This is Plantain Lily. Obviously we call her
Lily. Lily was given to me as a birthday present in 1998, and on the
same day I got her, I damn near accidentally killed her. And this is the
gripping story about why I hate slug poisons that contain metaldehyde (which
includes the vast majority of slug baits).
And let me state from the
beginning, I do not know who gave her the beer. I do not condone
giving beer to dogs less than 3 years old.
On her first day with us, her first
day with me as her guardian and protector, I had to go to a friend's
nursery so I took her along to show her off. And since I don't use
slug bait, it didn't occur to me that this awful stuff would be scattered
throughout the hostas. Until I looked down and saw her eating something.
"What's that blue stuff?" I asked. "Uh, slug bait." came the reply.
And off we went, flying down the road to the nearest vet, driving 60 miles
an hour through suburban Baltimore, running red lights and terrifying
pedestrians.
At the vet's office, they gave her
something that made her puke her guts out. Everything came up bright
blue and you could see the little pieces of bait pellets that she had eaten.
They called Poison Control and the word came back that Lily had consumed a
lethal dose, but the fact that we got it out so fast was encouraging and she
might live. At least that made me feel a lot better about having run
down three innocent children on the way to the vet. Her first night as
my dog was spent at the vet's, hooked up to intravenous anti-convulsives.
The next day, the vet told us that
it looked like she would be alright, that if she was going to die it usually
happened within 24 hours, but that sometimes dogs appeared to recover but
died 2 or 3 days later. That was sort of encouraging.
Well, happily Lily lived with no
ill effects. For a while we wondered if her ears were ever going to
stop growing, and we thought about naming her Mule Ears, but eventually she
caught up with them.
Since I posted
this page I've had a couple of people opine that I have
overstated the danger. Apparently, some manufacturers now put
Bitterex in their product to make the pellets taste bad to
mammals. That's a good thing, but unfortunately, I haven't found
slug bait for sale in our area that lists Bitterex on the label.
Click here
to see what the National Pesticide
Information Center has to say.
Based on
information supplied by our friend Bill Myer (see
article here), we are informed that supposedly "safe" slug
baits, containing iron phosphate, such as Sluggo and Safers,
might be even more dangerous to dogs, children and other
wildlife than traditional metaldehyde baits.
These chemicals
can be used safely, by placing them where only slugs can reach
them, but that involves some thought. Spreading the
pellets through the garden by the handful is not the answer.
