Would have to be a very very tiny dog or a very strong chocolate for a dog to be done in by a piece of birthday cake.
Somewhere on the web there is a site for calculating the amount of what kind of chocolate as compared to the weight of the dog is dangerous....
Chabby once ate a pretty good amount of cheap chocolate candy....and at midnight the vet and I were punching away on our calculators determining the % or cocao and Chabby's weight and how much she might have eaten at most....
And she can't eat turkey at all....even a small couple of bites of lean white meat gives her the runs...
Best to be safe than sorry!
Mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie are pretty good treats.
Linda C

The WonderWeiner once ate an entire box full of fudge covered granola bars without so much as a burp. The vet told me that the amount of chocolate in milk chocolate was so miniscule as to not be much of a worry, but if he ate a bar of dark chocolate it would be a different story.

Turkey skin? Really? Even Elery's dog Pancho eats the turkey skin and everything makes him sick to his stomach. Except the turkey skin, apparently. Hmmmm...

Of course, I knew abou the grapes and raisins are just dried grapes so that stands to reason.

Still, Pancho will get his own plate with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, green bean casserole and probably some of those parmesan crusted sweet potatoes.

No dessert, he's on a diet. (grin)

Annie

I also heard chocolate is not dangerous to all dogs. Thankfully ours is one of them. She ate 2 cups white chocolate, 2 cups milk chocolate and 1 cup dark chocolate (at least). I was terrified when I came home and found the bags ripped open from off the cupboard. She didn't even get sick! Yep, she has some nasty habits that we really need to work on. Good to know about the turkey skin.

Hmm never heard about the skin thing my mom always gave our dogs turkey skin and whatever as she was cleaning the carcas...
My dog has eaten an ant bait house, and she has had hundreds of grapes probably, over her 8 years..the boys were always feeding them to her..until one day I came across something that said they weren't safe for dogs to eat.
Oooppss...
She's never had anything that caused her any discomfort..even the ant bait house.

I've also read that onions are bad for them. And another is sugarless gum. Not that you'd actually feed it to a dog..but we had a little beagle whose nose would find its way into any unattended coat pocket or purse. Anything that held an appealing scent was history. She was notorious for eating DD's flavored lip gloss.

I think some dogs just have cast iron stomachs. I had a dog-Great Pyrenees & G. Retriever mix-that ate everything as a puppy. She loved my young fruit trees & ate a cherry, 2 peach & a pear tree, & we're talking 4" trunks. Don't know how she could take down a tree so fast. DH says that cherry trees can be dangerous for horses, so you wouldn't think a dog could do well. Our dogs are on an underground fence & wear collars. She chewed up her companion dog's collar while they were in their pen at night. Batteries included. We didn't think immediately about what happened to the batteries for a day or more. Checked the pen thoroughly & no batteries. She at 2 more of the collars & chewed the batteries out. Never found the batteries, so she might have eaten them. She did develop an incurable cancer at 5 years, maybe her early diet did have some effect. I miss that dog terribly, she was the sweetest, best dog I've had.I didn't know about grapes, so it's good to know.

Yup: Turkey skin! Or large amounts of bacon or sausage... anything rich and fatty. It wasn't caused by turkey skin, but Jazmyn, our greyhound, who gets no people food and a prescription diet only, has been hospitalized for pancreatitis three times now. It's very painful... essentially, the body goes out of whack and starts digesting itself. It's bloody, ugly, messy and you can't make the pain go away for your dog. Avoid it!

Thanks for the info! My dog Boomer once ate a gigantic Hershey milk chocolate bar that my daughter had received as a present. She'd left it in a gift bag on the steps and he found it and promptly scarfed it down, wrapper and all. Never got sick. He also has eaten his share of turkey skin and hasn't gotten sick. But I will not feed him anymore, and I do my best to keep him away from chocolate. Before we knew grapes were poisonous (only the red ones, I think) he had his share of those as well. One Christmas about 4 years ago, we were in the midst of a remodel. Hence, we were living in the basement. I'd cooked a lb of breakfast sausage and put it where I thought it was out of reach while we opened presents. Sure enough, he got into it and ate it all. Never missed a beat. The things that do make him sick are dirty diapers (he's a disgusting beagle mix that will eat anything, the stinkier the better) and corn cobs. Thankfully, no more diapers here.

