Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot com where
Speaker 1: smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, is
Speaker 1: chocolate poisonous to dogs? You may have heard people say
Speaker 1: that chocolate will kill dogs? Does that make sense? If
Speaker 1: I can eat chocolate, why can't my dog? It turns
Speaker 1: out that for dogs, a chemical and chocolate called theo
Speaker 1: bromine is the source of the problem. Theobromine is similar
Speaker 1: to caffeine. It's toxic to dogs when it ingests between
Speaker 1: a hundred and a hundred and fifty milligrams per kilogram
Speaker 1: of body weight. Different types of chocolate contain different amounts
Speaker 1: of theobromine. It would take about twenty ounces of milk
Speaker 1: chocolate to kill a twenty pound dog, but only two
Speaker 1: ounces of Baker's chocolate or six ounce is of semisweet chocolate.
Speaker 1: It's not that hard for a dog to get into
Speaker 1: something like an Easter basket full of chocolate eggs and
Speaker 1: chocolate bunnies and gobble up to a pound or two
Speaker 1: of chocolate in a single sitting. If the dog is small,
Speaker 1: that could be deadly. It turns out that chocolate poisoning
Speaker 1: is actually not as unusual as it sounds for a
Speaker 1: human being. Caffeine is toxic at levels of fifty milligrams
Speaker 1: per kilogram of body weight. That's the same as for
Speaker 1: dogs with theobromine. Humans generally weigh a lot more than dogs,
Speaker 1: but small children can get into trouble with caffeine or
Speaker 1: chocolate if they consume too much of it. Infants are
Speaker 1: especially vulnerable because they don't eliminate caffeine from the bloodstream
Speaker 1: nearly as quickly as adults do. Dogs have this strange
Speaker 1: ability to wolf down lots more food than a human does,
Speaker 1: and that makes a dog a lot more susceptible than
Speaker 1: chocolate poisoning than a human it be be sure to
Speaker 1: check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Speaker 1: Join how staf Work staff as we explore the most
Speaker 1: promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Staff Works
Speaker 1: iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.