So what do I do? There was a big, furry arachnid outside our back porch, and the dog was drooling so I assume he started playing with it and realized it wasn’t as good as it looked. I go out about 5 minutes later, and see the dog drooling profusely now, but otherwise fine. I know that tarantulas are venomous but aren’t usually deadly, and he is a fairly large dog, so what should I do? Take him to the vet? Induce vomiting? Hope that he chewed it up really fast and it didn’t bite him?
If he was bit a trantuala bite is unlikely to harm him significantly unless he is a very small dog. A tarantula bite has about as much venom as a bee or wasp sting.
If he ate it (or chewed it up) he was probably blasted with the thousands of irritating hairs covering the spider and these are possibly irritating his mouth and throat lining.
Cisco just told me that he was recently in Colorado, and that someone told him that we didn’t have wild tarantulas here. Believe me, we do. I’ve seen 3 already today.
Update on the dog
He doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of discomfort, no difficulty swallowing, he ate his dinner just fine and is all normal in every respect. I think the hairs of the spider may have just irritated the inside of his mouth and caused him to salivate more.
Just saw astro’s post while replying, that’s what I’ve been thinking. I don’t think I’ll take him to the vet, since he seems to be perfectly fine. Thanks to everyone with information about tarantula bites.
He’ll probably “give it back” in a few hours…whenever my dogs eat anything icky it always comes back up. I am one of those people who calls the vet if an animal as much as sneezes, basically a worry-wart. Hope everything goes good for the dog.
So do you know if the dog actually ate the whole spider up or did you just see him taking a test nibble? Would be interesting to know whether the tarantua’s hairs actually kept the dog from chewing him up and saved his life, or whether the hairs just made the dog drool a bit in between spider burps later.