No chocolate or turkey skin stories but our Chow, Blackjack, once sniffed out the bowl of hard sauce on the table waiting for the plum pudding to be served. She ate the entire bowl! Don't know if she loved the butter, or the rum? (sigh) We called the vet immediately but he said she'd sleep it off & sure enough...she napped throughout the rest of our holiday celebration.

Blackjack also ate an entire box of our son's glow-in-the-dark crayons. We didn't know she'd eaten them until we started seeing these bright spots in the yard at night. An investigation confirmed our suspicsions...yep, she was leaving LOTS of glow-in-the-dark piles around everywhere! So, keep an eye on the kids crayons!!

/tricia

Sooz, what a sad story. Those owners must have felt so guilty - I know I would have. :(

White chocolate, at least, isn't really 'chocolate,' but still - with any chocolate I'd be cautious, as I'm sure you all are! I don't have dogs, but there are so many things I'm surprised they can't eat. DIdn't know about the turkey skins.

Ditto on the sugarless gum - the ingredient Xylitol is dangerous to them. That can be found in other things too, I believe, like mouthwash and toothpaste.

I'm kind of laughing, though, about some of the things your dogs have eaten! I know it's not really funny, but the crayon story was hilarious! REminds me of when I was watching my brother's dog who had just been to the vet and had a bright green bandage on his foot. When he came back in from outside the bandage was gone (and I was even watching him!) and before I knew it, there was a green bandage poop pile. It's amazing it didn't get obstructed. My sister's dog, however, liked to eat washcloths (twice) and had to have surgery. You just never know!

This slightly OT, but I once BBQ'd 8 whole chickens. We had a big BBQ pit/smoker at the time and when the grocery had chicken on sale, I decided to just do up a bunch of them at once and put them in the freezer. I basted them with a vinegar "mop", smoked, tended and babied them all afternoon.

We ate about 1 1/2 of them and the other beautifully done birds were on a platter on the table. We got up from the table and about 30 minutes later when I went back in there .... the platter was empty. I thought that my husband had already picked them up. Everything was spotless. Our 5 year old Bernese Mountain Dog, who normally was picture perfect, breed champion, obedience titles etc.... had eaten all 6 remaining chickens!!!! Bones, skin and all. There was NO trace that there had even been chickens on that table. In fact it was hard for me to believe that she had really done it!

I went back and forth all that evening between being worried and being so mad at her that I hoped that she felt some pain!! She was fine... never even had a quesy stomach!

Grace

Tricia, your dog must have been related to the WonderWeiner. I've mentioned here many times that he ate a whole box of crayons when he was a puppy and pooped different colors for a week, LOL.

Fortunately, he was too short to reach any counters, because he'd eat anything. The only thing that made him sick was orange juice, which he loved.

As for the lip gloss, Ashley used to dress him up and put lip gloss on him, LOL, poor long suffering beast. He didn't seem to mind, although it did offend him when she painted his toenails yellow that one time.

Poor Pancho, he's never eaten a bite of dog food in his life, he gets whatever Elery eats. I've even given him mashed rutabaga and he loves it, but he won't eat sushi. He's fat, but Elery says he'll die happy and well fed. Since the WonderWeiner always got people food until about the last year of his life when the vet said it was bad for him, I tend to agree. Less than a year after I started feeding him the commercial dog food, he got diagnosed with lymphoma. I promptly went back to feeding him organic vegetables, homemade whole wheat bread and grass fed beef. His last meal was a nicely rare grilled Porterhouse, cooked especially for him. Heck, we didn't even HAVE dog food in the U.S. until the 40s or there about.

Maybe that's why he never swiped food, he always got whatever we were eating anyway!

Annie

I had a German shepherd/boxer mix dog as a kid. She could and did eat anything. My first from-scratch cake was a devils food with a thick, rich chocolate frosting. We put it on the coffee table with plates etc., as we'd invited friends to come for cake and coffee. I was so proud of that cake. It never occurred to us that LuLu would bother it, she was very good about not taking food etc unless we gave it to her.

