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The holiday season is supposed to be about fun, celebrating and spending time with the people and pets that you love, but for many people, rather than finding themselves enjoying time at home, they find themselves at the emergency vet because their pet's got into something that is not normally around the house but happens to be there during the holidays.
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So if you don't want this to be you, stay tuned.
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You're listening to Starlight Pet Talk, a podcast for pet parents who want the best pet care advice from cat experts, dog trainers, veterinarians and other top pet professionals who will help you live your very best life with your pets.
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We also share inspiring rescue and adoption stories from people who have taken their love of pets to the next level by getting involved in animal welfare.
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My name is Amy Castro, and I'm the founder and president of Starlight Outreach and Rescue and a columnist for PetAge Magazine.
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I've rescued thousands of animals and helped people just like you find the right pet for their family.
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My mission is to help pet parents learn all the ways that they can care for, live with and even have fun with their pets, so they can live their very best lives and their pets can, too.
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Welcome to Starlight Pet Talk.
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I'm your host Amy Castro, my guest today, has been with us before talking about what it's like to go to the emergency vet, but today he's here to share some of the things that pets can get into trouble with over the holiday season.
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Dr Tyler Sugarman-McGiffen worked as a veterinary assistant and a technician for 15 years before going to vet school.
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After he completed his undergraduate work in 2010, he attended Western University of Sciences, where he graduated with his doctorate in veterinary medicine in 2015.
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After his internship, he started working as an overnight emergency veterinarian, where he's enjoyed teaching technicians and veterinary students who rotate through, and he actually even started a podcast for his technicians to help them learn more about the diseases they treat.
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So, tyler, welcome back to the show.
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Oh, thank you, Amy.
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Thank you so much for having me back on.
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Well, I immediately thought of you when I thought about how much our pets can get into trouble over the holidays and making emergency vet visits on the holidays, because I personally have gone through that where actually it was my husband's mistake so I made him take the dogs to the emergency vet.
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But, yeah, we got to have a nice emergency vet visit on Thanksgiving.
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So I was hoping oh nice, I was hoping to help people avoid some of our pain and not end up at the emergency vet.
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I actually read an article from a I think it's probably a nationwide kind of emergency franchise, because I've heard the name a lot and I don't want to name them but they said something about a 372% increase in Christmas Eve emergency vet visits due to chocolate, and I know chocolate is not the only thing that pets get into.
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Absolutely yeah, why does it happen so much at the holidays as opposed to the rest of the year?
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Yeah, I feel like that's because there's a lot of people who are coming in around the holidays.
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You think throughout the rest of the year you don't have a lot of people who are visiting and then suddenly, during the holidays you have a lot of people who are visiting, or you have a lot of people are going out of town a lot, or they're going to other people's houses and leaving their pets alone.
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So I think that we just have it's just the circumstance of having so many people clustered.
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That kind of happens.
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Okay, yeah, I remember one incident when I was a kid it was also on Thanksgiving where my mom had taken out a stick of butter and was letting it soften on the counter and suddenly it was gone and she thought to herself.
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I remember her saying well, I thought, for sure I must have just forgotten to take it out.
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So she went and got another stick of butter.
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Lo and behold, it turns out our golden retriever, who normally there wasn't stuff sitting out on the counters, but he decided to help himself to not one but two sticks of butter.
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And it didn't end up in the emergency vet, but it certainly caused a lot of problems over the next few days.
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I'm sure there was a lot of diarrhea cleanup.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure.
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You had also mentioned in Because we kind of were corresponding back and forth about this, about house guests leaving things out.
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You know, maybe having people at your home where they're not used to, having a dog that can reach the counters or that kind of thing.
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Exactly.
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Yeah, so you're saying, you know they either have a small dog who can't usually reach the counter, so they just leave things out, or maybe they have a dog that does usually eat lots of people food, but your dog doesn't eat people food.
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So having guests over can be really hard too, because they're just not quite used to the house rules.
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Or maybe they even don't have a pet and so they don't understand like not letting the dog outside during certain times, or how to keep the dog safe inside the house or when not to approach the dog.
