Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot com where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, is chocolate poisonous to dogs? You may have heard people say that chocolate will kill dogs? Does that make sense? If I can eat chocolate, why can't my dog? It turns out that for dogs, a chemical and chocolate called theo bromine is the source of the problem. Theobromine is similar
to caffeine. It's toxic to dogs when it ingests between a hundred and a hundred and fifty milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Different types of chocolate contain different amounts of theobromine. It would take about twenty ounces of milk chocolate to kill a twenty pound dog, but only two ounces of Baker's chocolate or six ounce is of semisweet chocolate.
It's not that hard for a dog to get into something like an Easter basket full of chocolate eggs and chocolate bunnies and gobble up to a pound or two of chocolate in a single sitting. If the dog is small, that could be deadly. It turns out that chocolate poisoning is actually not as unusual as it sounds for a human being. Caffeine is toxic at levels of fifty milligrams per kilogram of body weight. That's the same as for
dogs with theobromine. Humans generally weigh a lot more than dogs, but small children can get into trouble with caffeine or chocolate if they consume too much of it. Infants are especially vulnerable because they don't eliminate caffeine from the bloodstream
nearly as quickly as adults do. Dogs have this strange ability to wolf down lots more food than a human does, and that makes a dog a lot more susceptible than chocolate poisoning than a human it be be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how staf Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Staff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes.