The Dog Blog with Kathryn Socie

Don’t Leave Home without It

By Kathryn Socie, 5-28-08

	photo credit: Dan Socie

I barely have to leave the backyard before I find my dogs munching, crunching and rolling in something entirely too foul to speak of. With abundant wildlife occupying seemingly every square inch of open space in Montana, it’s no surprise that there’s an equal amount of festering carcasses and nasty poo.  With whole animals, chunks of flesh, limbs and hooves all in various stages of decay laying about the woods and grasslands in a kind of canine all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, how could any dog resist the temptation?!

So thrilled are my dogs with the buffet of goodness that they have both mastered the art of choking down large chunks of flesh and bone on the fly as I holler in frustration, waving in a useless display of anger behind them.  I have, on occasion, caught up to one and with rage intact yanked several feet of hide from the deepest crevices of his esophagus. As delightful as this may be for the four-legged, it poses more than a few potentially serious problems.

This wholly rank behavior has health consequences and the last thing I (anybody, really) need is a thousands-of-dollars veterinary bill from impacted chunks of a limb or, worse, the death of one of my beloved bad dogs through gluttony. So, I strategize. Within my handy dandy bag of anti-carci consumption tricks, I carry a bottle of 3% hydrogen peroxide-- particularly on long outings and just after hunting season when carcass numbers are very high.  An absent component from most veterinary first aid kits, hydrogen peroxide is a fabulous emetic, forcing Fido to give up the goods once they’ve made it down the hatch and out of reach (great for consumption of chemicals and toxins too!).  Yes, the label does distinctly warn of the toxic properties of this product if ingested because it causes volcanic-like vomiting. Perfect.

The appropriate dose is one teaspoon per 10 pounds of body weight, but I use a syringe for ease of getting it in and down quickly (one teaspoon equals 5 cc or 5 ml). Vomiting should occur within 15 to 20 minutes, but in my experience it happens in about 20 seconds.  If you have a die-hard consumer of foulness, make sure once she vomits, that she doesn’t promptly eat it—no offense Labrador lovers, but they are the worst culprits of this endearing behavior.

Safely inducing vomiting can save your dog’s life and as hard as it may be to make your dog sick, this brief discomfort is a much better option to the pain the worst case scenario would cause.

Disclaimer: Chat with your veterinarian about her/his preferred procedure prior trying this technique to get some credentialed advice regarding appropriateness of inducing vomiting under a variety of scenarios.

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