Preventing Water Toxicity in Dogs: Essential Tips for Safe Water Play

In this episode of Vetsplanation, join me as I dive into the dangerous world of water toxicity in dogs. From the exhilarating water play to the sudden onset of life-threatening symptoms, we'll uncover the hidden dangers lurking beneath the surface. But what happens when a dog named Noodle takes one too many sips? Stay tuned to find out...

What You’ll Learn:

• Decipher the gravity of water toxicity in dogs, possibly changing your perception of their water intake.

• Build your knowledge on recognizing early signs of water toxicity, providing quick intervention which is often crucial.

• Discover triggers of water toxicity, that might be hiding in plain sight during water-filled fun activities.

• Access insights on immediate treatment options, prepping you to respond efficiently during emergencies.

• Consume information about halting water toxicity before it starts, advocating for a well-guarded health regimen for your pet.

Ideas Worth Sharing:

• "Drinking too much water can actually be harmful and even life threatening to our four legged friends." - Tyler Sugerman

• "Be diligent in monitoring your dog's intake of water during water based activities." - Tyler Sugerman

Read The Transcript:

Tyler: [00:00:00] Welcome to Vetsplanation. I'm your veterinary host, Dr. Sugarman, and I'm going to teach you about veterinary medicine. In this podcast, we dive deeper into the understanding of what our pets are going through and break down the 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. So your veterinarian may have different treatment options or different opinions.

This information I provide here is just to help pet parents to have a better understanding for their pets. If you like our podcast, please consider sharing this. Podcasts with at least one friend or someone else who has pet. Now let's jump into this week's episode.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Vetsplanation. So this is the podcast where we make very complex veterinary topics easier to understand. [00:01:00] I'm your host, Dr. Sugerman, and today we're going to be diving into an important issue that every dog owner should be aware of. That is water toxicity.

Yes, you heard me right. Drinking too much water can actually be harmful and even life threatening to our four legged friends. So let's get right into it and learn how to keep our dogs safe and healthy.

Let's start by discussing what water toxicity is and how it affects our dogs. Water toxicity, it's also known as water intoxication or also hyponatremia. It's a life threatening condition that affects dogs when they ingest a large amount of water in a short period of time. So this excess water, it dilutes the dog's electrolytes, and I'll talk a little bit about that more later, but the electrolytes that we normally think of are going to be things like sodium, potassium, chloride, and there are many others.

Water toxicity particularly affects sodium though. It disrupts the balance between [00:02:00] water and electrolytes in the body. So as a result, the cells in the dog's body can begin to swell, causing potential organ damage, and even in severe cases, leading to brain swelling and seizures and death.

So we're going to talk real quick about what sodium is to help explain how water toxicity happens. So in normal everyday life, the kidneys regulate how much water is going to be kept in the body and how much water it's going to get rid of as waste, aka urination or pee.

Normally if sodium becomes too high, signals are sent to the brain that tell them that they are thirsty. Same thing happens to us when we eat a ton of salt, think about eating a ton of chips, right? You become really thirsty. Same thing happens with them. So that tells the body to keep more water in. To help dilute out or bring down the sodium back down to normal.

Now, the opposite happens when sodium levels are too low, so this is called hyponatremia. [00:03:00] Hypo means low, and natremia means sodium. So hyponatremia. If there is too little sodium in the bloodstream, it tells the brain that the pet is not thirsty and to get rid of large amounts of water through the kidneys.

By getting rid of the water, it's helping bring down the sodium back down to a normal level. Just to Sum that up a little bit, too much sodium in the body makes the body... Thirsty, or makes the dog thirsty, and too much water makes the dog urinate more. So all this is done to help keep that sodium at the right levels in the body.

After ingesting too much water, there will be a very rapid increase in very dilute urine. The urine will basically look clear like water. If the body cannot get that sodium level back down to normal quickly, then this is when all these bad things happen.

We'll talk about the clinical signs later, but the signs can range from things, like I said, is very mild things like an upset stomach to very [00:04:00] life threatening things like brain swelling. Now let's talk about what kinds of activities can lead to water toxicity in dogs.