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But I feel like there's a lot of factors around that too, and people are all coming together.
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People leaving food out is a big one, right.
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Or they want to make friends with the pet, like with the dog, so they want to give them lots of table scraps, or they want to just be really nice because they're like oh, it's Thanksgiving, we should share all of our food as they want to share that food with the dog, but that becomes a big problem as well, because, especially if that pet is not used to having people food, that could definitely cause things like pancreatitis, which is an inflammation of the pancreas, or it can cause what we call gastroenteritis, which is basically just like vomiting and diarrhea.
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And again, you don't want to have to end up in the emergency room because your dog has not stopped vomiting for 24 hours.
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So definitely like having people over, trying to talk to them about just the rules of the house.
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Please don't give them these foods.
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This is why we don't want to end up in the emergency room when we should be all celebrating and I think that people are really receptive to that or just letting them know, like my dog is very anxious, I don't want to let out of the room, or please make sure you close the door so my cat can't get out because my cat is an indoor cat.
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So I do think that as long as they understand one of the repercussions of it, that people are a lot more receptive to those things.
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Yeah, that's a good point, and whether you're you know whether because we're doing a lot of episodes right now around the holidays, so we're you know we've got an episode that's going to be coming out about should you get a pet sitter or should you board your pet.
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We've got one about taking your pets to family with you.
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And I think what you said as far as the house rules and knowing, knowing what the rules are, I think it is important that we make that really clear to people.
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I also think, too, it probably the problem kind of multiplies exponentially based on the amount of people, because I can imagine a scenario where somebody's thinking to themselves I know she said don't give him any table scraps, but it was just a little Well, when you and 15, you and 15 other people gave just a little.
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Now now, now the dogs had half a turkey and it's probably not so good.
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Exactly, exactly.
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You know, some of the other things too is when you have house guests staying over, you know, sometimes they'll bring things that you may not think about.
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Like, I do have a lot of THC toxicities, so a lot of people bring pot over for the holidays so that they can have fun.
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Yeah, but that becomes a big problem because then, especially if you as the pet parent don't know that it's there and then you just suddenly start seeing your pet look like they're drunk, that could be a big problem too.
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So, even like just laying out those kind of rules too, because, again, like, you'll have people who just bring it over in their pocket but then it falls out right and then suddenly, suddenly, the pet is acting pretty, pretty weird.
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Yeah, and that kind of thing can happen.
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Unfortunately, I have a friend and colleague who her husband had left some heart medication.
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I don't know if it fell on the floor or if it was on the side table or whatever it was, but I mean her dog actually died from ingesting that medication because it was such a little dog and it was obviously devastating.
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Yeah, it was devastating to everybody involved.
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So I think that is a good point.
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And I actually had that happen the other day.
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I had something sitting, it had come in the mail and it's you know.
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I had it sitting on the side table and I thought, you know, probably nobody's going to touch it, but you just never know, especially for never know, yeah, yeah.
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Somebody just gets curious and grabs that bottle and the next thing you know they've eaten the whole thing.
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So that's a good point.
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I think you know one of the things that I always try to tell guests for, not only for my pet safety but for the safety of their stuff is, you know, put your stuff in the guest room and just close the door.
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Exactly that way I don't have to worry because we've got foster pets and we've got pets that, especially cats.
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Sometimes cats just don't like the way other people stuff smell.
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And the next thing, you know, my cat my cat's pee in your suitcase Exactly, and you know that's sort of embarrassing when you've got a guest.
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So yeah, keep that kind of stuff closed out.
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You had mentioned, too, that a rise in euthanasia, I know, and people don't like to hear about that, but what's that about over the holidays?
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Is it related to these indiscretions or something else?
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It's usually not Well, yes and no.
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So it can be because related to the indiscretions, because, you know, a lot of people spend a lot of money during the holidays, especially Christmas time, right?
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So you're spending a lot of money on Christmas gifts and then suddenly something happens, like they get into something and then they aren't going to have enough funds then to, let's say, maybe they ate their guest socks, you know, and then they don't have enough money to like do the surgery to remove the sock.
