Meet Sally…

Sally is a 10-month-old chocolate brown Labrador.

One afternoon…

Sally had been playing in her yard and seemed completely normal when her owners came home. They fed her as usual but about 30 minutes later she started to shake a lot, collapsed and started to seizure. Her owners rushed her to the Mount Waverley AEC.

The diagnosis…

When she arrived at the AEC she was continually seizuring. She had an intravenous catheter placed and was given some medications to stop the seizures. her body temperature had been increased by the seizures so she was given a cool bath.

A blood sample was taken and she was found to be very dehydrated so she was also started on intravenous fluids.

The AEC vets suspected that she had ingested some sort of toxin. There were some snail pellets down in a separate part of her backyard yard but her owners didn’t think she could get to them. Sally was anaesthetised and had her stomach washed out under a general anaesthetic. A large amount of green snail bait was removed from her stomach. A whole lot more was removed from her intestine with an enema. Mmmm… Sally thought snail bait surely was tasty!

Sally was kept sedated for the rest of the night to prevent her from starting to seizure again while her body eliminated the snail bait she had already digested. Once the toxin was out of her system she was weaned off the medications.

The good news…

By the next evening, she had returned to normal. She had stopped tremors and was very bright and was allowed to go home.

Snail bait is formulated with cereal and is very attractive to dogs, especially those with good appetites. The best option is not to have it on your premises if you have a dog (occasionally it is eaten by cats)- they will sniff it out and chomp it up – and unfortunately, they don’t learn from their mistakes!