Can dogs eat chocolate? The editor of "We Love Pet Network" tells all kinds of dog owners: Never give dogs chocolate! Otherwise, the dog will be very dangerous!
In the United States, chocolate is one of the five common items that cause poisoning of pet dogs, and the remaining four are car antifreeze, marijuana, rat poison, and pesticides. The secret of chocolate that makes people unable to stop is the cocoa alkali contained in it. Cocoamin can excite the central nervous system, relax muscles, and improve heart rhythm - no wonder eating chocolate makes people feel that love is coming. Cocoamin also has two famous brothers who belong to the same methylxanthine family, namely: caffeine and theophylline.
Just seeing these names, you may suddenly realize that cocoa, coffee and tea can become the three major beverages, and it turns out that there are common characteristics. If you savor it carefully, whether it is coffee, cocoa, tea or cola, it has a hint of bitterness. This is also due to the methylxanthine substances, their pure products are very bitter.
These substances are poisonous to most animals, but this trick is not good for the primates where humans are located. We have a high metabolic rate for this type of substance, that is, humans will quickly detoxify these toxins in the body through the liver and excretion of the kidneys.
Unfortunately, dogs are not primates, and they do not effectively excrete methylxanthine substances in the body. It takes about 20 hours to expel half of the methylxanthine that is consumed in the body.
For a Pomeranian weighing 3 kg, eating 3-4 grams of dark chocolate at one time may cause poisoning, which is just a small bite; eating 10 grams of dark chocolate at one time may cause severe vomiting and cramps; eating 60 grams of dark chocolate at one time may cause its life due to tachycardia and muscle stiffness. This is just the weight of a plate of chocolate.
For dogs who don't know how to eat, swallowing a plate of chocolate is obviously not too difficult. The famous Merck veterinary manual recommends that if the amount of dark chocolate that a dog eats at a time exceeds 1.3 grams per kilogram of body weight, it must be sent to the animal hospital for treatment.