Penny's bad day

Poor Penny. After her lovely day on Thursday cornering a rat and eating her bone, yesterday she snaffled a piece of plastic from under some meat and had to go to the vet so they could induce her to vomit it up. She's okay now, but was pretty unhappy when she came home.

We do have some washing soda crystals on hand to provoke vomiting in a case of poisoning, but on reading this veterinary advice, I'm sure glad our own vet was open and could do it for us.

For one thing, our vet had to administer a second medication to stop her continuing to vomit, and that would have been impossible for us to do at home.

The above link has some useful advice. For one thing, it's necessary in a case of poisoning to assess whether you might do more harm than good to induce vomiting if the poisonous substance is corrosive.

Secondly, there's some good advice about using dishwashing liquid to wash off a substance on her skin. We had to do that some years ago when she had a bad reaction to Advantix, a topical tick medication.

ZiwiPeak dog foods do not have carrageenan in them

I emailed ZiwiPeak and got this reply about whether they still have carrageenan in their products.

This is the reply:

Thank you for your enquiry about the carrageenan in ZiwiPeak canned food.As from October 2014 all canned food was produced with the new formulation that excluded the use of carrageenan.Of course it takes many months for the new formulation stock to filter through to all retailers in the marketplace but by now I would expect it it be all carrageenan free.

So that's good.

pet food with carrageenan in it - is it too dangerous?

Long ago, someone pointed out to me that our favourite canned pet food has carrageenan in it, and said that ingredient is reported to be carcinogenic. I decided not to worry about it, because I thought  ZiwiPeak, the brand I'm talking about, is ethically produced.

However, today I was reading a report by a cardiologist about carrageena. He says he wouldn't eat it himself. Reluctantly, I decided not to buy this terrific brand of food any more.

And then...

In researching this post I found they don't include it any more! Hooray!

Two things occur to me:
1. If they have taken the trouble to replace carrageenan with what they say is a safer ingredient - agar agar - then they must have concluded that carrageenan is indeed dangerous to our pets.

2. Why is carrageenan still listed on some websites as a ZiwiPeak ingredient?


I reckon it's worth looking at the ingredient list on anything you give your dogs - and on any human product - to check for carrageenan.

Let's ban the use of Diclofenac

I was reading the latest edition of Australian Birdlife and came across a reference to the danger of veterinary Diclofenac prescriptions - it's an anti-inflammatory and analgesic drug. The reason it's mentioned in the Birdlife magazine is that it's highly toxic to vultures.

I can imagine a scenario where a cow, having been medicated with Diclofenac, dies and its carcass attracts vultures, including the wonderful, beautiful lammergeier, the largest bird in the European Alps.

From what I've read online, I gather Diclofenac is not a usual drug for dogs in the USA. It is not approved for use in animals by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but it can be prescribed legally by vets as an 'extra-label' drug.

Here's an extract from a review of a book by Dr Tim Flannery, Here on Earth:

For many years, India’s White-rumped Vulture population was large and thriving, but from the late 1990s the number of vultures suddenly declined. So precipitous was the drop that 97% of the birds disappeared over 15 years. As they died out, the animals they once scavenged were left to rot. Cattle carcasses piled up, feral dogs increased in number and the spectre of a rabies epidemic grew. The Parsees, a religious group who place their dead on towers to be consumed by vultures, watched in horror as the bodies of loved ones accumulated and slowly decomposed.
In 2006, autopsies revealed the birds’ kidneys had been destroyed by Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug given to cattle and water buffalo. Completely inadvertently, humans had brought the vulture population to the edge of extinction. In the immensely ambitious Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope (Text Publishing, 352pp; $34.95), Tim Flannery describes the vultures and other case studies that follow this depressingly familiar plot: either through indifference or ignorance, by poisoning the environment, changing the climate or launching more straightforward hostilities, humanity has created one ecological disaster after another. Will the vultures survive? Veterinary Diclofenac was banned in India in 2006 and small groups of vultures returned. However, the drug is still sold illegally, so the birds still suffer. 

