Dogs' pot poisoning soars as pets dig through trash, stash
Katherine Seligman
Updated 8:10 am, Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Animal abuse is generally illegal. If you accidentally poison your children because you left drugs or poisons laying around where you kids can get them, CPS can remove your children from the home. Can, or should, animal control authorities have the power to remove a pet from the home when a careless pet owner poisons it because he is too stupefied on his precious weed to know or care if he is endangering it?The Pet Poison Hotline, which takes calls from around the country and Canada, noted a 200 percent increase in reported incidents of poisoning in the past five years. Dr. Lori Green, a critical care veterinarian at the San Francisco SPCA Veterinary Hospital, says the clinic treats as many as three dogs a week for symptoms of marijuana toxicity: trembling, vomiting and walking troubles.
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Pot affects dogs differently than it does humans, veterinarians say, because dogs don't have liver enzymes to metabolize tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. At higher doses, marijuana can cause dogs to vomit, lose coordination and bladder control, have tremors, and be nervous and over-reactive. Their body temperature and heart rate may drop.
In extreme cases dogs may suffer seizures or seem unresponsive, but THC poisoning is rarely fatal. Dogs usually recover in 12 to 24 hours, though signs can last up to 72 hours.
As the above article points out, dog livers lack the capacity to metabolize THC, thus, THC is poisonous to dogs, and in a small number of cases, fatal. Legal or illegal, there is little credible evidence that says that cannabis does NOT affect your judgement and reaction times, and therefore the people using the drug are not able to make good judgements about protecting pets while they (the owners) are high. The law generally says that dogs are chattel, which means that absent willful or negligent abuse, you can generally do whatever you want with them. On the other hand, most dog owners (at least here in the U.S.) would agree that their dog is not just property, but also part of their family. For that reason as much as any other, dogs deserve some kind of protection under the law. All laws, or abolishment of laws, have unintended consequences. It would appear that this is one of the unintended consequences of pulling back from drug control, specifically with regard to marijuana laws.
I'm not so much asking for opinions about the legalization of marijuana. I generally concede that the War on Drugs is a bust (pun intended), and getting the state uninvolved in it can't be any worse than the results we've already had. If you get rid of marijuana control, you get rid of a certain amount of bureaucracy. Others are certainly free to disagree with that. MY interest in this story is whether or not we, both as a people and as a government, have a responsibility to act to protect pets from the consequences of their owners' folly when it comes to marijuana poisonings. OR, conversely, should we just leave things alone and absorb the fact that as more and more people use the drug, there will be more and more dog poisonings. . . . .as has already been recorded as fact?
Discuss.....
