Act Now! How to Respond to Strychnine Poisoning in Your Beloved Pet
Picture this: a seemingly ordinary day turns into a heart-pounding race against time as a mysterious poison threatens the lives of beloved pets. In this episode of Vetsplanation, Dr. Sugerman discusses the dangers of strychnine poisoning in pets, highlighting the signs and symptoms to watch out for.
What You’ll Learn:
Discover the unseen perils of strychnine poisoning in pets that can lurk in everyday environments.
Learn why prompt action is a game-changer in the face of a strychnine toxicity crisis within your furry friends.
Uncover the daunting hurdles veterinarians face while diagnosing strychnine poisoning and the crucial role of a comprehensive case history.
Dive into the depth of poison management protocols, including intensive medical care and supportive therapy.
Understand the unsettling risks associated with unsupervised outdoor activities of pets and how to better protect them.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
"Prevention is key. Take the steps to protect your furry friends from strychnine poisoning and ensure their safety." - Tyler Sugerman
"Don't hesitate to reach out for help if you suspect your pet has been exposed to strychnine. Acting quickly can make all the difference." - 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
Read The Transcript:
Tyler: [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 to Vetsplanation, the podcast where we break down complex veterinary [00:01:00] concepts and make them understandable for everybody. I'm your host, Dr. Sugerman, and today we're going to be discussing a really serious topic called strychnine poisoning.
This happens in a lot of pets. So I think it's really important, especially now as we're going into summer, that we're going to see a lot more of these as I've already seen a couple of them in the last couple of weeks. So strychnine is a highly toxic substance. It's found in certain plants, including the plant called strychnos nux-vomica tree, which I think is really interesting because vomica is in the name to assume vomit, right?
But they don't usually vomit with this. Just an interesting fact. Unfortunately, it's also often used as a pesticide for rodents and other types of pests. You'll most commonly find this for things like gopher bait, rat bait, and they'll put it out for coyotes even as well. Usually this toxin is, or this poison is put underneath the ground so that the gophers and moles and stuff will be able to get to it that way, but I've definitely seen lots of [00:02:00] people put it above ground.
I've seen it as like a stick form as well, but it can be used in a lot of different ways. This toxicity, it can affect all pets and wildlife. This includes things like birds or dogs, cats any domestic animals that are outdoors. It can affect pretty much anything, rabbits, lots of different types of animals.
So interestingly enough, it does take more for a cat to ingest than it does for a dog to ingest to cause a toxicity. But the interesting thing is that with cats, like they're much smaller, right? So maybe they only need a couple of granules of it. Maybe we'll say 10 granules of it versus dogs that will end up needing only that same size, would only need about five granules of it to cause a toxicity.
Usually these toxins, you'll find them as pellets is the most common form. They're typically going to be colored. So usually red or green are the most common colors for them. As a veterinarian, I've seen too many cases [00:03:00] of strychnine poisoning that can occur quite suddenly.
It's really important to understand what the signs are and the symptoms of strychnine poisoning, that way we can get your pet treated as soon as possible, which can be life saving for them. Let's talk about some of the symptoms of strychnine poisoning in pets first. Some of these symptoms can actually start to appear within even 15 minutes of ingesting the toxin.
It can be up to two hours after ingesting the toxin as well, but that usually depends on whether the pet has a full stomach or not, if their stomach is really full, it's going to take longer for them to digest and it's going to take longer for those symptoms to occur. Ideally if your pet had eaten dinner, went outside, you saw it eat strychnine poisoning.
That's like the best situation we could have because hopefully we can get them into the hospital before they start to see those symptoms. But, if they didn't, if they're just outside, you didn't know this could happen within 15 minutes of eating it. [00:04:00] Initially, most of the pets are going to seem really restless, very agitated, very anxious, and could show some muscle stiffness.
This is really difficult because lots of things can cause agitation, anxiousness, muscle stiffness. We just had the 4th of July and think about all the pets who were really anxious because of the fireworks. If that's the case, then we may assume that this is because of fireworks and not because of getting into something like strychnine.
You also may start to see them like drooling quite profusely. They're just like constantly drooling from it. They may start to experience muscle spasms or seizures or may even have difficulty breathing. A lot of times these pets they're just like very rigid in the way that they stand. The muscle stiffness can also kind of distort the pet's face.
It almost makes them look like they're grimacing. It's a very nauseous look to them. Their lips are really pulled back and [00:05:00] they're like, part of their teeth will be showing and they just look like they're. They're just super nauseous. One of our big clues is that when they start to have seizures, the seizures are pretty continuous.
So it's not like our regular seizure patients. A lot of seizure patients will have one, maybe two seizures. They go back to being normal and they're fine after that. These seizures will occur over and over again. And the pet is not normal between those seizures or after those seizures. Then as this toxin progresses, the animal may start to have like really bad muscle rigidity and their limbs become really stiff.
