My cat Freckles likes beer, but keep it from him. He’s suspicious of mixed drinks. I once met a St. Bernard with a big taste for beer. He was the frat house dog, and he had to put down at age five with a toasted liver. I also knew an Irish Setter named Thor who was a maniac for illegal smoke. He’d follow a cigarette around the room for the exhales. When I last saw him, he was a chubby 8-year old. Irish Setters are notorious dimbulbs, anyway, so it would be hard to spot any damage.
Well, it’s not as good an idea as not letting your pet ingest something toxic, no. But given the choice between pouring a tiny amount of a very dilute mutagen down an animal for the space of five minutes or so, and letting your pet die a potentially very nasty death, I’ll take the mutagen every single time. It’s not as good as intravenous apomorphine, but most folks don’t have apo, syringes, and needles lying around the house, and you’ve only got thirty minutes to get that crap out of them before they start absorbing it. So peroxide’s a damn good first aid measure. Hell, I’ve worked at clinics that didn’t even keep apomorphine in stock because we didn’t get that many toxicities. Care to guess what we induced vomiting with?
Harmless, there’s probably no serious danger to Jesper if he drinks moderately, but you have to keep in mind that moderate for him means he can have roughly half a teaspoon a night. Do you have a shaker that small? 
I thought about giving him a small dose last night just to calm his behiney down!
He was acting so loony I think he might be sneaking snoot-fulls out of the fridge. 
Or else he’s gotten into the “special catnip” again. :dubious:
Threadspotting: 9 Lives . . . and 12 Steps. (Submitted by Whammo)
:eek:
How does one say it?
“Woot”, I believe is how it goes?
If I offended you, CrazyCatLady, I apologize. That certainly wasn’t my intent.
My intent was to point out that we (pet owners) should try to have a “pet first aid kit” in the house, just as many of us do for humans. Your vet should be able to help you out with what you need to put in this, and maybe he/she will have a better suggestion to induce vomiting with. Maybe not.
My point was simply “Be prepared”; ironically enough a point that I can’t say I’ve followed. It simply never occured to me that I would have to induce vomiting in my own animal to save them. It is something I am thinking about now (thank you), and I plan to talk to my own vet and see what he says to stock for an emergency ingestion.
I’m not offended, but I am exasperated with people who don’t know anything about veterinary medicine giving alarmist, inaccurate medical advice.
Of course owners should have a first aid kit, and one of the things that should be in it is peroxide, because that’s what your vet’s going to tell you to give if you need to induce vomiting. In the veterinary field, we’re well aware that peroxide can be a mutagen, but we’re also well aware that dilute solution is a pretty weak mutagen and that most mutations are harmless. Given those facts and the fact that it’s a small amount, with limited contact, it’s a pretty negligible risk, and it’s a damn sight better than a dead patient. We worry far more about the patient aspirating than we do about the mutagenic properties of the peroxide.
(Well, except maybe for that one guy who told a woman whose cat had eaten some lilies to give the poor thing table salt till it puked. It takes a hellacious amount of salt to induce vomiting, and by the time she got enough down him to take effect, he’d absorbed quite a bit. That kitty had a first-rate electrolyte imbalance for quite some time.)
What we usually recommend for first aid kits is a rectal thermometer (digital ones are faster and often easier, but with mercury you don’t have to worry about batteries going bad), some sort of lube (hey, if your dog was putting something up your butt, wouldn’t you want him to at least lube it first?), bandage material, peroxide, and appropriate restraint devices for your pet (muzzles for dogs, thick towels or small blankets for cats.) I usually tell people to keep a few days’ worth of any long-term meds and an extra leash in there, too.
The thermometer, obviously, is to monitor your pet’s temperature, in case of fever, heatstroke, or hypothermia, or if you’re monitoring a bitch close to whelping. Bandage material is for cuts and scrapes (some owners like to keep Neosporin around for minor stuff that doesn’t really require a vet visit), and can be used to splint a very unstable broken limb in a pinch. Roll gauze can also be used for a makeshift muzzle. Peroxide is for cleaning up minor cuts and inducing vomiting (remember, peroxide on an open wound stings a bit, so be careful). The muzzles and towels are so you can handle a frightened or painful pet without getting injured yourself. A scared or hurt animal is more likely to bite you than an aggressive one, and if you get hurt it’s going to be a lot harder to help your pet. You do not, however, want to put a muzzle on a dog that you’ve given peroxide, as they can keep horking for quite some time afterward.
And two aspirins for the hangover.
What?
Actually, a lot of people do keep baby aspirin in their pet first aid kits, for mild pain in their dogs. It’s not appropriate in a feline first aid kit, though; it’s toxic for kitties. Ibuprofen and acetaminophen are toxic to both species and should NEVER be kept in a pet first aid kit.