.”
 
Oy!  That’s a lot of chocolate!  The reason chocolate is toxic is that it contains caffeine and a drug called theobromine – these are both central nervous stimulants and dogs are much more sensitive to them than humans.  The caffeine causes hyperactivity and a high heart rate, but the real problem here is the theobromine.  In high enough doses, it causes cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal heartbeats), seizures, and even death.  (Caffeine toxicity can be a real problem in higher doses, such as ingestion of over-the-counter stimulants.)
Blessings. I'm listening to “I Got Money Now” by Pink from the album I'm Not Dead on badgeitunes61x15lite.gif .
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