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So it can definitely be like those kind of things.
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So you will have a lot of financial things that we have to euthanize pets over.
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Or it can just be because they you know their kids are coming home and so they just want the kids to say goodbye one last time from college before they all go to euthanize their pets.
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So I feel like there's a lot of just like circumstances Again, like we just have a lot of people coming around and so people will want them to have like one last goodbye because they just feel like it's their time.
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So we'll have a huge rise in euthanasia.
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It's like I'll usually do, you know.
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I know, again, like people don't really like to hear about it, but typically like.
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I usually do six to eight euthanasias a night, and during the holidays I usually do about 15 a night.
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So it's quite a rise, yeah.
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Well, that's got to be taxing on you and your staff as well.
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You know, here it's supposed to be this happy time of the year and yet you know that's a lot of sorrow that's associated with that.
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So, yeah, but I mean I can understand it to a certain degree that people would want to.
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You know, if you've got, especially if you've got kids that have gone off to college and they basically were raised with that animal, to not be there is probably really hard.
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Yeah, you know it brings lots of the holidays, brings a lot of challenges into the journey.
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Lots of emotions, right yeah.
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Yeah, for sure.
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So beyond, obviously you know food, lay those ground rules down.
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Don't go haywire with giving your pet a bunch of foods that they shouldn't eat.
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Obviously, the different kinds of foods that people tend to get into, you know the common foods, but are there any in particular that you think that maybe people like we all kind of know about the chocolate thing?
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Right, and yet please don't feed chocolate.
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Right, exactly.
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Beyond that, what are some of the things that you see the pets coming in for?
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Yeah, so one I think around Thanksgiving time.
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The number one is turkey.
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Like we think about turkey actually being really not a very fatty turkey, right, Like you don't think about turkey meat in general being fatty, but think about everything that you put into that turkey to make it taste better.
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You know people are injecting it with butter, You're putting in all the stuffing, you have tons of seasoning on the outside and that now becomes a very spicy or very spicy to.
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The dogs are not used to that.
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Right, Lots of fat filled turkey.
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It's no longer a really lean type of bird, so I feel like people often feed that again because they're just like.
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Well, I want to share this with my pet because it is now Thanksgiving and I feel like we should share these things.
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So like those kind of things.
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Lots of gravy People put like if I had people pour gravy all over their dogs food.
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So like, well, like again sorry, I have to laugh at that, because all that is is fat and flour.
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It's a fat right, exactly.
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Dog does not need that.
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Exactly.
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And then like potatoes and stuff like usually, again, potatoes aren't a big deal, but when you've now put tons of butter and stuff in them that becomes much bigger of a deal.
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Or people who decide not to do turkeys and things like roast beef again is kind of a more fattier thing.
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Again, you're putting lots of fat on it, you're putting gravy on it, it's like those tend to be like a lot of the ones that I see that people will get during Thanksgiving time and then during Christmas.
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I find a lot of it is chocolate.
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So people tend to bring chocolate over for their, for the kids in the family and extended family, and then they leave it out and then the dog gets to it.
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Or also, another food is going to be the bones that people get for presents.
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So there's two types of those.
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So one is like those big bones that they find like pets, martin stuff, right, oh yeah.
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But we think again, like bone, you're like well, bone isn't very fatty or anything, but the marrow of the bone is extremely fatty.
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And so you give them, like this big bone, and now they have just all of that fat on the middle and then they get pancreatitis from that as well.
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Wow.
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Or the bones that are the round ones you're like, they kind of have like the inside that's cut out.
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So the dogs tend to get stuck around their jaw and then it goes around between their yeah, between their teeth and their jaw.
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And then they got to come in because I have to either, like, put them under sedation to slip it off, or have to cut it off, depending on how big it is.
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Oh, wow, yeah, so it's not even just the what we traditionally think of.
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Is, you know, ingesting bones, although that you know that I'm sure is an issue too.
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Is that you know?
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I kind of feel like people have learned, but they haven't you know.
