Mastodawn

TIL if you suspect your dog to have eaten a potentially toxic mushroom in the US your protocol before calling poison control is to try and identify the mushroom by posting it to a public Facebook group for emergency mushroom identification ostensibly ran by volunteer mycologists.

My two responses on my fb thread were "what makes you think your dog ate that" and "might be bovista but idk" I am in hell

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Brianna Townsend Nov 8

You are then supposed to take their guess to ASPCA and they will charge you $110 to take that guess over the phone and give you a case#.

The after hours vet then calls them with the case# to try and provide treatment.

Treatment is then entirely unchanged from typical digestive distress protocol because they can't prove the dog ate or didn't eat any such unidentified mushroom

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René Nov 10

@britown so induce vomiting and hope for the best, then? My dog's never seemed to notice the existence of mushrooms, but I'd be worried if he ate any of them - even the innocuous looking little brown mushrooms can be deadly and they're impossible to identify.

Hope your pup is okay!

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Brianna Townsend

@negavolt pup is doing ok, but is needing to take liver enzyme medication for a while because they went up. We think she ate it some 3-4 hours before she started throwing up so it was at least partially digested. inducing vomiting if caught earlier is probably correct but I don't really know. She's eaten bad stuff in the past and been sick for a day or two, but this was constant full body dry heaving every few minutes, I'm glad we took her in.