My dog ate chocolate, grapes or swallowed an object: what do I do now?

Half past ten on a Sunday night. Half a bar of dark chocolate was left on the table, and your eleven-kilo beagle is now standing by the chair licking the foil. Or the fruit bowl holds nothing but the bare grape stalk. Or you caught the last second of a sock, an apricot stone or a chunk of rubber ball going down. In all three cases the next ten minutes matter more than anything that follows. And the most useful thing you can do in them sounds odd: do not try to sort it out yourself. Gather, estimate, call. Below is exactly what to do now, what to tell the vet on the phone and what the next few hours usually look like.

The first 10 minutes, step by step

1. Get him away and gather what is left. The wrapper, the pieces, the pill box, the rodent bait packet, the broken plant. If he has already vomited, the vomit goes in a bag. All of it comes with you to the clinic.
2. Work out how much he ate, worst case. The bar was 100 grams, 30 are left: count 70. You do not know how many tablets were in the box: count it full. The vet works from the dog's weight and the largest possible amount. An optimistic guess does more harm than a gloomy one.
3. Call now, not when the signs show. Your own vet or, if nobody picks up, an out-of-hours clinic. With chocolate, signs come at 6 to 12 hours. With grapes, the kidneys fail at one to three days. With rat bait, bleeding starts at three to five days. A dog wagging his tail ten minutes later tells you nothing about what is coming. And for many substances the window in which the vet can get the poison back out of the stomach is the first hour. Two at most.
4. Do not make him sick on your own initiative. Not with salt, not with a finger down his throat, not with a recipe from a Facebook group. Salt in quantity is a poison for dogs in its own right. Badly induced vomiting can end up in the lungs. And with caustic substances, petroleum products or sharp objects, whatever burned and cut on the way down burns and cuts on the way back up. If the vet decides vomiting will help, they tell you what to do or do it at the clinic, with a drug that works within minutes and under their eye.
5. Do not give him anything "to neutralise it". No milk, no oil, no bread, no charcoal off the barbecue, no food. Some of those speed absorption up.
6. With objects, two rules. If a thread, a strand of wool or a ribbon hangs from his mouth or from under his tail, you do not pull: the thread may be caught in the gut, and pulled, it saws through it. If he is choking (cannot breathe, paws at his mouth, gums going blue), open his mouth and take the object out only if you can see it and grab it easily. Otherwise you leave that very second, with someone else phoning from the car.
7. Set up the trip. Lead, blanket, the packaging, his health record, one person driving and one beside the dog. In the car he lies down and stays warm. If he is sick, no telling off; bag it.

What happens if you wait

Chocolate makes the dog restless; he drinks a lot, vomits, has diarrhoea, then the heart races and skips beats, tremors arrive and, in bad cases, seizures. Grapes and raisins bring vomiting in the first hours, then lethargy and, in the dogs who react (not all of them, and there is no way to know in advance which), kidney failure. The sweetener in chewing gum and "sugar-free" products crashes the blood sugar within 30 to 60 minutes: weakness, staggering, seizures. Rat bait gives whole days of looking perfectly healthy, then blood from the nose, in the urine or into the chest. After antifreeze he seems drunk in the first hours, then seems to have recovered, then the kidneys shut down; the antidote only works if given in the first hours. A lodged object means repeated vomiting, a painful belly, no stool at all, lethargy, usually within one to three days. All of that is why the call happens now, not tomorrow.

What to tell the vet and what they do

On the phone

• What he ate or swallowed. Read the product name and the ingredients list off the packaging. With chocolate it matters whether it was dark, milk, cocoa powder or baking chocolate. With gum and sweets, look for the sweetener in the ingredients. With rodent bait, the active ingredient and the colour of the pellets. With medicines, the name, the strength and how many are missing.
• How much: the worst-case estimate from step 2.
• When: the time, as precisely as you can.
• The dog's weight and age. Do not know the weight? Weigh yourself holding him, then without him.
• What you see now: vomiting, drooling, restlessness, tremor, lethargy, pale gums, fast breathing. Or nothing, and you say "nothing".
• Other illnesses and medicines, whether she is pregnant, whether he has had stomach trouble before.
• How far you are from the clinic.