So usually they'll have their limbs, they'll have their arms like very outstretched. Sorry. They'll have their arms very outstretched. And that's because of the fact that the way that our muscles work, it's easier for our limbs to become stretched out than it is for them to become flexed.
They may also have a really arched back and appear to be like in really severe pain, like their belly [00:06:00] will be very painful. This is really similar to something we call a saw horse stance. If you think of a saw horse, like people cut wood and stuff on those saw horses that they have legs just out like this that's the stance that they appear to look like.
Without treatment, these muscle spasms can lead to really to them becoming really hyperthermia. It just really high temperatures and eventually can lead to cardiac arrest, unfortunately, which is fatal. We want to make sure we can see these signs beforehand. If we do, we get them into the clinic as soon as possible.
Let's talk about what you should do if you do suspect that your pet has been exposed to strychnine or you see any of these clinical signs. So if you know, or even suspect that they've ingested strictening, you should definitely contact the vet immediately, either your regular veterinarian or an emergency hospital.
Most of the time, these pets are going to need to be hospitalized, so I do recommend going to an [00:07:00] emergency hospital if you can. A really quick response is critical. Like I said, if your pet had just eaten food and then ate the strychnine, we have a much better chance of getting as much of that out as possible.
We can try to make them vomit if they're not showing any of those clinical signs yet.
A really quick response is critical. And your veterinarian will need to know what your pet was exposed to. So if you know what it was, grab a picture of the bag or if you have the receipt for it, grab the receipt. We need to know like exactly which one. And unfortunately, a lot of companies will make this and they make other similar products.
So you may say let's say it was, for instance, Tomcat. I don't even know if they make strychnine, but let's say it was Tomcat. Tomcat makes a ton of different types of them. And so we're going to need to know exactly which one it is. So we know how to treat them correctly.
And then we also need to know like what kind of symptoms you've seen at home already. If you've already started to see them become really rigid or you saw them drooling previously, like we're going to need to know that to know [00:08:00] whether we can make the pet vomit or not. They said ideally they haven't shown any clinical signs and ideally we're able to make them vomit if that's the case.
If you don't know what it is, you can always call poison control as well. There's two different poison controls. One is called ASPCA poison control. The second one is called Pet Poison Helpline. Both of them will help to just try to determine whether this could be strychnine poisoning or not, because there's lots of other things that can cause these symptoms as well.
That's one of the difficult things it could be lots of other things. So we need to know is this possibly strychnine?
Let's talk about, like, how strychnine poisoning is diagnosed. Unfortunately, there is no test that we can perform that will tell us whether this was a toxin or not. There's no test that I can run very quickly in the hospital to be able to tell me that. You can send out testing for certain things usually they like the stomach contents to be able to be sent out for strychnine poisoning.
But the problem is that it's not a quick test, it's something you have to send out [00:09:00] to a lab, which comes back in three days or five days or a week, and by then we would have already needed to start treating for all of this. So there's no quick test that I can do to say, yes, this is strict poisoning.
A lot of this is just based off of the history that you as the pet parent gives us. If you know that you put strychnine out, you put some sort of rodenticide or rodent killer out. That's the best clue that we're going to have that this is a toxin. The other thing we have to go off of is just the clinical signs.
Like I said, if we see a pet that's just like having seizures over and over and over again, I'm going to be much more suspicious of it being a toxin than I am going to be of it being true seizures. Again, that could be wrong. It could be that they do have true seizures. So really, we just have to try to treat their symptoms the best that we can and hope that this is a toxin and they get over it.
If the pet does vomit, though, I would look through all of the vomit. Sometimes you can see pellets. Like I said, they're usually a reddish color or a greenish color.[00:10:00] Hopefully you can see some of those to be able to tell that this was strychnine or not.
All right, let's talk about how a strychnine toxicity treated. Treatment for strychnine toxicity. It usually, like I said, involves hospitalization. They'll need intravenous antiseizure medications, meaning we have to give medications to stop seizures right directly into the vein. They'll need intravenous muscle relaxants, again, something to help relax all of their muscles that goes directly into the vein.
They may need an oxygen therapy. We may need to do supportive care to help try cooling them down. This is quite a lot that they have to go through. Typically this could be that depending on how much they got into and how severe the symptoms, it could be that they just need to be monitored overnight, or it could be that they're hospitalized for several days.
Again, this just depends on how severe those clinical signs that we're seeing. This can get really bad to the point where it even causes kidney problems, like kidney failure, or It can [00:11:00] cause something called rhabdomyolysis, which is where they have a breakdown of all of their muscle. So this can become very severe.
In those cases, they typically will need to be hospitalized for several days. But typically your veterinarian is going to work with you to create some sort of individualized treatment plan, so we can just make sure we get the best outcome possible for that pet.
It depends again how severe they are. It may be so severe that they unfortunately have to talk about putting them to sleep. But we're not going to know that until we see how severe these things get. This is not a toxicity that can be treated at home though. I want to make sure that that's very clear.