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So, yeah, that you know you probably shouldn't give your dog bone, is there?
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Does it really matter?
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I've read some things that said that it's OK as long as the bones aren't cooked, or does everything potentially pose a danger?
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Exactly Everything potentially poses a danger.
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So they say when it's when it's cooked that it can splinter more.
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But I've definitely seen it splinter even just when it's not cooked.
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I've even.
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You know, yes, it does probably splinter a little bit more when it's cooked, but also when it's not cooked that it's harder and gets like stuck between like their teeth and stuff.
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It really just depends.
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So I feel like neither one is a great option for that.
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And if you are giving them bones, I think just like really really monitoring them to make sure that they're not eating too much, they're not just swallowing the whole piece down, because I've definitely seen a dog do that and I've had to get it out of the, out of the esophagus.
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So yeah, I would think a lot of this might have to do with just knowing your dog's habits, because some dogs you know and it's the same thing with toys, right, you know some.
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I had a.
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I had a little dog named well, she wasn't that little, but I had a dog named Bonnie that had a stuffed toy that was, you know, her baby.
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She had that baby the whole time and never, it would never have crossed her mind to tear that baby up.
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And I've got other ones.
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You give them something.
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In five seconds later they've torn it up and eaten all the stuffing.
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So kind of knowing this squeaker and yeah, exactly.
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So knowing knowing your pets habits with some of this stuff, I would think would make a difference.
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Yeah, yeah, exactly.
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So it's like in, like you were saying, with the stuffing and stuff too, right Again, that's another toy that you tend to get for Christmas, but if you know that your dog destroys it, it's probably not a good idea to get that.
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Yeah, yeah, and I had mentioned two things.
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Well, the one I did I was very aware of it and knows it's very bad is the xylitol.
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So that's the sugar free sweetener that's in a lot of products, and what kind of trouble does that cause for our pets?
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Yeah, so typically like you'll find them under things that say sugar free, and not everything that sugar free has xylitol in it.
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So you do just have to look on the back of the package for it to see like what it says.
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But what happens is depending on the dose that they get.
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The first thing that usually happens is they get hypoglycemia, which just means that they have really low blood sugar, like so low that it could potentially cause seizures.
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It's really really low.
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The second thing that it can potentially do is cause liver failure.
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So those liver values will rise depending on the dose that they got.
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And as long as we can get to it early enough and try to help protect them, most of the time they'll do okay.
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But it's those ones that we don't know that they got into it and then, because you can skip that hypoglycemic phase, you can skip the seizure phase and just go right to liver failure.
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Those are the ones that become a lot more deadly because we don't know that they had had gotten into it or we don't know that it had, it didn't have that phase and we just went right into the liver failure and then they become really sick really fast.
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Wow, yeah, and yeah, it could be something that I mean, such as probably with a small, especially with a smaller dog, a relatively small amount.
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You don't even realize they've gotten into anything.
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Exactly.
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Yeah, you had mentioned another one was macadamia nuts, and that kind of surprised me, because dogs can eat peanut butter and a nut to not right, not, apparently not Right, apparently not yeah, so macadamia nuts actually cause them to have this temporary paralysis, so they'll come in and they just seem like they're completely paralyzed.
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And you know, for certain dogs like corgis and stuff like, the first thing that comes to my mind is going to be that they have a back problem.
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But unless we know that they had gotten into macadamia nuts or you start seeing it come out in their stool, as soon as it starts coming out in their stool, miraculously they're cured.
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Oh wow, they are no longer paralyzed again.
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That's incredible so no, no long term effects from that, then or usually no long term effect.
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Luckily, usually as soon as they, as soon as those macadamia nuts are out of their system, they're usually fine.
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Okay.
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But one other one, though, that we haven't quite mentioned yet has been onions and garlic.
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That's what I was going to get there, cause I thought people don't.
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People put garlic on pet food and I've never done it to like, put garlic on pet food to repel mosquitoes and fleas, right, or am I making that up?
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Oh no, this is, yeah, that's definitely a widespread thing on the internet, and so there are dose dependent things.
