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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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