Zacks' Story

Zack (not his name actually) is a young male Border Terrier. In the manner of dogs he was investigating the garden in the morning and came across some small blue pellets. Deciding they looked tasty he ate the lot, not knowing they were slug poison.

By midday Zack was not looking very well at all so his owners rushed him to the vets as he had started bringing up something blue in colour. It was a horrendous day so the only person spare to see him happened to be me and so after explaining who I was I started a quick clinical examination to get some idea of his status. Zack apparently didn't enjoy this and started convulsing on the table.

At this point there wasn't much time to worry about the niceties, something needed to be done right away. I ran off to grab a vet and some diazepam (Valium). In a short while Zack was not fitting and had a drip to keep him hydrated whilst we looked up what he had eaten from the description given by the owner.

One of the more popular chemicals for killing slugs is called metaldehyde. Unfortunately it also kills other animals pretty quickly too depending on the amount they have eaten.

Time to get rid of any left in his stomach - gastric lavage. This isn't very pleasant and involves sticking a tube down the throat and in to the stomach whilst the animal is anaesthetised. The stomach is then filled with water or, as in this case, activated charcoal to try and dilute or soak up the poison. Zack also started passing blue diarrhoea - a bad sign as it shows he'd had time to absorb a lot of the drugs.

We left him alone with a lot of valium in a quiet dark room to prevent his nervous system becoming stimulated which may set off other fits. Throughout the rest of the day we took it in turns to keep an eye on him, monitoring for any changes or signs that the drugs we were giving were not working.

Around 5 he started to convulse again, although this time he did not respond to the diazepam meaning we had to re-anaesthetise him to stop the fits. By 6.30 this was beginning to fail too and we had to resort to more potent drugs to try and keep him stable.

All was well until 9.30 when he started to twitch once more. Again we gave him more drugs to control the fitting and organised a rota to keep him under surveillance all night.

It quickly became clear that Zack was not recovering as well as we would like. His heart rate started to drop to dangerous levels and his breathing rate also decreased. By 10.30 we were breathing for him trying to get him over the worst of the exposure, all the while his heart rate was falling.

At 11.30 he started agonal respiration. This was a bad sign. At the same time he started to shed his intestinal lining and we knew he would not make it through the night. Five minutes later Zack was dead.

We cleaned up in silence, exhausted by the efforts over the past few hours but knowing we had done the best we or anyone else could have. Home and sleep beckoned to start again in 7 hours time.