My Dog Ate An Ant or Roach Trap, How Toxic Is It, What To Do

An article from a qualified veterinary surgeon. My Dog Ate An Ant or Roach Trap, How Toxic Is It, What To Do?

I guess you are on this page because your dog has chewed or eaten an ant or roach trap? First thing to say is to relax, take a deep breath and read on, good news!  This is rarely a serious situation, these products are almost always of extremely low toxicity to dogs and would very rarely have any effect on them. Even if they ate a few …

Reading the label on the pack may make you think that these products are highly toxic. But the truth is that the United States Environmental Protection Agency mandates that all household insecticides carry the same label warnings despite wide variations in toxicity, as I said most ant and roach traps are of very low toxicity. I suspect this is the case in a lot of other countries as well.

Ant or roach traps seem to be good way to get rid of ants which can infest your house, the plastic ant traps are left in strategic places, to attract the ants these devices contain substances like peanut butter and of course dogs love this as well. Ants then carry some of the contents back to their nest, the contents of course are toxic to ants and that wipes out the colony. Everyone then is happy until the family dog tears the ant trap apart and devours the contents.

The bottom line is that the toxin in ant traps is not that poisonous to dogs, normally even a small dog would have to eat the contents of quite a few traps before they were affected in any way.

That covers the contents of the ant trap, but what if your dog chewed up the plastic housing as well and may have swallowed some of that, what then?

The best thing to do in these circumstances is to just sit it out, monitor your dog and see what happens. In my experience most dogs will get way with this type of thing and you will see no ill effects. Hopefully any fragments of the housing will be small enough so that they just pass straight through your dog’s intestinal track. If this has just happened in the last couple of hours then feeding your dog some mashed potato or a few slices of bread would be a good idea. The idea is that these will form round and cushion any sharp plastic fragments as they pass along your dog’s alimentary tract.

However there are no guarantees and very occasionally in the past at my clinic I have seen problems related intestinal obstruction or alimentary tract damage where a dog has swallowed plastic. You would be therefor wise to monitor your dog for such signs as vomiting, lethargy, not eating, straining or abdominal pain.

Bear in mind I am advising you via the internet, while I am sure the information given above is accurate if your dog swallows any of the contents of an ant trap or chews one up then it is only common sense that you should watch for any odd symptoms and contact your vet without delay if any occur, but this is usually very unlikely.

Want more information? You can verify the accuracy of what I have told you by visiting sites such as the one I am going to give you as a link. But first it could be that I have set your mind at rest or saved a call to an expensive poisons helpline. If that is the case then please consider how you could help me out in return, one option would be to publicise this article by posting it to your social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+ using the buttons below. I would very much regard that as a favour, now here is the link where you can read more on the subject : LINK

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This entry was posted on May 12, 2009 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Animal Poisons, Aok. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.