Rodenticide Chronicles ep. 3 - Cholecalciferol Toxicity Unveiled
Welcome to 'Rodenticide Chronicles Episode 3,' where we shed light on cholecalciferol toxicity, one of the most sinister rodenticide poisons. This episode unravels the enigma surrounding the clinical signs and symptoms of cholecalciferol exposure, which often start subtly with lethargy and weakness. As we discuss, the absence of a definitive test to identify the exact toxin makes it challenging for veterinarians to confirm the poisoning promptly. You'll gain a deeper understanding of the limitations and complexities of diagnosing this toxin and why waiting for results can have dire consequences. We emphasize that cholecalciferol toxicity has no quick fixes, and success stories depend on early detection and relentless dedication. Don't miss this comprehensive exploration of the intricacies of cholecalciferol toxicity, a crucial installment in 'Rodenticide Chronicles.
What You’ll Learn:
The importance of detailing exactly which rodenticide you may have on your property
The diagnostic challenges associated with identifying this toxic threat
Why there is no quick antidote for cholecalciferol poisoning
The importance of symptom-based treatment, including hospitalization, IV fluids, and medications
How blood work changes occur over time, impacting the diagnostic process
The significance of ongoing monitoring and the unpredictable prognosis
The necessity of early intervention and vigilant pet care to protect your furry companions
The long-term effects and complexities involved in managing cholecalciferol toxicity
The value of preventive measures and alternatives to dangerous rodenticides
Ideas Worth Sharing:
"One of the big problems is that if the pet comes in with those symptoms, we have a huge list of differentials that we might be considering." - Dr. Tyler Sugerman
"Unfortunately, you have to be in this for the long haul, knowing that it might be months that we're doing this." - Dr. Tyler Sugerman
"Always bring the box because that's really going to help us know what kind of rodenticide they could potentially have gotten into." - Dr. Tyler Sugerman
Resources:
ASPCA Poison Control
https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/animal-poison-control
(888) 426-4435
Pet Poison Helpline
https://www.petpoisonhelpline.com/
(855) 764-7661
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Read The Transcript:
Dr. Sugerman: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to Vetsplanation. I'm your veterinary host, Dr. Sugerman, and I'm going to teach you about veterinary medicine. In this podcast, we can dive deeper into the understanding of what our pets are going through and break down medical terms into easier to understand chunks of information. Just a quick disclaimer, this podcast is for informational purposes only.
This is not meant to be a diagnosis for your pet. If you have questions about diagnostics or treatment options, please talk to your veterinarian about those things. Remember, we are all practicing veterinary medicine and medicine is not an exact science. Your veterinarian may have different treatment options and different opinions.
The information I provide here is to help pet parents have a better understanding about their pets. If you like our podcast, please consider sharing this podcast with at least one friend or just somebody else who has pets as well. Now, let's jump into this week's episode.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Vetsplanation, where we help you decode the world of [00:01:00] veterinary medicine. I am your host, Dr. Sugerman, and today we are going to be continuing through our rodenticide toxicity journey. For those of you who are just joining, we've already talked about rodenticides or toxins that kill rodents by talking about coagulopathy rodenticides that have an effect on them that stops their blood from clotting so they bleed. We've also talked about neurotoxic rodenticides that cause neurological damage. And then today we're gonna be discussing our third major group of rodenticides.
Those are called cholecalciferol rodenticides. These are definitely my least favorite, so I have saved them for last. Cholecalciferol, it is quite a mouthful, right? Interestingly, it's actually the chemical name for vitamin D3. You might think of vitamin D from things like the sun. Also, it's found in a lot of over the counter vitamins as well.
And it's okay to take those in small doses, like we do for our regular [00:02:00] vitamins. That is something that helps our body. It's when it is found in much higher doses, that's when it becomes more problematic. Like I said, today I'm going to be talking specifically about vitamin D rodenticides, but this can actually happen when your pets get into your vitamins as well. A lot of the same things will happen.
So I've talked about on the other two rodenticide podcasts about how rodenticides came about. It started with warfarin, which is where one of the anticoagulant or coagulopathy rodenticides caused a bunch of rodents to die because they weren't able to clot their blood anymore.