With that, the vet decides within two minutes: you come in now, you watch him at home, or there is something to do on the spot with them on the line.

At the clinic

1. A quick look at everything: pulse, breathing, gum colour, temperature, how alert he is. In a dog who is seizing or struggling to breathe, the rest waits.
2. Emptying the stomach, if the substance went down recently, is not caustic or oily, and the dog is awake and able to swallow. An injection or a drug dropped into the eye or nose, effect within minutes, and the vet sees with their own eyes what comes up.
3. Binding the toxin in the gut, for some substances, with a product that stops it crossing into the blood. Sometimes repeated.
4. A drip, to support the kidneys and dilute what has already reached the blood. With grapes and antifreeze it is the main part of treatment and runs for days.
5. Blood tests matched to the substance: kidneys for grapes and antifreeze, blood sugar for the sweetener, clotting for rat bait, liver for some plants and medicines. Repeated at intervals.
6. The antidote, where there is one: for anticoagulant rat bait, for antifreeze in the first hours, for some medicines. For chocolate and grapes there is no antidote; there is only support.
7. With objects: an X-ray, sometimes with contrast, or an ultrasound scan, to see where it is and whether it is moving. Many small, smooth objects pass on their own within two to four days, and the vet tells you what to look for in the stool. Threads, sharp objects, batteries and magnets are not waited out. Whatever stays put or blocks comes out by endoscope, if it is still in the stomach, or by surgery.
8. Monitoring, from a few hours to a few days. With rat bait, treatment runs for weeks, with check-up blood tests.
9. At discharge, which signs to watch, what he eats, when you come back. Write it down while you are still there, because at home you will not remember.

How to prevent the next time

A dog who has swallowed something dangerous once will do it again. Not out of spite. To him, the meal was there and it was good.

What is dangerous and when the signs show

The list is not complete and it is no substitute for a dose calculation. The amount that does nothing to a German shepherd can kill a chihuahua, and with grapes there is no "safe" amount for anyone. When you are not sure, you call.

In the house

• A bin with a heavy lid, or shut inside a cupboard. The bin is source number one: bones, corn cobs, foil with chocolate traces, greasy napkins.
• An empty worktop when you leave the kitchen. A medium-sized dog reaches any worktop. A motivated one reaches the table too.
• Medicines, the dog's own included, in a closed cabinet, up high. To a dog a blister pack or a plastic bottle is a toy that rattles, and he has it open with his teeth in two minutes. Tomorrow morning's tablets do not live on the bedside table.
• Guests' bags on the coat hook, not on the floor. That is where the gum, the sweets, the tablets and the chocolate are.
• Holidays have their own calendar: Christmas and Easter chocolate, raisins in festive baking, grapes in autumn, raw dough on baking days. On those days the dog is in a room where nothing sits on the table.
• The plants in the table do not live in the house or garden, or live where he cannot reach.
• Garage and larder: antifreeze wiped off the floor at once and kept in a closed container; rodent bait never where the dog can get to it, and the packet kept for as long as the bait is down, so you know what to read out on the phone.
• Socks, underwear, children's toys, sewing thread: put away. Socks are among the objects most often removed by surgery from young dogs.

On the street and in the park

• Teach him the swap. He hands over what is in his mouth and gets something better from you, every single time, with no telling off and a cheerful word. The dog who has learnt that opening his mouth means confiscation swallows fast. The one who has learnt it means a piece of cheese spits things out on his own.
• A "leave it" practised on boring things, indoors, for weeks on end, before you need it on a chicken leg found under a bench.
• For dogs who scavenge with passion, a basket muzzle, taught patiently with good treats, is safety equipment. It lets him pant, drink and take treats, and it takes away the one "pleasure" that can kill him.
• Eyes on the ground wherever rodent bait is laid (around blocks of flats, by the bins, near warehouses) and wherever people leave food out for cats.

Two things to save in your phone

Your own vet's number and an out-of-hours clinic in your town, with the address. And the dog's weight, in his contact card. On the evening the chocolate bar disappears, you do not want to be hunting for a phone number or a figure.