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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot com where

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Speaker 1: smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, is

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Speaker 1: chocolate poisonous to dogs? You may have heard people say

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Speaker 1: that chocolate will kill dogs? Does that make sense? If

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Speaker 1: I can eat chocolate, why can't my dog? It turns

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Speaker 1: out that for dogs, a chemical and chocolate called theo

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Speaker 1: bromine is the source of the problem. Theobromine is similar

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Speaker 1: to caffeine. It's toxic to dogs when it ingests between

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Speaker 1: a hundred and a hundred and fifty milligrams per kilogram

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Speaker 1: of body weight. Different types of chocolate contain different amounts

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Speaker 1: of theobromine. It would take about twenty ounces of milk

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Speaker 1: chocolate to kill a twenty pound dog, but only two

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Speaker 1: ounces of Baker's chocolate or six ounce is of semisweet chocolate.

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Speaker 1: It's not that hard for a dog to get into

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Speaker 1: something like an Easter basket full of chocolate eggs and

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Speaker 1: chocolate bunnies and gobble up to a pound or two

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Speaker 1: of chocolate in a single sitting. If the dog is small,

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Speaker 1: that could be deadly. It turns out that chocolate poisoning

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Speaker 1: is actually not as unusual as it sounds for a

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Speaker 1: human being. Caffeine is toxic at levels of fifty milligrams

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Speaker 1: per kilogram of body weight. That's the same as for

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Speaker 1: dogs with theobromine. Humans generally weigh a lot more than dogs,

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Speaker 1: but small children can get into trouble with caffeine or

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Speaker 1: chocolate if they consume too much of it. Infants are

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Speaker 1: especially vulnerable because they don't eliminate caffeine from the bloodstream

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Speaker 1: nearly as quickly as adults do. Dogs have this strange

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Speaker 1: ability to wolf down lots more food than a human does,

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Speaker 1: and that makes a dog a lot more susceptible than

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Speaker 1: chocolate poisoning than a human it be be sure to

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