And then came about our next types of rodenticides, the more powerful coagulopathy rodenticides because warfarin just wasn't killing enough rodents and they were getting immune to it. And then we moved on to the neurotoxic rodenticides, which killed them faster. And then they're like that wasn't fast enough we need to kill them even quicker than that and have better [00:03:00] success rates. So then they came up with this cholecalciferol rodenticide.
So let's discuss like what this bait looks like. Remember in the coagulopathy and neurotoxic rodenticides how I said they all look alike? Guess what? This one also looks like all the rest of those. So if you haven't heard about me talking about this yet, I'm... We'll go over it and if you have, I'm sorry, I'm going to go off on my little tangent again.
I always recommend keeping the package of the rodenticide that you have put out so that way we know what kind of rodenticide it is. Because the problem is that companies make more than one rodenticide and all of the boxes look exactly the same. They will literally the package looks exactly the same except for there'll be one word that's changed and that is the active ingredient of that rodenticide.
Tomcat is a great example of this because they're one of the most common rodenticides. And guess what? They make all of these different types of rodenticides. So if I don't know which one [00:04:00] very specifically it is, you could send me a picture of one that you think it is online, but it might not be the correct one. You could look at a picture and be like, Oh, I know it's Tomcat or tell me it's Tomcat rodenticide, but it could be any of the rodenticides.
It does not tell me which one it is, unfortunately. Therefore, we either need the box, so we know exactly which rodenticide it is, or even like a SKU number from a receipt that you have will also help us as well. We also talked about the fact that rodenticides can come in lots of different varieties.
The most common one is going to be a hard block, and again, every single one of those rodenticides is made into a hard block. They can be in different concentrations and still be in a hard block. This one, cholecalciferol specifically, does come in a softer block sometimes, or a pellet form, which the other two rodenticides come in as well. Which again makes this very difficult to know which type of rodenticide it is.[00:05:00]
And if we don't know which type of rodenticide it is, we now have to treat for all three of them. Best if you could bring the package in so we know exactly what it is. Now, the blocks, the harder ones, they can be something that's really hard to digest, so sometimes we can make them vomit and know it's a block, but again, we don't know which rodenticide it is, we just know it's one of them. They also come in a variety of colors, so again, it doesn't help us to know which one it is.
Alright, so let's talk about what cholecalciferol does to the body. So we actually have to know a little bit about what the body does with vitamin D3 or aka cholecalciferol normally to know how it wreaks havoc on our pet's bodies.
So cholecalciferol or vitamin D3, it's absorbed into the intestines, which is then absorbed into the bloodstream. It travels to the liver where it's converted or changed into another molecule and then travels to the kidneys, where it's converted [00:06:00] again to a different molecule. So the majority of this happens in about 48 to 96 hours, so that's about 2 to 4 days.
This is what the body will naturally do with your vitamin D. It moves it to where it needs vitamin D, and usually we do just fine. This form of vitamin D actually does help make sure that your pet's calcium and phosphorus, which are just two types of minerals, are in a correct amount in their body. But it's when we get too much of that, it becomes a problem.
So I've talked about this before, like in water toxicity and oxygen toxicity. These are things that we need, they're essential, but too much can be a problem. Too much vitamin D3 then can cause a problem as well. So too much vitamin D will cause too much calcium and too much phosphorus to be absorbed by the intestines.
That causes an increase in the amount of calcium that's kept by the kidneys. It even can cause the bone to be destroyed because [00:07:00] it's pulling calcium out of the bone because it's where we store a lot of calcium.
The body will then put that calcium into things like soft tissue, like so under your skin, in the muscles, or even just on the skin itself. It doesn't sound like it's that bad, right? You're like storing calcium other places, not a big deal. Storing calcium under the skin, no problem, but really the bigger problem is that it's going to cause them to go into kidney failure and can cause them to have things like seizures and stuff as well from having too much calcium in their body. So we don't want that to happen. We want to make sure we try to avoid that because this can actually be a pretty detrimental thing when this happens. So let's talk about like how much cholecalciferol is toxic.
