Hey,

Happy Wednesday!

March is National Pet Poison Prevention Awareness Month (if you can name it, it probably has its own day, week or month).

Whenever I see the word ‘poison’ it takes me back to my wedding, where I sang Alice Cooper’s classic rock rumination on toxic love and lust — ”I wanna kiss you but I want it too much. I wanna taste you but your lips are venomous poison.”

With hindsight, not the most romantic choice…

Anyway, the P-word is also one we dog parents worry about a lot. Our dogs can be hurt in so many ways and we want to keep them safe. So we take care near roads, we monitor them when they swim, we keep them close when there are potential predators or perils. 

But poisons are silent assassins. 

If your dog snaffles a pile of raisins, a pizza topped with onion, or mints or candy containing the sweetener xylitol, and you don’t see it, the effects might not be noticeable — at least not immediately. 

If they’re regularly fed chocolate — toxic to all dogs — by an unknowing child, they might not get sick for a long time… until they do. Dogs can have different tolerance to toxins at different life stages.

These are just a few of the many regular human foods that are poisonous to your dog — and then you’ve got all the other damaging substances that get left lying around, such as rat poison and marijuana. Or even toxic feces (sorry, but some dogs like it!).

And, of course, you can find toxins in dog food. 

Many toxins are naturally occurring and, although good manufacturers will go to great lengths to test their food for harmful presences, they can very occasionally be present in certain batches. 

The deadliest of these is aflatoxin, awareness of which is something our founder Dr. Mike Sagman was very keen to raise. You can read his article on the matter here.

There are also potential issues with dog food that uses low-grade meat by-products. Do you know what’s been thrown into the grinder? What state of health was the animal in? Was it wearing a flea collar?!

Some artificial preservatives risk health damage in the long term, six of which you can read about here.

But I don’t want you to panic. I mean, we all have to feed our dogs and there’s plenty of great dog food out there full of good ingredients and regularly tested for contamination. 

You just need to be careful. Read the label, read our reviews, try to buy food with the best quality meat, don’t share your food unless you’re certain it’s ok for your dog and, when walking, look out for anything discarded that might tempt them to have a nibble. 

And, of course, look out for our recall alerts (and encourage your friends and family to sign up if they haven’t).  

I hope I haven’t put you off your breakfast. And not all poisons are deadly — despite my song choice, I’m still happily married.

Until next time,