At 05:12 PM 3/3/01 -0500, Stacie Tolen wrote:
>I was always under the impression that even the amount of chocolate in a
>couple of M&Ms or Hershey's kisses can be very toxic to dogs. (I suppose
>perhaps then that it could be just as toxic to we humans.)

Well, it's not as bad as all that.  A large amount (large being relative to
the size of the dog) of milk chocolate, a smaller amount of semi-sweet and
an even smaller amount of bakers chocolate, yes.

But it depends on the dog.  Since this same one has, in her youth, ingested
an entire double box of double chocolate brownie mix and had more problems
with the sugar than the chocolate, I'm not worried by a few M&Ms...  [And
it would be better not to mention the chocolate she's stolen from my neice
and nephews before they wised up--and before I could catch her at it!]

And fwiw, *I* didn't introduce her to the stuff, but I am confessing to
using her taste for it to my advantage!  I took the time to research the
subject once I'd discovered she not only had a taste for the stuff but had
managed to steal a small box of assorted chocolates from my mother at
Christmas (one of those with about 9 filled ones)...

Anyway, here's a quote from the following page --
http://mirabos.bham.ac.uk/ukclub/toxicchoc.htm -- it agrees with data I've
seen and what my vets over the years have told me:

"The following information is taken from: Kirk and Bistner's Handbook of
Veterinary Procedures and Emergency Treatment (6th
edition) (a very useful book):

The active ingredient in chocolate is theobromine:

*  The half life in the dog is 17.5 hours
*  The Toxic dose in the dog is 100-150 mg/kg
*  The concentration of theobromine varies with the formulation of the
chocolate so:
   -  Milk chocolate has 44mg/oz (154mg/100gm): toxic dose for 60 lb dog -
60 oz of milk chocolate.
   -  Semisweet chocolate has 150 mg/oz (528mg/100gm): toxic dose for 60 lb
dog - 18 oz of semisweet chocolate
   -  Baking chocolate 390mg/oz (1365 mg/100gm): toxic dose for 60 lb dog -
6 oz of baking chocolate

Thus a dog eating one oz of baking chocolate would have to eat almost 3 oz
of semisweet or 10 oz of milk chocolate to get the same dose
of theobromine."

[The rest of the page has more good information.]

What it doesn't say is that white chocolate hardly even qualifies, which is
why that's even "better" for my purposes (and I generally don't like it, so
it's not a temptation to me!).

Oh yeah, the dog in question generally weighs between 65 and 70 pounds...
When I get it, I get one small bag and I don't have any of the stronger
stuff here (sounds like I'm talking about alcohol!), so even if one of them
managed to get up on my desk and into the cabinet where I keep it, there
wouldn't be a fatal dose--or even one that would give them the mildest of
symptoms.

Actually, I've seen far worse problems with the same one getting into
grain-based products!  None of that here, now :)

Dianne