Chocolate Hounds

You're not supposed to give chocolate to dogs. Everybody knows that, just like they know you're not supposed to give beer to babies. What they might not know is that apparently, once you give a dog a taste of the dessert, your dog will become a canine Smeagol, fiending for its chocolaty "precious." The situation, however, isn't just as simple as that. Whether you knowingly give your pup a taste of chocolate, or if it instead gets its paws on it by more mismannered means, if given the chance, most dogs will exhibit the strange suicidal tendency of gorging themselves with lethal quantities of the toxic confection. I'm not sure why they do this, but it wouldn't be fair for man to judge its "best friend." After all, it's hard to argue that humans are well defined by their powers of reluctance or restraint in abusing substances that are hazardous to their health.

The potentially fatal components of chocolate exist in its fairly high levels of caffeine and theobromine, an alkaloid of the cacao plant that dogs metabolize much more slowly than humans. An extended and elevated presence of thembromine in a dog's bloodstream can lead to nausea, vomitting, diarrhea, epileptic seizures, and death.

Most dog owners have stories about their pets getting into chocolate. Generally the outcome is not very serious, and can, in retrospect, even be funny -- dogs pooping Hershey's kiss foils, exhibiting psychotic hyperactiviting, or being strangely picky in raiding a $50 box of Godiva chocolates. Last week, Tessie, my 20-something pound Beagle Whippet mix, battled her masochistic craving for chocolate and almost lost.

I returned from a quick trip to the grocery store to find my living room the scene of a crime: empty wrappers, torn up packaging, a trail of chaos leading from an open cabinet in the kitchen out to the living room carpet. The culprit was obvious, tail between her legs, her eyes avoiding my reprimanding gaze -- we both knew she was in trouble.

After examining the evidence, however I realized that she might be in more trouble than I had first thought. Among the wreckage were the empty wrappers of four 90 gram bars of Mexican table chocolate. Knowing that this was equivalent to more than three-quarters of a pound of some chocalaty substance, I called the vet. They recommended that I induce vomiting by giving her some hydrogen peroxide. After a few tablespoons, I only managed to induce gagging, to which she responded by madly dashing out in the yard and eating some select shrubbery. Taking her to the vet was the next line of defense.

A few hours later, Tessie walked through the door with my dad, who had picked her up when the vet closed. She looked like many of us have felt following a night of particularly poor decision making: shaky-legged, head down, eyes bloodshot from spending the last couple of hours throwing up -- she looked miserable. Her heart was apparently beating at 200 beats per minutes and she had an uncontrollable leg twitch, all signs of continued theobromine poisoning. We decided to play it safe and took her in to the emergency veterinarian. An hour and a half later, she was released, and finally looked a little better.

I'd like to think that this experience has taught my dog a valuable lesson, but who am I kidding, she's a dog. Dog's don't learn lessons easily, and, like I said, now that she's tasted chocolate, it's all Tyrone Biggums-like chocolate addiction for Tessie. Here's to hoping that she never gets an opportunity to eat it again.

+ x 4 = Trouble