[Dailydrool] Poisons

[Elizabeth Lindsey]

Accidents do indeed happen, and I'm so glad this one had a happy  
ending. My heart was in my mouth as I was reading about it.

My reason for contributing to this thread is to warn that even when  
you think you've gotten all the poisons safely locked up or off the  
property altogether, you can still end up with a bad surprise.

The last time we moved with our late Jane Basset, it was to a house  
that had been lived in by some very nice, kind men with two dogs and  
seven cats they obviously cared about. There's no way they would have  
put poison out because of their pets. And because of their pets, I  
thoroughly cleaned that house before we moved into it and saw no  
traces of poison while I was inside the cupboards and closets.

Yet, several weeks after moving in, Jane developed a bright red rash  
on her stomach. She was our basset who specialized in major medical  
emergencies, so I rushed her to the vet as soon as I saw it. By that  
point the rash had doubled in size. The vet was 90 percent sure it  
was poison and started treating her for it. I still can't figure out  
where she might have found posion because I never did see any on that  
property. I asked the men we rented from, and they swore they'd never  
put it out because of their own pets.

However.

As someone who's had
many pet rats (the domesticated variety, not the sewer kind) over the
years, I've learned that rodents are strong believers in stocking away a
food windfall (which is how they perceive poison)
for the future. They'll carry edibles all over the house and leave
them in little stashes to nibble on throughout the day. (My rats were  
free range in my office but not terribly successful at keeping steady  
stashes going in there because Jane, and later Elsinore, thought that  
finding and eating the stashes was like the best Easter Egg Hunt  
they'd ever been on.)

Before I had any pets at all, I lived in a porous 200-year-old  
farmhouse out in a field. The house, of course, was well populated  
with field mice. I put
out boxes of poison pellets, and the mice died. When I moved out, I
discovered that, just like my future pet rats, they'd carried the
poison all over the house. I found caches of it squirreled away under
the bathroom rug, under the refrigerator (along with the poisoned
corpses of a little mouse family), and squeezed between the split box
springs of a bed that was on the floor. If I'd had a dog at the time,
I'm positive the dog would have found the poison in the bathroom
before I'd known it was there.

Last summer when we had a suspected rat making a mess out of the  
enclosed compost pile at the back of the property, I called the city  
health department for help. All they would do was put out poison.  
When I heard that, I refused to give them my address for fear they'd  
put out poison against my wishes and not tell me. I knew that the  
poison might start out on the alley side of my fence, but that's not  
where all of it would end up. There's no telling where the rats would  
squirrel it away, and I'd never be able to find and remove their  
stashes. I told the health department I refuse to risk my dogs'  
health and safety, or the health and safety of the other pets in the  
neighborhood, in that way. (Turns out it was a possum anyway, not a  
rat, and I caught it with an illegal trap, not knowing it was illegal  
until animal control called and threatened to report me to the state  
wildlife agency--a story for another time.)

So I've come to feel that poisoning is always a remote but still  
realistic threat, whether you've personally brought the stuff onto  
your property or not. We have no way of knowing who's done what with  
poison in our homes before we moved in. We don't know what the city  
might be doing around our homes and when. We don't know if rodents in  
the past have stockpiled anything in our homes. What we *can* know is  
what the symptoms of rat poison look like (Google "rat poison  
symptoms in dogs"), how to respond to it, and how to get to the  
nearest veterinary ER.

Elizabeth