Unexpected Household Dangers to Your Pets

Everyone probably knows that you don't feed animals, especially dogs, any chocolate, onions, gum, Macadamia nuts, very salty food, raisins, grapes, bones, etc. However, always be aware of what is in the people food that you are feeding them. Cookies may have chocolate chips, the meat you're having for dinner may have been cooked with onions or it may not be completely boneless... But in addition to these things, there are other dangers lurking in your house.

I have a cat who loves the smell of bleach. If you clean with a bleach-based cleaner, he will roll around in the spot that you cleaned. If the bottle of the product is left on the countertop, he will sniff it for long periods of time. I guess people aren't the only ones into huffing. Needless to say, this isn't safe. When cleaning with chemicals, it might be a good idea to go back over the cleaned area with plain water to remove and/or dilute any of the chemical that is left behind.

At a veterinarian school open house, my tour group was told about a dog that swallowed a knife. We even saw the x-ray. My first thought was where did the dog get the knife? Of course that wasn't the point. A couple of years after that, my cat knocked a knife off the countertop and my dog grabbed it immediately. Just because a dog cannot reach something doesn't mean he can't get to it. In my case, the knife wasn't the only thing my cat 'handed' to the dog. Always be cautious with cats because not only can they get into anything, they will also share it with the dog.

Most people put collars on house cats in case they ever escape. Those easy breakaway collars seem like a great invention, don't they? If a cat goes up a tree and gets the collar hung on a branch, the collar is supposed to breakaway. However, cats can get them hung in their mouths over their bottom teeth. In this situation, the collars do not breakaway. I had this happen to a couple of my cats, and one of them has had an excessive drooling problem ever since. If an animal had a collar stuck in its mouth for a long period of time, they would die.

If you like to sew, beware. A needle and thread looks like a toy to a pet. I had a cat swallow a needle, and by the time I caught him, all that was left was a tiny end to the thread for me to grab and pull it out. On the same note, twist-ties look fun and appetizing to animals as well.

There are a lot of house plants that are poisonous. Lists of poisonous plants are easy to find so I won't include one here. But one plant that I have seen forgotten in lists of poisonous plants is the peace lily. I had no idea they were poisonous until my cat decided to eat some of the leaves of my peace lily. Luckily, my cat was fine, but yours may not be so fortunate.

Erasers seem pretty harmless, until swallowed that is. Your first thought might be that the animal will pass it eventually. Not necessarily so. A friend's mom told me one time about a cat that had a bowel obstruction--it was an eraser. And the veterinarian quoted the surgery at approximately a thousand dollars. I think the old expression fits here that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

My animals are like my children. And I know that other people feel the same way about their own pets. But when it comes to potential dangers, you have to remember that some animals are a lot smaller than human children. This means that what might not harm a child if swallowed, could very well be fatal to a pet.