I Forgot About A Pack Of Gum. It Almost Killed My Dog

A common artificial sweetener is lethal to dogs, and may already be in your home

Bowie’s OK. Let’s start with that so no one freaks out. But it was close. After consuming three times the amount of xylitol that, for his 65 pound bodyweight, should have killed him, our middle dog suffered a grand mal seizure, liver failure, and came very close to dying. It was the worst, hardest few days my wife and I have ever experienced. And given how common the poison is, and the fact that it’s often labeled with a much more innocuous name, this is something other dogs owners should be worried about too.

Bowie (like the knife, not the David who didn’t know how to pronounce his new last name when he got tired of being mistaken for a Monkee), was supposed to be a pomsky. Breeding those is a challenge that involves impregnating a female husky with sperm from a male pomeranian, all in an effort to capture the former’s look in a size that will fit in your purse. After being manually extracted (yes, like that) the purse dog semen has to be voluminized in a lab using a centrifuge, then …