Does your dog’s food contain rat bait? (FDA diet alert)
At the moment I seem to be talking all about pet food. Only yesterday I was discussing the news of raw food potentially giving cats tuberculosis, and not too long ago I was discussing the potential link between grain free diets and heart disease in dogs!
Well today I want to talk about the recent FDA announcement that a large number of different dog foods have been found to contain really high levels of vitamin D.
Why is vitamin D poisonous?
What vitamin D does is to primarily increase the absorption of calcium and so maintain blood calcium levels. If we get really, really high levels of vitamin D, essentially an overdose, then we get really high calcium levels within the blood.
What happens next is that this calcium starts to be deposited in different organs within the body. So you get little clumps calcium crystals being deposited in all the different body organs. The really common and serious one is the kidneys.
Now the kidney’s are rubbish at healing themselves and at the same time they can be very sensitive to damage. Once a certain amount of kidney damage has taken place then that’s simply game over. It’s fatal.
This is exactly what happens when we give our rats a really high dose of Vitamin D. They effectively die because their kidneys fail after effectively being transformed into big blocks of calcium. Most rat baits are actually warfarin based which does nothing to calcium levels but instead causes uncontrolled bleeding. While that sounds bad, it is actually much more treatable than your dog ingesting a vitamin D based rat poison.
Don’t be mistaken by the fact that because vitamin D is becoming increasingly recommended as a supplement for humans this is a minor issue that is being overblown.
What dog diets are affected?
The FDA announcement states that the levels of vitamin D that have been found in the affected dog diets are around 70 times the recommended amount! That is a huge error and the implication could be deadly.
The problem seems to be that all of these affected dog food producers have bought their ingredients from one single manufacturer. So one single manufacturer has produced a batch of a certain ingredient(s) or even complete foods where a significant error has been made in the manufacturing process, and this has then been distributed or included in the dog diets sold by different brands. To make matters worse, the long list of known affected dog foods may not be complete and it’s certainly possible, the FDA say, that even more dog foods will be included in this recall as more information comes to light.
So the list of dog foods that have been recalled is too many for me to list here. Make sure you check out all the latest on the FDA website.
The signs of vitamin D poisoning in dogs
If you’ve got any concerns that your dog is showing any signs of illness because of vitamin D then it is vital you get them to your vet as soon as possible. So what are the signs of vitamin D poisoning? Well, they can be varied but may include:
- Vomiting
- Weakness + Depression
- Loss of appetite
- Increased drinking + urination
- Vomiting + diarrhea
- Constipation
- Seizures + muscle tremors
- Abdominal pain
- Excessive drooling
If you’re feeding your dog any of these affected diets you should definitely stop feeding them. This is not something that we want to mess around with. Once we get really high vitamin D levels, then actually treatment is incredibly challenging. Once calcium has started to be deposited in the kidneys, or elsewhere within the body, then there’s no way we can really reverse that. And so once a dog is past a certain point then death is pretty much inevitable.
To be on the safe side, if your dog is being fed any of these affected diets and they’re experiencing any illness then just take them to your veterinarian. Let them know what your dog had been eating, have them checked over, get some blood tests run and see what the problem is. If it is vitamin D poisoning then getting treatment early means there may be a chance that your dog will be able to fully recover.
Which diets can you trust?
That’s a great question and too big an answer to address today. Are pet food companies and vets complicit in causing the health of our dogs and cats to be compromised so as to generate more revenue from the treatment of sick pets and special “prescription” diets?
Are raw food or home-prepared diets proven to be healthier, risk-free alternatives?
At the risk of poking the hornet's nest I’ve got an article planned in the new year discussing exactly these issues!
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Originally published at ourpetshealth.com.