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There are several stories from the past week, but we’ll start with the one involving trouble.

Sam’s family has and loves two beagles. The older of the two, Baxter, is now blind and has decreased smelling abilities, so he causes relatively little trouble, if you can find it in your heart to overlook his copious but unconscious drooling. The younger beagle, Maddy, however, has a nose sharper than a top-ranked sommelier, and no qualms about eating ANYTHING within barest reach that might qualify as food. Families with beagles (like Sam’s) tend to be aware of this instinct, and hide all food well away from countertop edges, in containers with rocks on them, or take other extreme measures to ensure they don’t come home to a swollen-stomached dog and tipped over food containers.

Sam and I don’t live with a beagle. This was made evident when we thought our precautions with the two bars of 85% rich, dark chocolate we received for Christmas were sufficient. They were tucked in a paper bag full of other presents in a room with the door closed for our time at his family’s house, but on the day after Christmas, one of us must have left the door open. About an hour later, Maddy appeared very guilty, licking her chops, and retracing her steps revealed two carefully opened dark chocolate wrappers dragged outside, with no remaining chocolate. Sigh.

We all know chocolate is bad for dogs, and that this particular dog had done a ruthless, very bad thing, but we didn’t notice any problems right away, and left it at massive scolding and a sharper sweep of the house for other edibles she might be able to reach. A few hours later, Maddy had the appearance of an espresso junkie with a fresh dose of caffeine, unable to sit still, whining and drinking lots of water, but otherwise as goofy as usual. Perhaps a stomachache, we thought. Nothing serious. Everyone went to bed, while I stayed up to do some writing. Her demeanor changed sometime after 11pm. She started trembling all over and her eyes became very bloodshot. She didn’t respond to her name quickly, and would lean against me with her whole body shaking. Concerned, I checked a few sources online. This one in particular gave me the scary facts – she had eaten 7 ounces of very dark chocolate, double the toxic dose for her body weight; and was showing more than half of the symptoms. I counted myself lucky she was not yet experiencing seizures or coma, and woke up Sam. We tried the family vet first, where the answering service promised to leave a message for the vet on call, who’d get back to us in 30 minutes. 35 minutes passed with no call, so we called back the answering service, who basically shrugged and said they’d tried. Luckily, FC is known for its top tier vet school and accompanying small and large animal hospital, complete with emergency services. A call to them and some quick math on their end meant that we should bring the shaking dog right away. Bundling up for the cold, we headed out, disturbed that even the sight of the harness and leash didn’t raise Maddy’s spirits. This was bad.

The drive to the vet hospital was unpleasant, to say the least. Maddy apparently hates cars, and was very vocal about it. We got there and found the hospital empty of patients, where a young, kind vet quickly scooped her up and took her back. From that point, things got better – from the info we could share about how much she had eaten and when, they decided to make her vomit (the vet’s words were, “She puked up a LOT of chocolate. It smelled nice at first…like hot chocolate. But also like dog vomit”), coat her stomach with activated charcoal, and keep her overnight with IV fluids to dilute the damage. He assured us we had done the right thing by bringing her in, and that he gets a LOT of calls this time of year with the same problem. Their knowledge means they can do some calculations on the phone, like they had with us, and give a good estimation of whether the dog should come in or not. In this case, Maddy had eaten an awful lot of quite dark chocolate containing large amounts of theobromide and caffeine, and the puking helped her from getting worse. The vet was friendly, gave us regular updates through the night, and after taking a down payment sent us home around 2am, saying we could pick up the very naughty and now empty-stomached Maddy in the morning.

In the morning, Sam’s dad (everyone had been briefed by this point) offered to pick her up. She came back overjoyed to be both out of the hospital and the car, but having learned nothing. It is remarkable that such an unpleasant experience had no effect on her. How many humans can’t remember the last time they puked their guts out and why?!? Thank your ancestors…it’s an evolutionary advantage not shared by most other mammals, and probably responsible for our survival through thousands of ecosystems. I suppose the silver lining is that she has no memory to blame me or Sam for taking her to the puking-place, but it was shocking how little time it took before she was performing acrobatics to (unsuccessfully) slide another chocolate bar from its high perch on a bookcase. Beagles!

Since then, there seems to be a residual sense of danger averted – she has carefully singled out each family member for licking and insistent whining, as if to reassure herself that no love was lost from her actions. It’s lucky she lived through it all. Having gone through this and being thankfully human, I learned that you should get a clear idea of how much and what kind of chocolate a dog eats, and see a vet if they have any symptoms as seen in the links above. Also, vets are totally underpaid for inducing and cleaning up dog vomit. That part of the bill was less than $30.

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