Halloween pet safety with Burrwood Veterinary

Oh, it is that spooky season Halloween just around the corner. And while it can be so much fun to celebrate with our pets, there are some dangers that you have to keep at the front of your mind, especially for Halloween weekend. So here to help keep our furry friends safe is Dr. Kendall Floto, a vet with Burwood Veterinary and also a little baby Duncan, seven months old. Yeah. Hey, donkey, donk. How you doing? Okay, Duncan's friendly. He's doing pretty good with his hat on. Now it's working because these are just candy corn nails. We would not want Duncan to actually try any real candy corn. Correct. Yeah. Let's talk about that. Yeah. So with Halloween coming up, obviously there's going to be a lot of candy, a lot of sweets in the house. And a lot of those can be dangerous for our pets. And so we'll oftentimes see, you know, dogs coming in that have gotten into the candy bowl. Obviously chocolate is our number one concern that can be really toxic to dogs. um other candies although they may not be toxic can certainly cause some GI upset pancreatitis things like that and that's the kids coming in maybe throwing everything from the bucket on the table exactly a little candy falls off and is under the chair nobody realizes it but the dog saw it happen oh yeah and they'll sniff it out to wait for everyone to leave the room before it gets into it and then folks end up calling you is that something that usually happens this time of year Yeah. Yep. Oftentimes. And a lot of times with things like chocolate and some sugar-free candies contain an artificial sweetener called xylitol, which is also toxic to dogs. Oftentimes we'll direct people to pet poison control. It's a really good resource to call. They have toxicologists on staff that can kind of advise you, do you need to be seen by a vet or is it okay to monitor at home? If you did not see your dog consume anything, what signs are you looking for that might indicate that they ingested something they shouldn't have? So most commonly it's going to be GI upset, so vomiting, diarrhea, not wanting to eat. We may also see things like lethargy and then some of these dog costumes are so I know they're so cute. With chocolate, we can sometimes see like neurological signs as well. So and that's at high high doses can we just clear that up but i'm i have my first dog um and so i've you know been told of course they can never have chocolate it's what is it about chocolate how poisonous is it how detrimental is it to dogs and how quickly so it's very dose dependent and it is very dependent on the type of chocolate as well so darker chocolates are more dangerous than lighter chocolates with white chocolate being the least dangerous. At lower doses, GI upset. At higher doses, we can see things like we can see them develop neurological signs. And in very severe cases, we can see them experience seizures. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Okay. What about the pet costumes and the door is going to be ringing? Some of these things cause a little bit of anxiety for our dogs as well. Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of costumes, you know, the recommendation is it's always cute you know it's I love seeing a dog in a costume making sure that they're comfortable making sure that they're not extremely anxious that they still have full range of motion and that they can move around normally in terms of trick-or-treaters you know the doorbell ringing door knocking door opening and closing if your dog is very anxious seeing your vet before the holiday can be really beneficial to chat about um sedatives anxiety medications that you maybe could give a couple hours before that trick-or-treating starts okay um placing them in a room near the back of the house kind of away from the front door playing some music at a louder volume to kind of distract from that activity at the front door those can all be good things to reduce their stress related to that how uh long in advance before activity is expected should you maybe give the dog a little little something something to keep them calm yeah usually it's about two hours an hour and a half two hours um and we had talked about cbd too um you know there are veterinary um specific cbd brands there's also over-the-counter calming chews and things like that the one thing i don't recommend is grabbing like a cbd meant for humans off the shelf no it's not necessarily um fda approved and so we don't know all the ingredients that are in that product of course of course you definitely want cbd that's meant for puppies exactly and doggies like duncan um okay duncan's first halloween what what is the costume is this it or is there a greater reveal this weekend this is it for now he's uh i'm going out of town so he's gonna be staying with a dog sitter so he's Frankenstein this year. Okay. Okay. Well, he's looking good. Thank you so much. Where can we find you? We Burwood is located at 14 mile and Woodward and Royal Oak. Very good.