The article in Australian Birdlife has this warning:

If we believe that because there are no vultures in Australia this is someone else's problem, we need to think again - there is recent evidence that Diclofenac is toxic to aquila Eagles too.This group includes the iconic Wedge-tailed Eagle and what's more, Diclofenac is approved for veterinary use in Australia as both an anti-inflammatory for horses and available without prescription for human use. With safe and cheap alternatives to Diclofenac available - such as the anti-inflammatory Meloxicam - it is time to phase the drug out before similar consequences start occurring in our own country.

Given that aquila Eagles live all around the world, for instance the Golden Eagle, I think it's important that this drug be banned everywhere, not just in India.

The mystery circle explained

Long, long ago, Penny and I were mystified by a circle of dead grass that appeared  in a local park.

We did figure eventually that the grass had been sprayed in order to prepare the spot  for an indigenous planting.

And now the planting is flourishing.

It's a pity that they probably used a horrible, dangerous herbicide on the spot originally, but I guess we'll have to hope it hasn't remained in the ground. (But latest science seems to indicate it stays around longer than Monsanto would have us believe.)

don't use Roundup if you have dogs

The World Health Organisation said in March that Roundup  'probably' causes cancer in humans.

If it is dangerous to humans, how much more so must it be to dogs, who walk 'bare-footed' on ground that has been sprayed!

I have previously posted about this pernicious substance. It's a dreadful product.

the tennis ball tree is in fruit again

How glad I am that Penny doesn't chew the tennis balls she finds. Otherwise, when December comes and the 'tennis ball' tree - aka in human terms as the plum tree - comes into fruit, Penny might chew her way through to the dangerous pip in the middle of the plum.

I hadn't realised the plums were ripening, until I glanced at Penny relaxing near her mat...

with the ball she stole from her friend Jabari last week...
and a new ball.

Hmm... what new ball is this?

It sure looks like a plum.

But, to misquote Shakespeare, what's in a name? That which we call a plum by any other name would smell as sweet. Or taste as good, if it hadn't been first chewed by a bird and then carried in Penny's mouth.

the dangers of dogs eating beans

Most evenings we eat vegetables and so does Penny. Her favorite place in the house is near the food preparation bench, where she sits patiently waiting for off-cuts of vegetables - carrots, particularly. One thing she loves also is the end of a bean. We've been giving her little bits of green beans for ages.

Lately I've been growing broad beans in the garden, mainly so I can dig them in and add to the nitrogen in the soil. But last night the pods of beans looked so enticing that we decided to cook some and eat them. (Okay, those who know we were supposed to eat the beans inside, and not the pods, are wincing, I guess.)

Human number two threw a couple of cut-off ends to Penny and decided to throw the rest in the compost, because of the funny whitish look of them.

Thank goodness she didn't give Penny the usual amount, because ten minutes later Penny was in the garden throwing up. And again, thirty minutes later, after she had her evening meal.

Of course, other than keeping an eye on her, it was immediately off to the internet to look for information.

First of all I came across this story, from bakers8:

I came home from work this week and thought that I would see if any of the broad beans were ready for eating. Upon viewing the vegetable garden I wondered at the fact that there were quite a few long stems of beans lying flat. It hadn’t been overly windy that day and it was dry. What had happened? Then I saw that there were no beans on any of the stems that were on the ground. No beans?

I puzzled for a while, picked some beans and went inside to prepare them for dinner. The chooks were happy to receive the empty pods and I thought no more about it – until M asked if I had fed Terry some broad beans. A lot of broad beans.

“No” I said, “I don’t think he likes them”.

“Well” said M, “there are a number of piles of dog vomit around the yard and it’s all broad beans!” (apologies to the faint and/or those with vivid imaginations).

