Dog recovering from nicotine poisoning

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2021 (2010 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon resident Dot Burgess had quite a scare this past weekend when her six-month-old dog Penny, a miniature Dachshund, ate a discarded cigarette butt while the pair were out for an afternoon walk.

While Burgess told the Sun on Monday that Penny managed to make a full recovery, she still wants to get the word out about how this kind of careless littering can result in nicotine poisoning for other people’s pets.

Burgess outlined her experience in an email to the Sun, revealing that Penny swallowed this cigarette filter during their usual walk inside Brandon Municipal Cemetery on Saturday, around 4 p.m.

“She grabbed a cigarette butt/filter, and even though she is small, she is also very determined to keep her find, and she has sharp teeth to back up her wishes,” Burgess wrote.

During the pair’s evening walk later that day, Burgess noticed that Penny was hyperactive to a degree that she had not witnessed since first purchasing the dog late last year.

“Granted she is an active puppy, but this was an excitement level that was so very over the top for her (and) I began to wonder if it could be the nicotine,” she wrote.

Penny’s condition got worse as the evening progressed, as the dog started twitching, trembling, drooling and exhibiting lethargy to the point where she could barely hold up her head.

“I immediately called my vet, and she told me that my puppy would likely be OK after a few hours, since she had ingested it about three hours plus before,” Burgess wrote.

However, the vet clinic also told Burgess that Penny could have been in real trouble if she ingested a second cigarette butt, since that amount of nicotine could be fatal to a dog of that size.

Thankfully, Burgess said the miniature Dachshund passed the cigarette filter through her digestive system by Sunday and was back to her usual perky self on Monday.

Moving forward, Burgess is going to keep a closer eye on Penny during their three to four walks every day, although she is also looking to take some more proactive measures to ensure that this accident doesn’t happen to other local pet owners.

“I am seriously considering donating appropriate butt-out stations in a few places in the cemetery, with appropriately worded signage to explain why it is important to ‘butt out’ there,” she wrote.

But in general, Burgess is asking her fellow Brandonites to simply exercise some restraint when disposing of their cigarette butts in the future, since those filters could do some real harm if they are left out in the open.

“Just be a little bit more responsible,” she said over the phone on Monday. “And that goes for all garbage because there are a lot of things that are thrown out that could harm larger dogs as well.”

According to a 2011 study published by BMJ — titled “Tobacco and Cigarette Butt Consumption in Humans and Animals” — the Animal Poison Control Center and Pet Poison Control Helpline received a combined 801 calls about dogs ingesting cigarette butts in the United States between 2005 and 2010.

This study concluded that cigarette butt consumption by animals is a frequent source of concern among American poison control centre staff and pet owners, especially since a minimum lethal dose of nicotine is reported to be around 9.2 milligrams for every kilogram their dog weighs.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

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