No, this is not a holiday shopping guide or even a holiday shopping avoidance guide!
This is a pet safety guide.
It was inspired by a question about someone’s dog who ate her daughter‘s crayons.
Fortunately, crayon eating just leads to multicolored poop. While crayons may not be dangerous to your fur babies, there are definitely children’s toys that should be avoided.
Probably the most dangerous kid toy is Play-Doh even the homemade kinds. I made homemade Play-Doh for my daughter when she was little. One of my dogs ate it. And-of course-it’s all over the Internet how dangerous it is. What’s interesting is that it’s not directly dangerous to eat the Play-Doh. It’s what happens afterwards. Play-Doh, and especially the homemade kind, contains an incredible amount of salt. So as long as there is plenty of water available, a dog can flush all of that salt out of his/her system.
And let me tell you, my Lady dog guzzled water! In a 36 hour period she drank about five giant bowls! (She peed like a race horse too.)
Fortunately, she was fine – because she had plenty of access to water. And then my daughter understood the importance of keeping these things out of the reach of the dogs.
So what else is dangerous? Anything that can be eaten and get stuck in the intestines! Little hard toys. Big hard toys that can be chewed up.
- Nerf balls.
- Golf balls.
- Tennis balls and or their covering.
Some dogs do fine with these. And then they puke it back out. But there are some dogs who don’t and they can’t puke it back out. These are the ones who end up with the medical emergencies.
And the tricky part is sometimes we don’t even know that our dogs, or our cats honestly, ate something they shouldn’t have.
I have a client whose dog likes to eat socks! There’s an obstruction waiting to happen.
I had a client who came to me once saying she wasn’t sure if there was a piece missing from a little toy with a string. Because she didn’t know for sure, it took her a very long time to make a decision whether or not to go to surgery. Sure enough, the piece of plastic was anchored in the intestines, and the string had migrated down the intestines and was causing some serious damage. Just like a parent to human babies, always trust your gut about your fur babies.
So I guess the bottom line when we have a mixture of two and four legged children: Always be vigilant. We have to be double on top of keeping things tidy and teaching the two legged children to keep the four legged children safe.
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Still seeing patients in Tampa, Clearwater, and virtually.