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So you, they can have a small amount of it, but how do you know like you'd have to really research exactly how much they can get into, especially when you're doing things like cooking for like Christmas and Thanksgiving and stuff you are, you are not worrying about.
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You know how much garlic and onions and stuff you put into each meal, right, like you're just cutting them up frantically to make the meal so with those, that it can actually cause I was called hemolytic anemia, but it basically means that their red blood cells they're not working anymore.
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They almost explode in a sense, so they can't work anymore and they have a loss of red blood cells.
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Red blood cells are very, very important because we need them to be able to carry oxygen around the rest of our body, and so they'll.
00:17:56.807 --> 00:18:06.315
They again can become sick pretty quickly and it's not right after they've eaten it, like it'll be within about like 24 to 72 hours usually, that they're going to start getting sick.
00:18:07.179 --> 00:18:21.298
Yeah, Well, and I would think with many of these things, as you start talking about the impact other than possibly the macadamia nuts and how quickly those pass through the body is that it's not a matter of you're going to run to the emergency vet and then be home that time.
00:18:21.298 --> 00:18:26.086
You know in time to open your presence that night, your pets going to be in the hospital for days and days, right, yes?
00:18:26.086 --> 00:18:28.037
Yes For most of these, if they survive at all.
00:18:28.460 --> 00:18:35.415
Right, yeah, exactly, for a lot of these it's days and days, you know, maybe not so much the bone that they got around stuck around their jaw and stuff, but a lot of these.
00:18:35.415 --> 00:18:41.523
Yeah, the getting into garlic and onions, some of the pancreatitis ones are so bad that they have to be hospitalized.
00:18:41.523 --> 00:18:47.104
Eating the object ones are usually going to have to be hospitalized, so it's not, it's not like a quick turnaround, unfortunately.
00:18:47.806 --> 00:19:02.969
Yeah, so it may seem like a hassle to again laying down these rules and monitoring everything, but it's well worth, obviously, the life of your pet for sure, but just think about the expense and just the impact to your holiday and your family visit.
00:19:02.969 --> 00:19:12.176
Definitely worth a little vigilance, for sure, right, exactly, yeah, so beyond the food items and the bones, what other things?
00:19:12.176 --> 00:19:15.125
Because one of the things that I thought about was cats eating tinsel.
00:19:15.125 --> 00:19:20.535
But beyond that, what are some of the other things that you pull out of pets at the holidays?
00:19:20.535 --> 00:19:23.240
Or, yes, fine, coming out of pets at the holidays?
00:19:23.823 --> 00:19:32.734
Yeah, tinsel is a big one for cats, right, because they're like so shiny and fun and they want to play with it, even their toys that they get so like all those toys on strings.
00:19:32.734 --> 00:19:35.115
I pull out a lot of strings from cats.
00:19:35.115 --> 00:19:43.651
Nerf bullets that's another really popular one in cats is those kids that, yeah, they get Nerf guns and then they shoot the Nerf bullets and then the cats eat them.
00:19:43.651 --> 00:19:49.116
And the hard part with those is because they're foamy, they expand and so they almost always get stuck All right.
00:19:49.116 --> 00:19:51.832
One of the other things I forgot to mention to food is corn cobs.
00:19:51.832 --> 00:19:58.242
Corn cobs is another big one that I find because those can be really dangerous and they can just like roll around in the stomach for months to years.
00:19:59.046 --> 00:19:59.346
Oh, wow.
00:19:59.647 --> 00:20:07.071
Yeah, and then also with cats, like the ribbons that people use to tie their presents and stuff.
00:20:07.071 --> 00:20:11.605
They'll often eat the ribbons and then they get what's called linear foreign bodies from those.
00:20:11.605 --> 00:20:17.038
It's just where it goes from, like the stomach, all the way down through their intestines because that ribbon is so long that they ate.
00:20:17.720 --> 00:20:24.881
I would think that at first thought or first glance, you would think OK, a piece of tinsel, let's just say so.
00:20:24.881 --> 00:20:28.457
It's maybe 14 inches long and it's really skinny.
