In the past three weeks, three cases of dogs ingesting toxic marijuana leaves have been reported at local veterinarian clinics.
The first incident occurred on Sept. 24. Immediately after Montaran Laura Hansen returned home from work she found Ben, one of her two border collies, stumbling and unable to walk a straight line to greet her.
 Laura Hansen of Montara walks her dogs Maggie and Ben (foreground) who fell ill after finding and eating some discarded marijuana plants in the open space land near her home. |
She took Ben to Linda Mar Veterinary Hospital in Pacifica, where he was X-rayed and given fluids intravenously. The X-ray showed a bud of marijuana in the dog’s stomach and a technician noted it as the source of the poison, recommending that Hansen take Ben to a specialist in San Francisco. Hansen drove Ben to San Francisco Veterinary Specialist that night and doctors ran more diagnostics, including a urine test.
Meanwhile, Hansen returned to the location at the park where she’d walked Ben earlier that day and discovered three pot plants discarded beneath a pine tree near the path. She scooped them up and brought them to the vet for evaluation.
“I didn’t know it was marijuana,” Hansen said. “I had no idea. But he tested positive for marijuana.
“When I found out Ben was just stoned, it was kind of funny,” she said. “The vet up there said he sees three dogs a week that get into their owners’ stash.”
Araba Oglesby, an intern at San Francisco Veterinary Specialist, said she’s never treated a “marijuana dog” personally, but that they frequently find their way to the clinic.
“We get them more often in San Francisco than on the Peninsula,” Oglesby said. “We probably see about 10 to 15 cases in a year, more in the summer than the fall or winter.”
Oglesby said the majority of such cases come from the Mission District in San Francisco and that she’s only heard about a few dogs coming to the clinic from the Peninsula. She also speculated as to why a dog might sniff out and scarf down the toxic plant.
“I think it’s usually dogs that have a history of getting into things in general — usually Labs and golden retrievers or pit bulls —we call them ‘counter surfers,’” she said. “I’m sure there’s a lot more out there than what we see. Sometimes the symptoms are so slight.”
Oglesby said a dog would need to consume six grams per pound of its total body weight — “quite a bit” — to die from the poison in marijuana. But it doesn’t take much for a dog to get sick from eating pot plants, she said.
Vinny, a 15-month old Australian shepherd belonging to Montaran Trish McGrath, can probably attest to that.
Less than a week after the incident with Ben, on Sept. 30, McGrath showed up at Half Moon Bay Veterinary Hospital with Vinny, pupils dilated and struggling to maintain his balance.
“The first thing (Dr. Laurie McKinney) asked me when I brought him in was, ‘Has he gotten into some pot?’” McGrath said.
McKinney wasn’t aware of Ben’s encounter with the substance a week earlier but recognized the symptoms and had heard, perhaps coincidentally, about a local woman who took two of her dogs to the North Peninsula Veterinary Emergency Clinic in San Mateo the day before for consuming cannabis.
“I’ve known dogs that have gotten into pot-infused products — brownies,” McKinney said. “I’ve never known or heard of dogs going and ingesting actual plants growing, but apparently that’s what happened in this case.”
As fate would have it, Hansen and McGrath bumped into one another in the very same park where the incidents had occurred only a few days after McGrath’s dog had recovered. Hansen thought it strange that McGrath’s dog had gotten into marijuana because she’d already removed the plants she’d found. How did Vinny get into pot in the same spot, six days after Hansen had removed the plants? The two women wonder whether there is more marijuana in the area.
“It’s a mystery,” McGrath said.
To solve the elusive cannabis caper and put an end to illegal growing or harboring of marijuana plants in the park, not to mention save aggravation for the dogs and owners who wander there, San Mateo County Sheriff’s Lt. Marc Alcantara sent the Narcotics Task Force to sweep the area the first week of October.
“We found no gardens in the area,” Alcantara said. “We followed up with one of the reporting parties and went with them and checked the area where they usually walk their dogs but found nothing. At this point the investigation is suspended.”
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