Love to stock your home with chocolate cookies for Christmas? Keep your canine friends away from chocolate as it can be poisonous for them, researchers have warned.<\/p>\n
The findings reveal significant seasonal peaks of chocolate ingestion cases across the year, most notably on Christmas and to a lesser extent at Easter, as chocolate becomes more accessible within the home.<\/p>\n
Theobromine is a caffeine-like stimulant which can lead to an upset stomach, a racing heartbeat, dehydration, seizures and, in the most severe cases, death in dogs, the researchers said.<\/p>\n
“Dogs love a chocolate treat and at Christmas there are plenty about. Sadly dogs can’t eat chocolate safely so people should keep festive chocolates away from pets,” said P-J.M. Noble, veterinary researcher at the University of Liverpool.<\/p>\n
“If chocolate is consumed, owners should talk to their vet as soon as possible, and ideally be prepared to quantify the amount and type of chocolate consumed,” Noble added.<\/p>\n
For the study, published in the journal Veterinary Record, researchers analysed 386 cases of chocolate ingestion in dogs from 229 UK veterinary practices between 2013 and 2017.<\/p>\n
The study also found that chocolate ingestion was significantly less common in older dogs and that no specific breed is more at risk than others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Love to stock your home with chocolate cookies for Christmas? Keep your canine friends away from chocolate as it can be poisonous for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15458,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15459,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15457\/revisions\/15459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}