Clinical signs can occur in pretty small doses, as little as what's called 0.1 mg per kg. I'll discuss that in a minute. A block has about 10.5 to [00:08:00] 21 mg of cholecalciferol in it. So that means roughly a 60 pound Labrador would have to ingest about 3 milligrams or about a third of the block to be able to cause a problem of the smaller 10.5 mg block or about a sixth of the 21 milligram block.
Now, Labrador is going to go over and just grab it and chew it and eat it. They're not gonna be like I know that I can eat one sixth of this block. No, Labradors are just going to eat it. Just a very small amount can cause a problem, but this also means if you have somebody like a Chihuahua that would need to ingest a pretty, pretty tiny amount in order to cause a problem.
So if we're talking about the pellet form, it would only take about half a tablespoon for a 20 pound dog to cause a toxicity. That is a tiny amount. Plus it could take weeks or months for that toxin to be completely out of the body. And now we have to deal with all of this extra calcium and extra [00:09:00] phosphorus for that whole time until all of that's out of the body. Again, I do not like this rodenticide because it can be so long that all this occurs over.
So real quick, we're going to go over what to do if you know that your pet had gotten into a bait. I know that if you've listened to the other rodenticides, you've heard about this already. But if you do know, one first thing is to make sure that you bring in the package to us immediately and bring your pet into us immediately.
Like I said, there's different types of rodenticides, but the best thing that we can do is make them vomit. So we'll give them medication to help induce emesis, meaning that we make them vomit to try to get as much out as possible. If we can get as much out as possible, then they won't absorb that much.
That usually has to be done though if you know that they've gotten into it within the first four hours. After that, it's already gone through the stomach and into the intestines, and we cannot get them to vomit that back up. As soon as it goes through the [00:10:00] stomach into the intestines, it's gone. We can only make them vomit up what's in the stomach itself.
So ideally bring them in, bring the package. We'll make them vomit. Sometimes we can just do that. We make them vomit and then I'll talk about the other things that we're going to do. But if you bring the package, then sometimes we're able to just know how much they could have gotten into and if this is going to be a problem and what we need to do.
It's when we don't know the amounts that they've gotten into, that becomes a problem. We don't know what kind of rodenticide they got into that's a problem, or if they've gotten into a really high dose, that could be a problem that we may have to call or have you call an expert in poison. So that's going to be the ASPCA Poison Control or the Pet Poison Helpline, which we'll post their numbers in the show notes.
There's also, I will mention on the back of some of the packages, there's on the EPA approved packages, there are rodenticides that have a 1-800 number on the back of them that you can call for free advice. [00:11:00] The hard part about that is that it depends on like how much they got into. They can tell you sometimes yeah, they didn't get into enough to cause a toxicity, but they can't really make medical recommendations for us because they're not a veterinarian.
So that makes it a little bit hard. You still can call them. They can still give you helpful information, but they may still tell you to call a pet poison helpline instead. If we know that they had gotten into a rodenticide, then definitely bring them in. We can make them vomit and otherwise, if let's say you are away from any sort of vet hospital, four hours away from any vet hospital, which I feel like you should be able to get to a vet hospital within four hours almost anywhere that you live. But let's say you don't, you're four hours away from any vet hospital. You can give them hydrogen peroxide. I've talked about this on a couple of them. I do not recommend it in most cases though. I've seen lots of bad things happen. I've seen overdoses. I've seen people give their dog [00:12:00] aspiration pneumonia.
I've seen ulcers created by it. But if you have no other choice and you're just not near a vet hospital, you can use hydrogen peroxide to make them vomit. Just if we have those other things occur, now we're going to have multiple problems to deal with, not just the rodenticide problem. And the other thing is, your pet still needs to be seen by a vet.
So you will still need to make them vomit and then drive to a veterinarian, so we can do all of the rest of the treatments and diagnostics. Anyways, like I said, if you bring them into us, we make them vomit. And then we also give them a medication to help stop vomiting, so that they don't aspirate afterwards.
So that's where they inhale their vomit, which can definitely cause things like a really bad pneumonia. The next steps are going to depend on like how much they ate and what kind of clinical signs that they're having. So typically we'll give them at least one dose of activated charcoal.
Activated charcoal helps to bind some of the toxin and help push [00:13:00] that toxin out faster. We'll also draw what's called a baseline blood work, meaning that we're drawing blood work right now before the toxin has had a chance to take its effects on the body. That way we know where we're starting out at because you could have small increases in calcium, but we may not know because we don't know what the beginning was.