Water toxicity can happen in various situations, but most commonly it's seen during water based activities, such as things like swimming, water games , playing with fetching toys from the water, or even drinking excessive amounts of water from the hose or the sprinklers. Dogs that are really overzealous about water based play may inadvertently start swallowing large amounts of water, putting them at risk for this water toxicity.

This isn't usually something that just occurs just from the pet drinking water out of a dog bowl. Now that we've talked about the causes of water toxicity, what should pet parents watch out for? It is very crucial for dog parents to be aware of early signs of water toxicity, which can be things like vomiting, changes in their behavior, excessive salivation, meaning they're just drooling [00:05:00] constantly, bloating, so their belly looks very bloated, or dilated pupils, and that means that the black part of their eyes looks like it's really large. As this condition progresses, the dog's going to have more concerning clinical signs, they may become really lethargic, meaning that they're just really weak or don't really want to move.

They can be uncoordinated. We also call that ataxia, but they'll be very wobbly. They can even have collapse. Some of the even more severe symptoms are going to be things like seizures, coma or respiratory distress. They have a really difficult time breathing and these can occur in the advanced cases.

If you notice any of these signs, it is essential to go seek veterinary attention immediately so we can help the pet. What will be done at the vet hospital if we are suspecting water toxicity? It depends on how affected the patient is. For really mildly affected patients, [00:06:00] then it's usually just restricting water and then monitoring their electrolytes.

So we're taking blood work on them to make sure that their sodium is normal. And that could be all that's needed. We also monitor for any worsening of neurological signs as well, maybe we only see very mild signs at first, but then it progresses to these more severe signs.

If the patient is a little more serious than that, then it will probably mean putting in an IV catheter. So putting a catheter directly into the veins. So we can start them on IV fluids, usually ones that are going to contain a sodium level that's a little more than where their sodium is right now. We want to do this very slowly to bring their sodium back up so we can try to prevent any further neurological problems. Because giving sodium too fast can also cause brain swelling.

In very critical patients we do have to give that sodium faster, but we're also giving medications to help draw fluid off of the brain. So we [00:07:00] hopefully don't get that brain swelling. Sometimes we have no other choice but to do that, there can be long lasting effects that won't become evidence sometimes for about 3 to 4 days after treatment.

Real quick, I'm going to talk about a question that I've gotten a couple of times. People have asked before. If they have this water toxicity and their sodium is just low, and really all we need is electrolytes. Why can't we just give some sort of over the counter electrolytes, right?

Some of the waters that have electrolytes in it, or the Gatorades that have a lot of electrolytes in it, problem with that is that we don't know how quickly they're going to be absorbing that. That's one problem. So if they absorb all of that sodium too fast, then we're going to have worsening of neurological science.

The other reason is because that's not just electrolytes that you're giving, right? There's actually a lot of water and stuff in there too. To give a dog more water into its stomach, that's going to be diluted out in all the water that's already there in the first place. [00:08:00] It's really not going to make a huge difference. If they still have a bunch of water that's in there. Really it's better for them to come to the clinic right away.

Let's talk about prevention. What can dog parents do to prevent water toxicity in their pets? Some of the preventative measures that our pet parents can take are one, monitoring your dog's intake of water during these water-based plays, and ensure they don't consume excessive amounts of water.

The 2nd thing can be teaching your dog to leave it. The leave it command that kind of discourages them from drinking from water or sprinklers or puddles. So if they're going over to sprinklers and just like chomping at those sprinklers constantly, you can teach them, leave it or bring them into the house just so we can stop that cycle of them wanting to drink more water.

The 3rd thing is you can schedule regular breaks from your water play to make sure that the dog has time to eliminate some of that excess water that they've been getting.

The 4th thing supervising pets [00:09:00] during water activity to make sure that they don't like submerge their head too frequently or for too long. When they do that, they're gulping a lot of water down and maybe they only did it two or three times, but they've gulped so much water down that it can also lead to water toxicity.

And then finally, our 5th thing for pet owners is to be diligent for especially the smaller dogs and those with really high energy levels as they are more prone to water toxicity. They will not stop right. They will just keep going.

I'm going to talk about a case that I had real quick. The case of water toxicity that I had about a week ago. Now that it's getting warmer, people are watering more. They're out at the lake more and doing more dock jumping and stuff. There's definitely going to be an increase during the summertime here, but my case was a doodle who was chomping at the water when mom was just like watering the plants.