I walked out into the living room just in time to see her oh-so-casually saunter by the coffee table...and nibble off the cake with the side of her mouth as she passed. She must have been making passes for a while, because she'd managed to eat about 1/4 of the cake.

She used to pick all the low hanging pears from our tree, she'd circle the tree staring up until she found the ripest one before jumping up to grab it. She ate a lot of pears, they never seemed to bother her.

The only thing she ever ate that I recall making her sick was the time she got into the coffee can full of bacon fat we kept under the stove. It was a 10 pound can, and it was getting pretty full, I noticed as I was draining that morning's pan.

When I came home from school, there were these odd little pools of some light brownish-grey stuff everywhere and the house reeked of bacon. LuLu was nowhere to be found (she often hid when she knew she'd done something wrong). In the kitchen, the cabinet under the stove was open, and the coffee can only had a few inches of fat left in it. LuLu was eventually found, huddling in the corner of the yard looking pretty miserable...still retching once in a while.

To the day she died, some 15 years later, she wouldn't touch a piece of bacon. If you offered her one, she'd back away from you, whites of her eyes showing!

We had to buy a latch that operates like a car seat belt to keep one of our dogs from opening the refrigerator door and just helping himself to what ever was in there. He especially loved the small,three pounds or so, Smithfield Black Forest Ham and bagged spinach. Never could figure out his taste for spinach.

If you aren't using the turkey necks and organs, cut up the organs and mix a little in your dogs' food for a few days for a nutritious treat. The necks they can eat raw. If you're squeamish then don't do it. But a raw turkey neck is a Yummo treat to dogs. Just don't let them carry it around the house. Give it to them outside, supervised, and throw away anything they don't eat.

My 115 pound Lab ate an entire batch of magic brownies a friend of mine had unthinkingly left within her reach. I don't know whether the pot or the sugar made her hyper but that seemed to be the only effect.

I knew about all the others but not turkey skin. I have been giving it to my mini Dachshund for years and she has had no problems. I don't give her a lot. She also loves bacon and bacon fat mixed in with her dry food. Again no problem. She also eats grapes off the grape vines when I am not looking and every other vegetable including pulling carrots out of the garden. Compared to some of the other stuff she has found to eat (really gross) on our 2 1/2 acres up in the mountains, those things seem harmless.
Clare

The chocolate acts as a stimulate and can cause a much increased or irregular heart rhythm that can lead to death. The darker the chocolate the more adverse its effects.

Some of these are almost unbelievable--unless you're a dog owner, too, and then you know they're not. The glow-in-the-dark crayons are particularly cracking me up. They go so well with the entire lightbulb my girl ate when she was a puppy. Okay, not the entire bulb--she only ate the glass and the filament. She left the metal base, probably on the theory that it's rude not to leave something on your plate. You'd think that a dog who ate a lightbulb would be full of good ideas forever after, but no such luck. She also devoured a $1,200 dental appliance after it fell out of my mouth the first night I wore it to sleep. The fact that she's still alive fifteen years later proves I loved her enough not to kill her the next morning.

The German shepherd we had when I was a little girl ate several pounds of butter at one sitting and didn't die. But dogs get less able to tolerate foods that are bad for them as they grow older, and things that don't affect them at all on one occasion might make them very sick or kill them next time, so I hope everyone takes these warnings to heart. There are plenty of treats available that don't have any risks attached to them.

And then there was the alkie poodle I had...she would lap straight gin out of a glass if you weren't paying strict attention and drink the drips from a keg, spilled anything and sip on any alcholic drink left within her reach. I remember one party, a kegger large party where she drank the drips from the keg all night and we finally had to carry her inside and put her to bed.
Any other dog I ever knew would not touch any booze at all....but if she had been a person, we'd have been taking her to AA meetings!
Linda C

Oh Linda, you just reminded me of my first Rottie. He had a thing for Irish Cream. I couldn't place a glass down anywhere or that big tongue would be right in the glass. Dogs are so unique.

Lots of information to read on the subject!!

Here is a link that might be useful: Dangerous Foods to Avoid for Pets