So we do blood work just so that we know where our very first beginning is to know if those values have increased. We'll also likely give them fluids under the skin that's called sub Q fluids. You'll usually see like this. camel hump of fluid on their back, usually between their shoulders. And it's just something that helps absorb into the body.
It has good nutrients in it. It has fluids similar to water, but not the same, but it's something to help give them more fluids back into their body. So that way we can help with the dehydration of the fact that they were vomiting, but [00:14:00] also so we can again, try to help push out as much toxins as possible.
And then every day then, you'd have to come back every 24 hours to have blood work rechecked for 72 hours. So meaning, every day for 3 days, you come back and have their blood work rechecked to make sure that everything is normal. So if it is, if those, that calcium and phosphorus and kidney values are normal, you should be good.
You don't have to worry about it after that, and you don't have to come back for more blood work. So let's say though that they ate more than just a little bit, and they're not quite showing clinical signs yet. Then, we'll likely be giving activated charcoal for more than just one dose. It's usually three doses.
And if that's the case, we prefer them in the hospital. Ideally to give them IV fluids, so not just fluids under their back, like under their skin on their back, but actually fluids into their vein directly. The reason why is because we actually have to watch their sodium levels really carefully.
Unfortunately, [00:15:00] sodium levels can rise because of giving too much activated charcoal, which is why we need to be able to watch them very closely, because it can actually cause brain swelling if we're not careful. Which is one big reason why we can't just send them home with activated charcoal and have owners give it at home.
I've even seen this with people who have decided not to come into the vet, gave their animal activated charcoal and then came in later with brain swelling because the correct dose was not given. So ideally, we keep them in the hospital. We're checking their blood work before we give them each dose of activated charcoal to see that their sodium levels are normal to make sure we're not pushing them into having brain swelling.
And then we'll still perform the blood work, just like we had before. So after those 3 doses of charcoal, so they're usually in the hospital for about 12 hours at that point, 12 to 24 hours. They can go home though after that. We don't have to keep them in the hospital as long as they're not showing [00:16:00] any clinical sites.
You're still going to want to bring them back every day, though, for 3 days, just like we would for the lower dose, just to make sure that their calcium and their phosphorus and those kidney values are still normal.
Also in this case, we will likely have them take a medication called cholestyramine. I know it's like really close, too close of a name to cholecalciferol, right? Which is the toxin that we're talking about. But cholestyramine is something that helps with cholecalciferol toxicities.
Cholestyramine though is a medication used in humans and it can be found at pretty much any human pharmacy as long as you have a prescription for it. So not all veterinarians are going to carry it. Some of us do, but if not, it's super easy to get at least. So this medication is a bit complicated to describe, just kind of like cholecalciferol is a bit complicated to describe, but basically what it does is it helps stop the body from reabsorbing the toxin.
So now, when you think of something [00:17:00] that you ate for lunch. You think that it's passing through your intestines, just comes out in the feces. And it's gone, right? You've taken all your nutrients from it. It comes out pretty quickly. That's not quite what happens.
So what actually happens is the body will help absorb nutrients. It helps absorb medications and toxins through the intestines, and it brings them back to the liver. The liver decides what to do with them at that point, so it might go back into the intestines or go back somewhere else to different tissues or cells, but afterwards, it brings them back into the intestines where it can go through again and then can go back to the liver again.
This is called the enterohepatic circulation, where it's just going constantly through the liver and the small intestines. That's bad for toxins. That's good for nutrients because you can reabsorb nutrients over and over, but it's bad for toxins because that means you're reabsorbing those toxins over and over and over [00:18:00] again.
So what cholestyramine does is it binds or it holds on to certain toxins. It doesn't work for all of them, but to certain toxins. And it makes it to where the bloodstream does not realize that that's something that they need to reabsorb. So it goes through the intestines and just is excreted normally in your stool. Rather than it going through the intestines and being reabsorbed again.
