Tips From the Pet Poison HELPLINE — Onions and Garlic
We all want to keep our furbabies safe and healthy. Dogster Kristy Sweetland, furmom to Seva and Finlay, will be providing weekly tips and warnings from the Pet Poison HELPLINE™ to make that job easier. As a veterinary technician with the Pet Poison HELPLINE™ she’s going to help us all stay more on top of what’s dangerous for our furry family members.
Onions and Garlic!
Most of us with pets are aware of chocolate’s toxic potential by now. More and more of us are becoming familiar with other food product around the house which can be harmful. One of the most common household food products resulting in poisoning for dogs or cats happens to be onions or garlic. This group of harmful foods includes anything in the Allium family, which would entail all types of onions, garlic, shallots, or chives. It is thought that ingestions of these vegetables could be harmful in quantities greater than 0.5% of an animal’s body weight, but no definitive toxic dose has been established thus far.
This family of produce contains chemical agents by the name of disulfides which can result in the destruction of an animal’s red blood cells in large quantities. If toxicity develops, you may not notice sign for several days after an ingestion. The resulting effects of the anemia would be lethargy, rapid breathing, a rapid heart rate, vomiting, diarrhea, refusal to eat, and you would generally notice extremely pale gums. Blood transfusions are often necessary at this stage in order to allow regeneration of the blood cells. Measures to protect the kidneys would also take place. If your veterinarian can initiate these treatments, your pet faces an excellent prognosis for recovery.
Watch the gardens if you grow chives or onions and keep the pets away from these areas. I strongly discourage you from loading your pet up with garlic as a natural remedy for flea control, as well. This could be harmful over chronic periods of time and, believe it or not, many of the chemicals used today, manufactured from responsible pharmaceutical companies, can be more benign than some of the natural remedies currently in use.
While “loading them up” on garlic may not be advised, it’s hard to ignore the health benefits of small amounts of garlic, especially since people have been feeding it for ages. People have to stop thinking more is better, and that just because it’s natural means it’s automatically safe, and just be sensible.
We don’l “load it up” but we do know it does work for fleas here in our home. And we would rather use garlic ina small dose then toxic chemicals in any dose.
Amen to that, Margarat. The “more is better” mentality has gotten a lot of pets (and people!) in trouble.
thanks for the info. Mama was wondering why garlic was on the no-no list and yet it still ends up in so many pet recipes. She is try to learn to cook for me! Isn’t that nice? I think we are going to try cheese straws from the 3 Dog Bakery book this weekend!
Love, Savvy!