Our dogs & cats occasionally get into each others food. They also get plenty of their designed for critter food.
Dawg loves pizza crusts, some with a few little pieces of cooked onion.
Our dog, 110 pounds of crossed St Barnard & Pyrenees, 3 years old. loves people food, ice cream, some canned cat food he will sneak & some canned major brand dog food you could not get him to eat until starvation sets in.
How much cat food would he have to eat for it to be lethal, what kind or with a lot of what in it? By it self with no other dog food? With his normal dog food?
I am allergic to some foods that he eats just fine. Other people do also.
How important is the difference between a 10 pound dog and a 110 pound dog? People poision does not need to vary very much to kill a 100 pound person or a 400 pound person.
Are animals more effected or affected by body size than people? What about breed and what it has always been fed? ( Arctic sled dog vs Florida 7 pound bra baby Shih Tzu?
The joke is that the dog will be attacked by the cat and suffer from it, not that the food will directly affect him. Cat food does tend to have more fat and protein than what dogs need, so if that is a significant part of the diet, the dog may be getting more fat and protein than what it needs.
I can’t find the link, but I read several years ago about a cat hoarder woman who had been feeding dry dog food to a ll her cats because it was cheaper. By the time she was busted, many of her cats were blind, dead or dying of heart disease.
(Mouse meat, any sort of heart meat and clams are all very high in taurine.)
I have three dogs. A few years ago one of them ate a pound of Mackinac Island fudge. I had my suspicions, but didn’t know for sure which one was the culprit and my vet advised to administer hydrogen peroxide to make them puke. I keep hydrogen peroxide in my dog & cat medicine chest just in case, so I did. I felt awful - all three dogs were outside heaving up their stomach contents and were very miserable. I had suspected the Lab, but the Rottweiler ejected the wrapper. I was most worried about my 25 lb dog because of her size.
In addition to being (mostly) carnivores, dogs are obligate scavengers and seem to be able to handle all sorts of nasty stuff like goose and cat poop, maggotty deer meat and raw bones. I don’t imagine most people would fare well after eating any of the aforementioned, but I’ve never had a dog affected by any of that. Not that I encourage or actually allow them to eat maggotty meat or poop of any kind.
Dogs have a much shorter and more acidic digestive tract than humans, so they can handle foods that would make most people sick.
That is true, but dogs tend to deal with rotten stuff and shit a lot better than humans do. It is not just a matter of their system being more used to it, either. A dog’s stomach juices are a good deal more acidic than a human’s, and will kill pathogens and dissolve stuff a lot more effectively than a human stomach can.
I know a dog who eats grapes straight off the vine, by the pound. And she is fine.
Only a very few dogs are sensitive to grapes/raisins, and no one knows why. No specific mechanism for a grape killing a dog has yet to be described, and they cannot seem to get any laboratory dogs to die, no matter how many raisins they are fed.
Yet many veterinarians have posters up warning people to rush their dog in should he gobble a single oatmeal raisin cookie…
That sounds more like the attitude I would expect from a cat… but I have friends that feed their cat dry dog food with no problem. I’ll be passing on the warning.
I had a dog who stole a large amount of milk chocolate from the kitchen countertop. We called the vet, but it had been over an hour, probably, since ingestion (we were out) and the dog weighed over 80lbs. The vet said just to keep an eye on her and make sure she had plenty of water available. He thought the dog : chocolate ratio wasn’t lethal, and if it had been, it would have acted fast.
She was fine, but she did run around like she’d done a line of coke for about an hour.
So we learned that we don’t need to panic if the dog eats a single chocolate chip, but that we need to keep the chocolate in a sealed container, in a cabinet.
…though if it is true their stomachs are more acidic, I would imagine they are more resistant than humans to quite a few toxins. Perhaps this why they can eat a whole box of slug bait and live.