It usually comes in a powder though that you need to mix with some sort of liquid. It is very bitter tasting. So I usually suggest mixing it with something that's like slightly sweet like an apple juice to be able to give it to them. And then they receive this medication every six to eight hours for about three to five days, depending again, like how much they could have potentially gotten into. If we reach that three day mark where we've done the blood work and everything is normal, then again, we should be okay.
Those are like the ideal ways this happens, right? It's they don't have any clinical signs. We just give them medication, maybe have [00:19:00] to hospitalize them for 12 to 24 hours. Not a big deal. That is our ideal situation to get your pet back home to its pet parents, right?
But what happens though, when we don't know if our pet got an cholecalciferol toxicity, or what happened, and what are the clinical signs that we should be watching for? So like our other rodenticides, there is no test to tell me exactly what they got into. You do have tests that you can send out based on like blood tissues and stuff, but that is unfortunately, usually if they die, that's when you're able to send those out.
It's much harder to do when our pets are alive. And also we don't get those test results back immediately. Like by the time we get results back, we already have some sort of differentials based on the blood work we already have. And there is nothing that we can give that it's going to be an antidote either.
This is really just going to be. Just treating them symptomatically for what they have.
So basically we can only look at the signs that the pet has, our [00:20:00] blood work that we have, and ideally knowing if this is something that's even on the property to know if this is a possibility or a differential for what we're seeing. And these symptoms can be vague at first. They can be lethargy, meaning they just don't really want to move around, weakness, not wanting to eat, vomiting, drinking more than usual, and even urinating more than usual.
On our physical exam, we might notice that the pet is dehydrated, or depending on how long it's been since they've had the toxin, we might find like little flat masses under the skin called metastatic mineralization. But it's basically like the body putting that extra calcium somewhere.
And like I said, that doesn't sound too terrible, right? You're like, they're a little bit lethargic. Not a big deal.
But one of the big problems is that if the pet comes in with those symptoms, we have a huge list of differentials that we might be considering. I might think that the pet had eaten people food and now has a pancreatitis, which is [00:21:00] something you could listen to on episode 10, or we might think that the pet has a urinary tract infection.
Or if they're an intact female, maybe we think that they have something called a pyrometra, which is another episode as well. Or we might think that they've eaten an object like a gastrointestinal foreign body that you can listen to on episode 34. Plus there's just a huge list of other differentials, even depending on their age, I might be thinking about cancerous things.
So the real problems though, are what's going on internally, not what we're seeing on the outside of the pet. Normally at this point, I would talk to pet owners about performing diagnostics, things like blood work or maybe radiographs, also known as x rays. Or just treating them symptomatically, meaning giving them medications to try to help them feel better and see if it resolves. The blood work changes though are hard because even if we did blood work, let's say the day that they started feeling not great, that may not be that we're going to see changes on the [00:22:00] blood work yet because blood work changes don't start to occur until about day three to four after they've ingested that.
Which kind of sucks because that actually can be detrimental by knowing that. So if the pet is showing signs at 24 hours and we perform blood work, it might look normal. But if we repeat that blood work the next day, we may see those changes of that calcium increasing and that phosphorus increasing and those kidney values increasing.
And this is not meant to tell you to wait though, like the first blood work is very valuable because let's say we didn't have that blood work originally, I didn't have any recent blood work, then I might think that maybe the pet had gone into chronic kidney failure or think that it's cancer because I didn't know that that calcium or that phosphorus had changed so quickly.
I know if we do catch it when there is blood work changes, we're gonna be looking for really high calcium levels, high phosphorus levels, and usually elevated kidney values. [00:23:00] Even though we still have a handful of other things that could be just based on those three things, like I said, we may worry about cancer or chronic kidney problems or hyperparathyroidism.
Them getting into vitamin D 3, just like when people have their vitamins and they drop one. Or in cats, like we might start thinking about this thing called idiopathic hypercalcemia, meaning we don't know why it happens. It just happens that they get really high calcium.
So therefore we might still have to do like more testing, usually testing of the calcium to see what kind of calcium it is, but we're still going to be needing to treat them. For that really high calcium and high kidney levels regardless. So more testing might have to be done to determine whether it is a toxin or not.
But again, like we still have to treat them. If we know what we're dealing with, we know that it's a rodenticide. These pets need to be hospitalized. We warn owners that since this toxin can hang out in the bloodstream for months, this could mean that for weeks to months, you're still doing [00:24:00] things like blood work and treatment and hospitalization on and off.
