I remember Cecil dealing with something like this before. He talked about dogs eating chocolate and getting sick and dying and how they would sometimes eat acetominophen (Tylenol) and get sick. My question though is how do they eat stuff that us humans won’t eat, such as garbage, old hunks of uncooked hamburger, crap from the table, not to mention chewing on dead animals in the backyard etc. and never seem to have any ill effects? I mean us humans just have to get dirty or biten by a mosquito or get some tick on us from being out in the forest and we’re seemingly done for. I know our immune systems are different, but how about pigs? They are supposed to be close genetically to us, but they’re…well…uh…pigs!
For the same reason the homeless or non-wealthy first worlders don’t easily die, you need an especially bad case of food poisoning for it to be lethal. Humans are a lot more resilient than you suggest, there’s a difference between the discomfort of a mosquito bite and a life and death situation. Bitching about how something “almost killed you” isn’t the same as really almost being killed.
Well, you may be right…BTW…HorseLoverFat??? Where did that come from? Are you a Horse that loves fat, or some fat guy who loves horses?
Anyway…I was a paramedic and EMT here in New Jersey for a while and it always was kind of creepy how some people died so easily and others went through hell and lived. Car accidents were the worst for this. But getting back to my question, it just “seems” as though it’s one bad news thing for humans after another. Can’t eat the chicken now; can’t eat hamburger for E Coli…you see what I mean. Life’s a bitch and as one of my war buddies used to say… “Don’t die stupid.” Nobody want to die chocking on a sandwich at Mickey D’s. Oh well… sorry for the rant.
[ aside ] The novelist Philip K. Dick noted that philip derives from the Greek for “horse lover” while dick is German for “fat” and has written himself into his works using the name “Horselover Fat.” One assumes that our poster is a fan of that author. [ /aside ]
The generic answer to your question is that all current critters (including Homo spiens sapiens) have evolved with certain tolerances and diets. Apparently, the wolves from which our current dogs were bred were even more scavengers than our predecessors, (or were scavengers more recenty than our forebears) and they have not lost as much tolerance for decaying food as have our guts.
And dogs DO suffer ill effects–I just cleaned one up yesterday morning. I think it was probably either the chef’s salad or the chocolate birthday cake she ate Sunday night.