Chocolate: Delicious Food for Human, Poison for Dogs

    Many people like to take a bar of chocolate at he teatime in the afternoon. At this time, maybe you want to share the sweet with your friends. If you cannot find anyone else, your dog is a good object to share with. Many people know that dogs also like desserts. But stop it, otherwise chocolate may kill you dog. In America, chocolate is one of five common items that can cause dog poisoning, the other four are antifreeze, marijuana, raticide and insecticide.   

     Chocolate contains theobromine, it can excite the central nervous system, relax muscles and increase heart rate.     However, for most animals, theobromine is poisonous. for human beings, we have a pretty high metabolic rate for theobromine, in other words, those toxins in our body will be excreted quickly through liver detoxification and kidney excretion, therefore the toxins cannot affect us. 

   Unfortunately, the situation becomes difficult for dogs. They cannot excrete the theobromine efficiently. Dogs can only excrete half of the theobromine they take after 20 hours. the minimum amount of theobromine which can poison a dog is 16mg per kilogram body weight. 300mg theobromine per kilogram body weight can cause the death of dogs. In addition, the usual chocolate milk contains about 1.4mg/g theobromine, and the black chocolate contains around 14mg/g. For example, for a dog whose weight is 3 kilogram, it he takes 3.42g of black chocolate, which is only a little bite, he might get poisonous. Taking 10g of black chocolate may cause severe vomiting and cramps. Taking 60g of black chocolate may cause its death due to fast heart rate and muscle rigidity. It is only the weight of a bar of chocolate. But for white chocolate, dogs can eat because it contains little amount of theobromine.

    In summary, if you want to share delicious food with your dogs, never feed them chocolate (except for white chocolate), otherwise your movement may let you lose your most loyal friends for the whole life.    

    Here is Yuhan Jiang's blogpost about milk, should we really need to drink milk? His point of view is very interesting and give us some information about why milk is bad. Nice blogpost, I like it.    

References:                                                                                            http://www.longbeachstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Chocolate-Festival-longbeach.jpg

http://www.talktothevet.com/ARTICLES/DOGS/chocolatetoxic.HTM