Raisin' Awareness!

Baking has been a therapeutic treat for a lot of us during our lockdowns and this November I was excited to think about baking the Christmas cake and perhaps making mincemeat to fill the house with wonderful Christmas baking smells and kid myself that having done this I’m all organised for Christmas ....

This year I hadn’t counted on our 17months old Labrador,Truffle, to take the therapy out of the experience. I started to think about buying the fruit to soak for the cake - none online - obviously everyone else is doing the same thing so I headed off to the shops and happily managed to get the last bag of raisins on the shelf. Once home everything was pushed to the back of the counter whilst I got organised but I got interrupted and in the meantime Truffle stole and ate all of the raisins! Panic! Aren’t raisins poisonous? A call to the vets confirmed that this was not good. What we didn’t know is that the levels of toxicity in raisins for dogs is unknown and so whilst one raisin might be very poisonous for one dog another can eat 100g.or more and be fine. We had no idea where Truffle fitted here but she had probably eaten 500g and she was very sick! End of calming Christmas baking moment and straight off to dog hospital where she was put on hydration and charcoal treatment to help prevent kidney damage/failure.

Two happy outcomes here - the first one being that Truffle is completely fine thank goodness and secondly I was very thankful for our Onyourbed dog beds and throws which are fantastically easy to whip off and put in the washing machine. The amazing liner did its job too and nothing went through to the mattress. So, although the Christmas cake is set to be the most expensive ever (veterinary bills will buy you many bags of raisins!) the dog bed is completely fine and ready for whatever she throws at (or on!) it next!

Hopefully writing about this very worrying experience will help protect more dogs from accidental poisoning. I for one have learned my lesson and won’t be leaving anything on the counter again!