Has your dog eaten raisins? Yorkshire Vet says you don't need to panic...

He was rushed to the surgery to be made sick and placed on an intravenous drip for two days. This was a challenge because the adolescent retriever was extremely energetic and quite unaware of the dire situation he might be in. Several bags of fluid later, and having chewed his way through innumerable drip lines, he was released and continued his healthy existence, totally unaffected.

Nobody seemed to know what the toxic dose of raisins might be. I had email communications with an expert in Australia but even she didn’t know. What she told me was that any amount of raisins was potentially deadly to dogs, causing anuric renal failure. And some dogs were more sensitive than others.

Her strong conviction did not fit with my experience. I’ve known countless dogs who have eaten the occasional hot cross bun, mouthfuls of Christmas cake or even a juicy grape. None of them dropped dead nor succumbed to renal failure. The conclusion seemed to be that some dogs are affected by raisin toxicity but by no means all. Was there some sort of genetic tendency? Maybe one that most dogs don’t have, so they would be fine.

But if your dog does have this tendency, they will become very ill if they eat raisins. In short, it seemed, nobody really knew.

As vets we spend much of our time trying to prevent dogs from feeling nauseous or being sick. Gastritis is a perennial hazard for a creature with the habits of the dog.

“The thing is,” explained one client recently, “he is just so close to the ground. We’ve really got no idea what he eats. Last weekend his face was dark green after eating a cow pat.”

Dogs eat all sorts of grim, dead or decomposing things. They lick everything and never wash their paws. It’s no surprise they are inundated with bacterial causes of vomiting. So to make a happy dog deliberately sick always seems mean. I saw a poor Golden Retriever last Friday who had swallowed a packet of silica gel. I feared it might cause a blockage as it sucked up moisture from its surroundings. So we decided to make him sick. The injection works alarmingly well. Within a few minutes, a worried look develops on the dog’s face, followed by predictable and comprehensive emesis. It’s always horrible but, luckily, in this case, the packet of silica emerged, mixed in with partly digested brown mush.

But back to raisins. Thankfully, at last, there has been some quantification of the toxic dose. This should help to provide guidance for both vets and owners and hopefully mean fewer dogs are made to vomit unnecessarily. So here goes – and this is NOT to say we should deliberately feed dogs raisins.

A 10-kg dog (for example, a large terrier) should not eat more than 30 raisins. It’s basically a small pile – exactly the amount that fits into a dessert spoon. A 20-kg dog (a Springer Spaniel) should not eat more than 60 raisins or two dessert spoons. For a 30-kg dog (a slim Labrador) 90 raisins (three dessert spoons) can be dangerous.

I hope that helps!