Sure enough, there was the evidence that somebody had decided to have a little smorgasbord prior to my return. And he must be feeling rather poorly as he hadn’t performed the other disgusting dog habit of cleaning up after himself!

I also found this on GardenWeb:

Beans in the family Phaseolus Vulgaris contain a chemical called Phytohaemagglutinin. If you cook it, the chemical is released and poses no threat. Raw, it's pretty nasty. In humans, eating small amounts of it via raw beans isn't usually fatal (from what I know, so don't read this, eat some raw beans then sue me when you die or get deathly ill), but even eating a small dose can cause some serious sickness like vomiting and general malaise and all. It's not usually fatal in humans unless larger amounts are consumed, but it's still dangerous enough to where I wouldn't eat raw beans.
It's dangerous though to most animals, not just humans. So, a dog would be just as likely to get it, if not more likely, as a human.

After all this research, I began to wonder whether my plants were in fact the same broad beans that others were writing about. However, I felt sure I had identified my plants correctly when I looked at the photos on this site, and read:

In much of the Anglophone world, the name broad bean is used for the large-seeded cultivars grown for human food, while horse bean and field bean refer to cultivars with smaller, harder seeds (more like the wild species) used for animal feed, though their stronger flavour is preferred in some human food recipes, such as falafel.
The term fava bean (from the Italian fava, meaning "broad bean") is its most common name in the United States, with broad bean being the most common name in the UK.

By the way, Penny seems fine today. Also, quite separately from her reaction to the beans, we scraped our own cooked pods into the compost because they tasted so awful.

is roundup - glyphosate - safe to use around dogs?

A recent article in Organic Gardener magazine, about glyphosate (Roundup), has me wondering about this herbicide in terms of its danger to dogs.

I have two concerns (apart from my general concern about the environment). First, I believe this is the herbicide that is used in Darebin Parklands, where we walk frequently.

Secondly, we have a back lane behind our house, one that is great for a short off-lead walk and also provides a private place to chase tennis balls. I asked our local council why a spray is used there and was told it's too expensive to mow it more than four times each year, so herbicides are used to keep the weeds down.

I've noticed that some weeds spring up immediately after the spraying in the lane and asked whether they might be Roundup-resistant, but the council official was non-committal about that.

However... now that I've read this article in Organic Gardener I see that there are now 16 weeds with confirmed resistance to this herbicide.

By the way, to clear up any confusion about what herbicide I'm talking about, here's a quote from the article:

Glyphosate is sometimes referred to by the original trade name Roundup, which was first marketed by Monsanto in 1974, and the two names are often used interchangeably.

I don't like to use this product in my own garden, so it bothers me that Penny is likely to be exposed to it when we're out walking. There's a lot of work being done to regenerate indigenous plants in Darebin Parklands, and glyphosate is considered to be an essential tool in fighting introduced weeds.

The article says,

While bush regenerators maintain they couldn't do their work without it, emerging research may yet see glyphosate join the long list of pesticides that were once thought to be safe, but turn out to be harmful.

The author says we tend to trust the story that glyphosate is relatively safe, but last year France's Supreme Court ruled that Monsanto had not told the truth about the safety of Roundup, and many Canadian municipalities restrict the use of any [pesticides] herbicides for cosmetic purposes such as lawns and driveways, because of health concerns.

Humans can wear gloves and face masks when they use it, and cover all exposed skin. But if my dog walks through a recently sprayed area, she will place her bare paws on it, she will roll in it, she might chew a few blades of grass, she might drink from a puddle that is polluted with runoff.

And not just recently sprayed areas, either - here are a couple more quotes:

While regulators agree glyphosate has a relatively low acute (short-term) toxicity compared with other herbicides, recent research indicating possible long-term health effect is causing controversy...

Glyphosate is relatively persistent in soil, especially in cold climates, where residues have been found up to three years after use. In warmer climates it stays in the soil for between four and 180 days.

Penny likes to dig, sometimes.