Is Chocolate Poisonous To Dogs?

Under the right conditions, chocolate can indeed be deadly for dogs. Tune in to learn more about the compound in chocolate that makes it dangerous for dogs (and how much is too much) in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
it's Christian Sager. I got a question for you. Will
chocolate really kill your dog? It turns out the answer
is yes. But how does this make sense? I mean,
I'm not a dog physicist, but most human beings can
eat chocolate, right, so why can't our dogs? It's a

(00:24):
good question. And when we talk about death by chocolate
for canines, what we're really talking about is a chemical
inside of chocolate called THEO bromine. It's like caffeine. This
becomes toxic to dogs at about a hundred to a
hundred and fifty milligrams per kilogram of body weight. And
I know that's the formula if you're going to try

(00:46):
to poison a dog, but please do not poison a dog.
That's not all different types of chocolate have different amounts
of THEO bromine, and a lot of it depends on
the type of chocolate the dog is eating and the
size of the dog. For instance, twenty ounces of milk
chocolate could kill a twenty pound dog, and only two

(01:07):
ounces of Baker's chocolate or six ounces of semi sweet
chocolate could do the same thing. Unfortunately, it is pretty
easy for dogs to get into stuff that they're not
supposed to get into. Trust me, I know this. I
have two pit bulls at home. They could get into
bars of chocolate on the ground, bars of chocolate on

(01:28):
the counter if they're tall enough, maybe even marzipan. As
weird as it sounds, chocolate poisoning is not all that unusual.
Caffeine is toxic to human jokes after about a hundred
and fifty milligrams per kilogram of body weight. And here's
the thing. Let's be honest, we're usually heavier than dogs.
Us human beings. We have a little bit more mass

(01:50):
than the average dogs, so our threshold for that toxicity
is a little bit higher. Small children, however, can get
into some trouble with caffeine and with BLT if they
consume too much of it at once. Infants especially can
have trouble with caffeine because they don't eliminate it from
their bloodstream as quickly as adults do. And there's another

(02:11):
thing when we're talking about dogs. Dogs can wolf down
so much food, so much faster than a human and
you don't even know where it's going. Sometimes it's like
there's a singularity inside that animal, and this means that
they approach that threshold of toxicity much more quickly, and
for this reason, dogs can be more susceptible to poisoning

(02:34):
by this chemical theobromine. So, to bring it all back around,
look the point of this episode, do not feed your
dog chopping. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube,
and for more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit has stuff works dot com