00:20:28.457 --> 00:20:29.380
It's not sharp.
00:20:29.380 --> 00:20:32.326
Why does that not just pass through?
00:20:32.326 --> 00:20:35.788
Is it because they're eating a pile of it, or does it get wound up somehow?
00:20:35.788 --> 00:20:37.997
What causes that problem or blockage?
00:20:38.438 --> 00:20:39.119
So a couple of things.
00:20:39.119 --> 00:20:46.217
Sometimes it gets wound up to like a knot and then that knot gets stuck in the stomach and the stomach is really large versus your intestines are really small.
00:20:46.217 --> 00:20:48.903
So you're going from like a really big opening to a really tiny opening.
00:20:48.903 --> 00:20:58.807
So that knot gets stuck where it goes from the big opening to the small opening and then all the rest of it, that's just kind of in this line, gets pulled up into the intestines.
00:20:58.807 --> 00:21:11.585
The intestines is constantly moving and it's kind of like makes it almost like an accordion, so it just like keeps scrunching up onto itself to the point to where it's almost cutting through the intestines because it cannot move anymore.
00:21:12.257 --> 00:21:16.565
Oh, wow, the other things that can happen too, is it's not just that it can get knotted up and stuff.
00:21:16.565 --> 00:21:18.462
Maybe it gets wound up in something else.
00:21:18.462 --> 00:21:41.390
Another common thing for cats to get into is going to be hair ties, and especially when people leave their hair ties around the house or their guests leave their hair ties and cats love those hair ties so it can get wound up around other things like hairballs, hair ties, other objects they might have eaten, plastic, things that might have already, that would have possibly gone through, like the hair and the plastic.
00:21:41.390 --> 00:21:46.641
They'll still wind up in this like ball and then make it to where the rest of that tinsel can't come down.
00:21:47.536 --> 00:22:03.046
Yeah, and it's funny because I don't I generally don't think of cats as eating stuff like that, but we actually had a cat that came into the rescue and and it wasn't a holiday related thing, but he had the like an entire, almost an entire baby bottle nipple.
00:22:03.046 --> 00:22:05.679
Yeah, and it's like, why would they?
00:22:05.679 --> 00:22:10.300
I mean, I guess I could understand why they would want to lick that, but to eat the whole.
00:22:10.361 --> 00:22:10.721
Thing.
00:22:11.763 --> 00:22:15.078
It's just, it seems like such a dog thing, but cats are at risk as well.
00:22:15.420 --> 00:22:15.721
Exactly.
00:22:17.405 --> 00:22:21.576
Okay, so we got to keep an eye out for those foreign bodies that they might ingest.
00:22:21.576 --> 00:22:24.332
What about holiday plants that we need?
00:22:24.332 --> 00:22:25.134
To watch out for.
00:22:25.664 --> 00:22:29.095
So plants, you know, one of the ones that I think is kind of a bad rap is poinsettias.
00:22:29.095 --> 00:22:32.010
So poinsettias like they can have in the house.
00:22:32.010 --> 00:22:38.195
But the thing is like when they do like lick them or bite on them, it does cause them to have an upset stomach.
00:22:38.195 --> 00:22:44.711
So it does cause them to have like vomiting, diarrhea, not wanting to eat for maybe a day, but usually after that they're okay.
00:22:44.711 --> 00:22:51.674
Typically they don't have to come into the hospital for those things, but one that is a really big problem is lilies, especially in cats.
00:22:51.674 --> 00:23:00.015
Lily toxicity can cause them to go into really bad kidney failure, and so they'll typically have to be hospitalized on IV fluids for those things.
00:23:00.015 --> 00:23:04.684
Oh, wow, yeah, for our dogs typically it's going to be raisins and grapes.
00:23:04.684 --> 00:23:10.196
You know I don't have a lot of grapes around these this time of year, but raisins there's actually a lot of raisins that people have.
00:23:10.217 --> 00:23:11.505
Yeah, you know putting it in stuff.
00:23:11.505 --> 00:23:12.307
Think of that beautiful.
