Mailboxes of Ann Arbor

That’s awful! I hope dogowners who don’t know better don’t get any ideas. Dogs can’t spit the toothpaste out! They need toothpaste that can be swallowed!

Oh goodness me yes. Be careful, you impressionable dogowners (do-gowners?).

Actually, Anonimous, it’s all in the training. I’ve taught my own 2 dogs to rinse and spit quite nicely. We get Tom’s of Maine (at the coop; shop local!) and they seem to like the cinnamint and fennel flavors best. Best part is that when they’re done they get half a Hershey bar as a reward. They love that.

Laura – thanks for the Hershey’s bar tip. We’ve been using chocolate cake for our dog treats, but I’m just getting so tired of baking!

You can still find cinnamint? I thought it had been discontinued! Or is it one of those weird-formulation toothpastes (baking soda or some such)?

Murph, you could skip the baking and just feed ‘em the chocolate frosting – one batch lasts a long time!

Laura, how do you get them to floss?

I would note at least for the archival record that no, by leaving the comments above un-redacted, The Chronicle is not encouraging people to feed chocolate to dogs, in any form, especially not cake. Rather, I believe that the commenters are riffing on the idea of people brushing their dogs’ teeth with Colgate and are fully aware of the various associated dangers.

Whenever I think of chocolate cake and dogs, I am reminded of a conversation I had with Adam de Angeli astride a teeter totter, some years back. Here’s an excerpt. To set the scene, Adam is describing an interaction between himself and a police officer:

AdA: [...] And I was, Well, can you please take my dog to the vet, can you help me, because we don’t have a car and it’s an emergency? And the cop goes, No, no, no, we can’t do that, sorry! And he’s also giving me a bunch of, Oh, I smell marijuana! I smell marijuana! And I’m like, Dude, my dog’s dying here, can you shut up? And finally he lets that go. And about a week later, down the steps in front of the laundry room, on the outside of the apartment building, there’s an entire knocked-over chocolate cake, not cleaned up at all. It was like a full …

HD: … so these are the classic things, the anti-freeze and the chocolate cake, that are sort of known to be bad for dogs.

AdA: Exactly. And the thing that was really suspicious about it, I asked everyone on the lower floor, if they had lost a chocolate cake. Certainly no one would have been going to the laundry room with a big chocolate cake.

HD: That’s kind of an interesting conversation starter, Excuse me, have you lost a chocolate cake?

AdA: I really at this point was pretty sure, but I was looking up chocolate, is it really poison for dogs is it just a rumor? I wanted to be sure about this. It turns out that chocolate cake is one of the only lethal types of chocolate for dogs, because anything smaller isn’t really enough to do it. And baking chocolate, especially, is not the same as candy-bar chocolate. So it was almost crafted to be like the lethal dose. It was knocked over, it didn’t look like there were any bites taken out of it …

HD: … so what kind of icing did it have?

AdA: Chocolate.

HD: So chocolate on chocolate. My favorite kind of cake happens to be chocolate cake, but it’s gotta be white icing. The kind that’s dense with sugar.

AdA: Yeah, I like white icing better, too.

HD: So anyway, back to the dog …

The dog survived. For the whole transcript, here’s the link: [Link]

What’s the research on Crest Whitening Strips? I don’t have any real cause-and-effect data, but every 12-minute treatment makes my cats go, like, batshit crazy …