Did you know that you shouldn’t feed your dogs avocado? This was news to me, because while I’ve always known that avocado is a no-no for parrots, I had no idea it could also be toxic to dogs. The ASPCA has a news bulletin out reminding people not to feed avocado to their pets, and it mentions that the troublesome ingredient is called “persin”. I tried to do a bit of research on the subject, (which is difficult, as the search engines keep insisting I must be wanting to search on the topic of “persian”), and found out that persin can cause myocardial necrosis—that’s pretty scary. Birds and rodents seem most sensitive to it, but the Merck manual says there are two known cases of dogs developing myocardial damage after eating avocado.
So, add avocado to your list of “weird things your pets shouldn’t eat”, along with raisins/grapes and macadamia nuts (dogs only). You’d think any species which routinely eats its own poop would be able to eat anything, but I guess you’d be wrong. Poop good, avocado bad… what a messed up universe our pets live in.