So there's no over the counter medication that you can give to treat it. And also by the time the poison is absorbed in the stomach. Your pet is already showing clinical signs. So even if I was to give you medications to help stop the muscle rigidity, to try to help relax those muscles, your pet's probably not going to be able to take that pill because it's, they just can't even like [00:12:00] swallow anything at that moment.
And they're having seizures over and over again, and it would take too long to absorb. That stomach is going to take a while to be able to digest those things because their whole body is just in fight or flight right now. Really, it's not a good at home treatment, unfortunately. Therefore it is highly recommended that you take your pet to the vet immediately. If you see that they've gotten to that, at the very least, if they can get them to vomit and get the most of it up, that would be fantastic.
Lastly, we're going to talk about prevention because prevention is key. Some of the steps that you can take to try to help prevent your pet from getting exposed to strychnine.
If you think that you have a rodent problem, use some sort of alternative forms of pest control that do not involve strychnine laced baits or pellets. You can ensure that your pet has limited access to those areas by having some of those little those black or green boxes to where the rodent has to go into it in order to be able to get it out.
Even then, those are not foolproof. If a rodent goes [00:13:00] in, grabs pieces of it, and then drags it out, and then your pet gets it, there's still a possibility that they're going to get exposed to strychnine. Trying to limit their access to public areas or other people's yards where strychnine may be put out because they don't think that their pets are going to be getting into it, or maybe they don't have any pets to get into it. And then always supervising your pets outdoors, particularly in areas where you're unsure if they could come into contact with what they call stray baits.
People will put them out sometimes like specifically to limit strays in their yard or specifically because they don't like pets in their yard. We want to make sure that we're really supervising them everywhere that they go having them just go outside and an unfenced area can be really problematic for lots of different things, but the strychnine is definitely one of those problems.
If you aren't sure if your pet could have gotten into strychnine, or if they got a toxic enough dose, like I said, you can always call Poison Control. If you're going to do that, I highly, [00:14:00] highly recommend that you go to the vet hospital on your way, call one of the Poison Controls, so that way by the time they get there, hopefully they could have told you.
Maybe it's not enough of a poison to cause a problem and that's great. All you have to do is turn around then, but if not, if you can get there and we can make that pet vomit before it starts showing clinical signs, that would be ideal. If you wait, call Poison Control, they tell you to come down and the pet starts having problems, the less likely the chances are that we're going to be able to make them vomit, and more likely that they're going to have to be hospitalized.
As I said, there are two different Pet Poison Control companies. They do charge a fee for their services, but if you have certain pet insurances the fee is waived, or sometimes even the pet insurances will reimburse you for that fee. If you have pet insurance, tell them, because sometimes they'll do that, or you can also just contact your pet insurance company and see if they do reimburse you for it.
So those two companies, like I said, ASPCA Poison Control [00:15:00] and the Pet Poison Helpline. The Pet Poison Helpline number is 855-764-7661.
And the ASPCA is 888-426-4435. Like I said, you can call either one of those. It doesn't matter which one as just as long as you call them, they'll usually give you a case number that you're going to need to give to us. All right, so that is all for this episode of Vetsplanation.
So I was actually going to talk about my fun animal fact is just something super interesting that I found out. We had gone on vacation this last week, which is why I wasn't here, but we went on this tour at Disneyland or Disney world, sorry. If you ever go, I would highly suggest going on this.
The ride was called living with the land ride experience and it was just super interesting how they do a lot of different growing of plants and stuff. They talk about how farming can be a really big problem [00:16:00] because like we use a lot of land and a lot of soil and there's not like a lot of like recycling of those things.
So it was talking about like different ways that they do farming and stuff. And one of those really cool ways was through something called aquaculture. So essentially they had water that ran from like the top of the plants down through each one of the plants on like a slope. And then it went into this water with the fish so those fish were able to receive nutrients from the land. And then that water is recycled back up to the plants so that the nutrients from the fish would go back into the plants.
I just thought it was a really cool way that they like were able to put both our farming techniques from fish, which we have a lot of farmed fish and our farming techniques from the land into use and how it could definitely decrease a lot of those problems. You should check it out, even if you just look at what they have online about it. It was super interesting and they had like crazy plants in there. [00:17:00] There was this giant winter melon that they grew, but it was very cool. Unfortunately, I wish I was able to do it here, but we're in Washington and I have a very shady area with a lot of clouds.
So there's not a lot of things that I'm able to actually grow here unfortunately. It's very cool just to be able to listen to it. All right, guys. So that is all for this episode of Vetsplanation. I hope you now have a better understanding of the dangers of strychnine poisoning in pets and what you should do when your pet is exposed and just make sure that, a quick response is truly going to make all the difference.
So thank you for joining us. Keep your pets safe and we'll see you next time. Thanks.
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 @ Vetsplanationpodcast.com or visit the website at Vetsplanationpodcast.com or find us on [00:18:00] Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok at Vetsplanation. Thank you all for listening and I'll see you back here next week.