We're going to call this doodle noodle. Mom said that Noodle had done this many times before, they go outside. It's routine that Mom waters the plants and [00:10:00] Noodle likes to go and chomp at the water. But this time, Mom had been watering for longer than what she normally did.

She had been watering for about an hour versus the 30 minutes that she would normally water for. And Noodle, the whole time was chomping at the water. In her situation, Noodle collapsed and Mom was super on top of it, rushed Noodle right in. When Noodle got to the clinic, she actually looked completely normal.

It was really interesting. I examined her, she was very bright and alert and responsive. My technician went to go take Noodle back out to Mom and even Mom commented, Oh, look, she looks like she's back to normal again. Then things got really weird. She started walking on her tiptoes on her back feet, and then high stepping with her back feet as if she was in a marching band.

My technician brought her back to me to see her weird behavior, and I saw it for about five seconds, and then it just stopped. Noodle seemed back to normal again. We watched her for a [00:11:00] little bit, and I had my technician get a little bit more of a history from mom, and I found out that she had been chomping and playing at water for about an hour.

Then I started worrying about water toxicity. When we got blood work on her, it showed some very key things. All of her electrolytes, her sodium, potassium, and her chloride were low.

Plus, she had a really low urine specific gravity. What that means is that her urine looked pretty much just like water. It was very clear. Luckily, mom was able to hospitalize noodle so that we were able to slowly bring up her electrolytes back to normal, we also did notice while she was in the hospital that she just peed enormous amounts of water just uncontrollably because that's what they do.

When we hospitalized her, we put her on her IV fluid so that we put her on a sodium where it's close to the sodium that she had in her body, but just a little bit higher than that. And then we slowly started to bring her sodium backup.

This has to be a slow process because otherwise it can cause brain [00:12:00] damage. We're rechecking her electrolytes very frequently throughout the night so that we can make sure that noodle did okay. And that those electrolytes were not being increased too quickly and causing brain swelling.

Luckily, noodle did great. She was able to return home back to mom with no complications or long lasting effects. It is one of the best things to, be able to fix a pet and send them home to live a nice, happy life. I will say, though, that there are some circumstances with some of those very critical ones, like we were talking about before, when we're giving these sodium medications and trying to bring their sodium back up to normal, and we have to do it really quickly. This can cause long lasting effects. We may not see it right afterwards, but it can become evident about three to five days after that treatment. So they may seem normal going home, and in three to five days, they start having some other neurological signs.

So like I said, Noodle did great. We're super happy. We hope that this is the outcome that [00:13:00] we have for all of our water toxicities. It's not a very common thing. I'll say that I've probably only had four of them in my veterinary career so far, but it's still something we should be well aware of.

So I hope this information helped our listeners to make informed decisions and have a better understanding of water toxicity in our pets. Remember, always keep an eye on your dog during water based activities and don't hesitate to consult your veterinarian if you do have concerns.

So we're going to do our animal fact real quick. I picked another water topic for today. Today we're going to talk about something called the stonefish. Now when you think about venomous animals, I'm sure your mind goes to things like venomous spiders or snakes. But did you know that there's a fish about 40 centimeters long that looks like a rock that's the most venomous fish in the ocean?

These fish are camouflaged to look like rocks or coral and sit in like flat reefs and shallow lagoons. They can even be found in tide pools during really low tide. What [00:14:00] seems like a red or orange rock actually has about 12 to 14 needle sharp dorsal spines. That means that there's these like spines on its back.

Each spine has a venomous sack at the bottom of it that injects extremely toxic venom into anyone or anything that steps on it. It's a very painful sting, but don't worry, there is an antidote for it. You just have to get to the hospital if you do come across one of these unsuspecting rocks.

All right, that is it for today's episode of Vetsplanation. Don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast with a fellow pet enthusiast. Join us next time as we continue to make complex veterinary topics easier to understand. I'm Dr. Sugerman and this has been another episode of Vetsplanation.

Stay safe, and keep your pets hydrated, but not too hydrated. Thank you, everybody.

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 at Vetsplanationpodcast. [00:15:00] 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.