Unfortunately, you have to be in this for the long haul, knowing that it might be months that we're doing this, but if it doesn't take months, that's great. We don't want it to take months, but I will tell you, I have had one patient that was receiving treatment with this on and off with frequent blood work for two months.
So this can definitely happen and it takes weeks to months for this to completely resolve. Luckily that pet did survive, but not all of them do. If they are showing clinical signs, then they do have to be hospitalized.
We need to give them IV fluids to help bring down the calcium as much as possible. We're going to want to place a feeding tube. So this tube it can go one of two ways either in the nose into the stomach or sometimes like we put a tube from the throat into the stomach. But that helps support giving them food so that way we can get medications into them.
We can help support their GI system[00:25:00] and also we can help them just get their energy levels up because they don't want to eat because they feel terrible. We're also going to want to give them medications like aluminum hydroxide, which is something to help bring down the phosphorus levels.
And depending on like how bad they are, sometimes we're giving things like steroids to help try to stop the calcium from being taken from those bones and from the intestines. Or we might give furosemide, which is a medication to try to help get as much calcium out of the kidneys as possible by having them urinate a lot.
And then also medications to try to help protect their stomach because they can get ulcers from this. Plus that cholestyramine we were talking about to try to help bind anything that's left so hopefully the intestines do not recognize it and just are able to move everything through into the stool.
So the prognosis of this really varies. They can have long term damage from this and it may be something that they have to be have monitored for the rest of their life. But the problem is we just [00:26:00] don't know that until months later. We wish that we could just look at some blood work and be able to tell you, yes, they're going to have problems later, but there is no way for us to know that.
I know that was a lot for our cholecalciferol toxicity, but that's cholecalciferol in a nutshell. And like I said, this is my least favorite rodenticide because it can be really hard to manage. And as always prevention is key. So keeping those rodenticides locked up in a box or better yet having a professional come out and telling them that you have pets so they can give you safer alternatives to those rodenticides.
And like I said, always bringing the box because that's really going to help us to know what kind of rodenticide they could potentially have gotten into. All right. Now on that note, we're actually going to do an animal fact now.
So today we're going to be talking about bats because we're getting close to Halloween. So people are usually afraid of bats because of like their portrayal in movies and [00:27:00] stuff and in old wise tales, like vampire bats sucking our blood and turning into vampires and like about rabies.
But bats are actually really cool. There are a huge variety of them. And they range from this bat that's called a kitty's hog nose bat, also known as the bumblebee bat, that weighs like less than a penny. That is how tiny it is. To the biggest ones, known as the flying foxes, that actually have a wingspan of about six feet.
People think of bats as hibernating, like they go into their caves, they hibernate during the winter like bears do, but actually not all bats do that. Some of them will migrate to other places, warmer places.
And now people don't like bats, but bats actually do so many good things for us. It's like one of the things that they do is they are like hummingbirds or bees. They actually help pollinate over 300 species of fruits, including things [00:28:00] like bananas, avocados, mangoes, nuts, figs, and cocoa. For anybody who doesn't know what cocoa is, that is chocolate.
That is one of the main ingredients of chocolate. So I'm sure most of the people know that bats are insectivores. Most of them, at least. We'll get to that in a second. But did you know that they can actually eat their body weight in insects? They can eat all types of insects. They can go from mosquitoes and grasshoppers and all sorts of things.
Moths and that means they can eat like thousands of insects every night and they help keep that insect population under control. They can also eat scorpions, like how many animals can eat a scorpion? But they can eat scorpions because they have some sort of weird immunity to them so that when they sting them it doesn't actually like cause a problem.
Even the venomous ones. There are also three species of bats that don't eat insects, they actually eat flowers, and some of the bats can [00:29:00] even eat things like fish or lizards or birds. Now, although they're great predators for things like our insects. There are actually not a lot of predators to bats.
Some of the main ones are going to be owls and hawks and snakes. Unfortunately, though, the real killer of bats is this weird white fungus that can grow on their nose. It's thought to be spread by humans, unfortunately, on their clothes and their shoes when they go into caves, especially when bats are hibernating.
