We continue to cover the various situations making pet owners locate a dog emergency hospital for professional treatment. A common situation we face as an emergency veterinarian center is helping patients expel a foreign body or harmful substance from their system.
Owners of cats and dogs might find themselves locking away household cleaning materials or picking up anything they left behind to keep their pets from eating harmful foods.
Some pet owners think that the best thing to do if their pet ingested something harmful is to induce vomiting, but can this be dangerous? Should you do it without professional help? How to induce vomiting at home? Let’s review this subject.
When Should I Go to An Dog Emergency Hospital?
If your pet has eaten, swallowed, or drunk anything harmful to them, you should look for emergency veterinarian services instead of looking for ways to induce vomiting at home.
As a general rule of thumb, pet owners should not induce vomiting at home. You should keep an eye out for over-the-counter medications lying around, gardening products, or some foods that could be harmful to pets.
You might want to lock away some household products like cleaning bleaches, detergents, or paints. Keep medications like ibuprofen, antihistamines, or heart medications, should be placed out of your pet’s reach. Some foods are also toxic to animals, including chocolate, grapes, and even some sweeteners like xylitol that you can find in peanut butter.
Pets may require treatment at a small animal and dog emergency hospital because once the toxins enter the bloodstream, they get distributed to all their system and begin causing health complications. The idea is that timely interventions can help eliminate all toxins from your pet’s organism and save its life.
How Professionals Vomiting at a Dog Animal Hospital
We will say it here and repeat it throughout this blog post: if you fear your pet ingested something harmful, you should take them to the emergency services.
An emergency veterinarian may induce vomiting to help your pet, but we do not recommend pet owners do this at home. Your pet may be experiencing a poisoning episode, and you may require as much professional help as you can in such an emergency.
Personnel in an emergency veterinarian clinic will take your pet and administer vomit-inducing medication.
You may hear the names apomorphine hydrochloride or xylazine depending on the pet’s species, and the idea is that your pet expels the contents in its stomach.
A word of caution to all our readers: vomiting will only clear around 40% to 60% of the contents in your pet’s stomach.
Your emergency veterinarian may recommend your pet undergoes additional testing or treatments while the rest of the team checks what got vomited. The team may prescribe additional medication to help your pet fully recover from their emergency, and other screenings like x-rays or blood tests could be the only way to determine that all is clear for you to return home with your pet.
Be prepared to spend a little more time in the emergency veterinary clinic as your pet recovers.
How to Induce Vomiting at Home?
Whether you can or should are two different matters.
Inducing vomiting is a last resort whenever you are home. There is much misinformation online about what you can use to induce vomiting, and many of those DIY home remedies can have negative consequences for your pet.
Remember that even if your pet does vomit, the emergency may not be over. Always take your pet to an emergency veterinarian.
How to Make a Dog Throw Up?
If your dog ate something they should not have, and you feel like the only way to deal with this is to induce vomiting, then we should do our part in letting you know how to do it well. Use a 3% Hydrogen Peroxide solution, and administer it orally.
Generally, you should give your pet 1 tablespoon for every 5 to 10 pounds of your dog’s body weight. You can expect your dog to start vomiting within the next 15 minutes.
Please, keep in mind that these recommendations apply to dogs. You should never provide cats with this solution, as it may result in severe cases of hemorrhagic gastroenteritis.
Xylazine to Induce Vomiting in Cats
When you bring your cat to the emergency care center, our professionals can inject your pet with xylazine to induce vomiting. This injection is reserved for cats as it’s not something your veterinarian would give to dogs.
Within just a few minutes, your cat will begin to vomit, and the veterinarian will later administer a different medication to counter the effects. Still, vets won’t induce vomiting in cats nearly as often as in dogs (which is already pretty rare), so make sure you ask ahead of taking your cat to the care center and make sure if they have xylazine.
When you take your cat to the vet, try to know exactly what your cat ingested—in some situations, making your pet vomit might be lethal.
If your cat swallowed a needle or some threads, we will avoid this process altogether. On their way out, these objects can puncture or cut through the animal’s organs. Likewise, if your pet swallowed something like bleach, it could burn its esophagus on its way out after we induce vomiting.
Always ask a professional veterinarian about their recommendation to avoid accidental harm to your pet.
What Not to Give Your Pet
Many pet owners may resort to some methods to induce vomiting that could instead result in more damage. Please refrain from using or doing any of the following:
- Gagging pets: trying to induce a gag reflex will not work because animals do not have the same reflexes as humans. This method can even result in trauma to your pet’s throat and put you at risk of being bitten.
- Saltwater mixtures: providing your pet with high salt levels will only increase the sodium in their system. If unattended, this increase in salinity can develop tremors, seizures, and even a comatose state.
Even if we have already mentioned you should take your pet to an emergency veterinarian during these emergencies, we would like to emphasize there are circumstances under which you simply should never induce vomiting.
Never induce vomiting if your pet is unconscious, weak, or suffers from a history of seizures or heart conditions. If you know or fear that your pet ingests chemicals like bleach, you should not induce vomiting because it can burn their throat when expelled or even burn their lungs if accidentally inhaled.
Best if You Go to a Dog Emergency Hospital
If there is one thing you should keep in mind after all of this is that you should not induce vomiting on your own when your pet has an emergency.
Take your pet to an emergency veterinarian as soon as possible. You can read more about what to do in an emergency in our blogs. We have an emergency veterinarian clinic in Mission Viejo, and if you are from any of the neighboring cities, like Rancho Santa Margarita, you can come to us for care.
