Halloween Safety Tips: How to Prevent and Treat Chocolate Poisoning in Dogs

With all the chocolate lying around at Halloween, take extra precautions to keep your dog away. If children control their own stashes of Halloween candy, they may be careless about where they leave it. Those bags full of Halloween candy will easily hold enough chocolate to be dangerous. Make sure to educate your children on the danger chocolate poses to dogs, and help them find a safe place to store their Halloween candy. Chocolate can be deadly to a dog, and even a small amount of chocolate is a threat to your dog's health. According to Dog Owner's Digest, chocolate can cause epileptic seizures in some dogs. In all dogs, chocolate can kill. Luckily, there are ways you can prepare in case your dog gets chocolate poisoning.

Before Halloween, talk to your vet about assembling an emergency first aid kit for your dog. Ask your vet for an emergency number that can be called at all hours. Make sure to do this before the holiday, when the house will be filled with candy. Some ingredients to be sure to include are a diluted mix of hydrogen peroxide, which will stimulate vomiting, helping to rid your dog of the poison, and activated charcoal, which helps prevent the absorption of poison. However, make sure to check with your vet before medicating your dog yourself.

How can you tell if your dog has ingested enough chocolate to cause a problem? The ingredient in chocolate that poisons dogs is called theobromine. Different chocolate has different amounts of this poison. If your dog eats chocolate, the effects depend on the size of the dog, the age of the dog, and the type of chocolate eaten. The more concentrated the chocolate, the more deadly it is. The Dog Owner's Digest says that white chocolate is the least poisonous to dogs, and that the dog would have to eat about 200 ounces of chocolate for every pound in their body to get poisoned. The dog needs to consume about one ounce milk chocolate, common among Halloween candy, per pound of body weight. The really dangerous chocolate is very concentrated, like baking chocolate. Only 0.1 ounce of baking chocolate per pound of dog is needed to lead to deadly results.

My dog, a small Bichon Frise, has eaten large pieces of chocolate in the past and survived, so don't panic. If you think your dog has chocolate poisoning, contact your vet. The symptoms of chocolate poisoning in a dog include diarrhea, vomiting, and hyperactivity. Not all symptoms will follow the same pattern in every dog. In my little dog, he showed hyperactivity for a few hours, and then became very sad and unhappy, and then about 12 hours after eating the chocolate threw up. He was fine a day or two later.

Always remember to talk to your vet, because they can tailor their advice to your pet. If your dog has any other conditions, or is especially old or young, may have a more severe reaction to a smaller amount of chocolate than listed here. They also may need to be treated differently. So avoid all disaster by keeping the dog and chocolate separate this Halloween, but be prepared just in case!