Unfortunately it has killed about 90 percent of certain bat populations. And there are 12 bat species that are endangered at this point. So decontaminating your clothes before going into the area with bats, not going from one bat cave to another bat cave can really help stop the spread of those things.
Also, other things that they have done for us is they have helped improve medicine for centuries. They actually pollinate lots of plants that we use for medicinal purposes. [00:30:00] And scientists have also used their echolocation skills to help people who are blind learn how to better get around the world.
We know that bats are the only mammals in the world that can fly. Some other mammals can glide, like our flying squirrels, but bats are the only mammals that can actually fly. So if you think that bats are just like way too weird compared to other animals. Especially other mammals, they fly, they look weird.
What if I told you that they're actually a lot more like our domestic species than you think? So they are actually a lot like cats in a way. They groom themselves constantly and will groom their others that are around them because they want to keep very clean. They also purr. Super crazy, right? We think about echolocation and clicking and stuff, but they do actually purr as well.
Or how about baby bats? Baby bats are cute. So they're actually like dogs. We call them pups. [00:31:00] And most of them can only have one pup or twins, just like in humans. They can't have big litters like our dogs and our cats. And they don't feed their pups insects, like we think about with like other flying things like birds.
They actually still nurse on mom, just like most mammals do. And they can have little outie belly buttons. Also cute. All right, so let's talk about those reasons why people are afraid of them. Vampire bats is a big one. So vampire bats do feed on blood. This is true, but it's actually from wildlife like deer or cows or horses that they feed on.
When they feed, they cannot drain the animal. They actually can only just eat very minimal amounts of blood. And it was thought that they would like take the blood and then it would just like the cow would fall over and die. Like I said, they can't take that amount. Actually, when they do this [00:32:00] they take only small amounts, but it's the secondary like bacterial infections that they get.
Now they have this open wound on their hoof and then it's they're stepping in all the poop. And then that gets into the bloodstream. And then that's what usually will cause a problem. They get other infections because of those bites, not because of the bites themselves.
And they have also very rarely bitten a human because of just like they come out at night, they prefer to go in like areas that don't have a lot of hair, like the hoofs.
They tend to be like in outdoor areas where there's lots of cows and stuff because they like to hang out in rafters of barns. So it's not very often that they actually bite a human. The vampire bats actually came more from the myth of vampires, these like blood sucking humans, and then turned into calling them vampire bats.
It's not that vampires really came from the bat that sucked blood in the first place. [00:33:00] Now as far as rabies, yes, they can have rabies, just like almost most mammals can have rabies. And there are actually more reports of rabies in skunk and fox than in bats.
So yes, bats can have rabies, but like I said, the chances of them having it and passing it to us is less likely. It's not every single bat that you come across has rabies. I would love to actually have bats live on my property, but unfortunately we have too much shade on our property and they have to stay really warm during the day.
So if you have a sunny spot, you can put up a bat box. So that helps keep them away from your home because they have an alternative place to be able to sleep and they're not being disturbed. And then they're going to eat all the insects around your property. That's what I would love to have them for.
All right, all those cool things, just remember to thank a bat the next time that you eat chocolate, like during this upcoming Halloween. And hey, don't forget to share this podcast with people, we [00:34:00] love hearing those comments and questions, so please keep those coming. And we really appreciate all that great feedback.
Also, my mom requested, if you want to help support us, we do have a PayPal. That we will put a link to in the show notes. Now we also have a Vetsplanation subscription, where at least once a quarter, we're going to have pet parents on to be able to have a chat. You can ask us questions about topics that you're just dying to know about, or we can just talk about your amazing pets as well.
And then next week we're going to be talking to Dr. Z again. This time we're going to be talking about a common disease called Cushing's disease. So tune in next week so you can learn about what to watch for in your own pet. And as always, thank you so much for listening. Remember to keep your pets happy, health, and safe. We'll see you next time.
Thank you guys for listening this week. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or you just want to say hi, you can email me at Suggs, S U G G S @ [00:35:00] VetsplanationPodcast.com or visit the website at VetsplanationPodcast.com or find us on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok at Vetsplanation. Thank you all for listening and I'll see you back here next week.