Foods Toxic to Cats and Dogs: The Full Reference

Most of what follows will never come up. But the ones that do come up, come up suddenly and at the worst possible time, usually on a Sunday. Worth knowing which ones mean a phone call and which mean watching.

The serious ones

Chocolate, by type

The variable is theobromine content, which rises with cocoa solids. A Labrador that eats a milk chocolate button is in a different situation from a terrier that eats a bar of 85 percent dark.

Those are rough guides for triage, not permission. Ring the vet with the dog's weight, the type, and the amount, and let them decide.

The ones that cause upset rather than emergency

• Milk and cheese: most adult cats and dogs are lactose intolerant. Diarrhoea, not danger.
• Fatty scraps and trimmings: a genuine trigger for pancreatitis, which is serious and often follows Christmas.
• Cooked bones: splinter and can perforate the gut. Never cooked. Raw is a separate debate with its own risks.
• Avocado: persin is a real concern mainly for birds; the bigger risk to dogs is the stone as an obstruction.
• Caffeine: tea, coffee, energy drinks. Similar mechanism to chocolate.
• Corn on the cob: not toxic, and one of the most common intestinal obstructions vets operate on.

Foods for birds specifically

Companion birds have their own list, and it's shorter and stricter.

• Avocado: genuinely dangerous to birds, more so than to dogs. No part of it.
• Chocolate and caffeine: as above, and birds are small, so doses that matter are tiny.
• Apple seeds, cherry and stone fruit pits: contain cyanogenic compounds. The flesh is fine, the pits are not.
• Salt: birds have very low tolerance. No crisps, no salted nuts.
• Onion and garlic: same red blood cell problem as in mammals.

Symptoms that mean go now

Regardless of whether you saw them eat anything:

1. 1Repeated vomiting, or trying to vomit and producing nothing. In deep-chested dogs the second one can be bloat, which is a surgical emergency measured in hours.
2. 2Tremors, twitching, unsteadiness or seizures.
3. 3Collapse, sudden weakness, or pale or bluish gums.
4. 4Suddenly drinking and urinating far more than usual, or producing almost nothing.
5. 5A swollen, hard or painful abdomen.
6. 6Breathing that's laboured or noticeably faster at rest.

Save your vet's out-of-hours number in your phone now, before you need it. The Animal PoisonLine (01202 509000) is a UK service that will tell you over the phone whether what your pet ate needs a vet visit. It's a paid service and it's considerably cheaper than an unnecessary emergency consultation.

Reducing the odds

Most poisonings are opportunistic rather than deliberate feeding. Bins with a lid that latches, bags off the floor, handbags with gum in them out of reach, and chocolate stored somewhere a determined dog can't reach, which is higher than you think.

A dog that counter-surfs is a dog that will eventually find something. Enrichment reduces the scavenging drive that causes it in the first place, which is the part you can actually control.

This page is a reference, not a diagnosis. If in doubt, phone. Vets would far rather field a call about a dog that ate one raisin than see the same dog in kidney failure three days later.