For many of us Easter is not just a religious event but also an opportunity for coloring hard-boiled eggs and making up baskets of candy. According to the National Confectioner’s Association, in 2013 Americans spent $ 2.1 billion on Easter candy, 70% of it chocolate.
It’s traditional to hide colored eggs and chocolates in preparation for a Sunday morning Easter Egg Hunt. The toddlers wander about in the spring sunshine while older siblings and cousins dash past, seeking out the brightly colored eggs and candies lurking under bushes, hidden along hedges, tucked into tall tufts of grass and nestled behind flower pots.
Seeking out brightly colored eggs and candies is fun for the little ones and entertaining for the older adults, but chocolate bunnies and treats in Easter baskets or set out for guests can be dangerous to our pets. Chocolate smells wonderful to dogs, causing them to seek it out and eat it. Although cats are unlikely to eat enough to cause a poisoning, most dogs will readily hunt down any chocolate that they smell and consume it, even enough to cause poisoning and death.
One of the compounds found naturally in chocolate is theobromine. Theobromine is closely related to caffeine, and if enough of it were concentrated in a capsule or tablet it would have a similar effect, increasing your energy level and mental focus. Theobromine is most concentrated in the outer shell of the cacao bean, which is discarded, leaving the precious, delicious inner bean to eventually end up in Hershey® kisses, Dove® bars and Starbucks® mochas.
The danger to animals wasn’t realized until someone thought of recycling the discarded cacao bean shells by adding them to animal feed. Suddenly, baby ducks, peeps, baby goats and young calves started dying, all with similar symptoms: vomiting, diarrhea, confusion, and seizures, followed by collapse and death. The deaths were eventually traced to the feed containing recycled cacao shells. Now cacao shells are re-used in landscaping mulch.
How much chocolate is dangerous to your dog? The smaller the dog, the less it takes for them to be poisoned. Also, the darker the chocolate, the more concentrated and more dangerous it is. A small (6-ounce) bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips is enough to kill an 18-pound dog. Baking chocolate squares are particularly dark and potent, with 2 squares enough to make a 50-lb dog sick or kill a 20-lb dog. Puppies and elderly dogs are at a higher risk of serious poisoning because they seem to be more affected by theobromine in chocolate.
If chocolate is so toxic to our pets, could toddlers or small children be at risk, too? Not really, because humans are experts at detoxifying and removing theobromine. Your human body has enzymes that work rapidly to break down theobromine, and they work twice as fast as the enzymes in a dog’s body. As a result, there are no cases of humans being poisoned by theobromine by eating too much chocolate, although there are plenty of cases of stomach upset from eating too much of the sugar and fat found in most chocolate candy.
Unfortunately, dark chocolate is not the only risk for your dog when eating Easter candy. Any type of chocolate or candy with a high fat content can be a danger, along with eating “people food” scraps containing fat. Eating high fat foods is dangerous to dogs because it can trigger pancreatitis, a painful inflammation of the pancreas that can lead to severe abdominal pain and death. My father-in-law loved to give his 12-pound 2-year-old Shih Tzu, Bolly, sausage patties every morning. For Easter Sunday dinner last year they had a big ham, and he shared some of that with Bolly, too. He had just given Bolly a piece of Easter candy when he suddenly started shaking and fell to the carpet, crying. They rushed him to the emergency veterinary hospital where he died that night from pancreatitis.
As you plan your Easter celebration, watch out for those killer chocolate bunnies. There’s more information about the dangers of chocolate and high fat foods to your pet at www.petpoisonhelpline.com/2011/07/is-chocolate-poisonous-to-dogs/.
