December 2024
Nancy Miller
It was Christmas 1990 something when my best buddy Max, a beautiful, white Bichon, dived into my Christmas stocking as I prepared breakfast for the family. Anyone who knows me at all knows that I love all things chocolate, and my husband had stuffed my personally handknit stocking with Hershey's kisses. My first idea that something was wrong was when I felt the wet hole in the stocking ... and then I saw wrappers and more wrappers and still more wrappers. Max was already zooming around the living room!
We had three children, one hyperactive, and I knew what chocolate and caffeine could do to a child, but I never dreamed what it could do to a 20 pound dog.
Max was a little different anyway. His mother had suffered severe eclampsia, and all the puppies had to quit nursing immediately, which left my sister bottle feeding a litter of puppies every three hours 'round the clock. She gave me Max at three weeks if we would just bottle feed him and love him, and we did. But a puppy separated from its mama and siblings at three weeks comes with a different set of problems, and Max was a little neurotic. So Christmas zoomies ALL DAY just seemed part of the norm for Max until they continued into the next day.
Obviously, we were not breeding dogs at the time, and we didn't realize how serious this could be, so by the time we called the vet the day after Christmas, we learned that the intense danger period had passed, but the dangers of chocolate at Christmas. can cause a lot more than just the zoomies!
Don't make the same mistake I made. Keep your chocolates up and away from your dogs. I had deeply researched this article for my blog, and then I found an article from my good friends at pawTree that sums up everything I researched into one amazing blog. Click this link
to learn all you need to know about chocolate poisoning. It even has a chocolate calculator where you insert your dog's weight and the amount of chocolate he ate to tell you what your next steps should be.
And for those of you who are wondering, Max was just fine by the afternoon of the 26th, but if we had known what we know now, he would have been okay a lot sooner.
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